Brad Pitt's Red Carpet Pest Speaks Out
This story first appeared in the June 27 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
By Seth Abramovitch
Infamous red-carpet interloper Vitalii Sediuk currently is scrubbing toilets and yanking weeds in Griffith Park as part of his 17-day community-service sentence for grabbing Brad Pitt at Maleficent's May 28 premiere. But the 25-year-old Ukrainian TV journalist told THR over a coffee in Hollywood he has no sympathy for the movie star, whom he insists he was merely trying to hug and never struck in the face.
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"I can’t feel sorry for Brad Pitt. He has everything you can imagine. And I’m cleaning toilets? Sorry, but excuse me," says Sediuk, sporting a tank top with a picture of Pitt on it ("From the ’90s, back in his prime").
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He also admitted that his previous ambush — leaping beneath America Ferrera's frilly Georges Hobeika gown at the May 16 Cannes premiere of How to Train Your Dragon 2 — didn’t pan out as planned. “Actually, I was going for Cate Blanchett,” says Sediuk of the stunt, which cost him his job with Ukraine’s 1+1 TV. But he saw the two actresses only from behind. “I thought, ‘OK, Cate Blanchett is a major star; she’ll have the bigger dress.’”
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The mistake was fortuitous. “The police asked me, ‘Did you see anything?’ And I said, ‘No, because the dress was many layers.’ ” Blanchett, by contrast, was wearing a sheer Givenchy skirt. Says Sediuk: “It would have been a sexual harassment [charge].”
Photo credit: David Buchan/Getty Images
