Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie‘s Château Miraval in France has been a pivotal location in both their tabloid frenzy marriage and their years-long contentious divorce. While Jolie sold off her stake earlier in the year to Pitt’s frustration, the actor has held onto his end of the secluded estate and winery business, which he’s claimed in court papers he developed “from scratch.”
However, Pitt has revealed a previously unknown attachment to the French chateau: Buried treasure. While promoting his new movie, Bullet Train, the actor confessed to GQ that he was conned into believing there was gold harkening back to the Middle Ages underneath the chateau grounds. Pitt admits he became obsessed with the hunt:
He tells me that he was approached a few years ago by a man who explained to him that the château was supposedly home to another fortune: millions of dollars’ worth of gold that one of the estate’s medieval owners had taken from the Levant during the Crusades and buried on the grounds. “I got obsessed,” Pitt says. “Like for a year, this was all I could think about, just the excitement of it all.” He bought radar equipment and scoured his property. “Maybe it has something to do with where I grew up, because in the Ozark Mountains there were always stories of hidden caches of gold.”
Turns out, the man was trying to drum up interest in “some kind of radar company,” and there was never any buried treasure. Despite being duped and admitting it was “pretty foolish in the end,” Pitt said he still had a blast. “It was just the hunt that was exciting.”
(Via GQ)