Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie’s Son Maddox Drops ‘Pitt’ From His Name as Family Rift Deepens

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s eldest son, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, 24, is distancing himself from his father by dropping the “Pitt” from his surname legally. Maddox is reportedly petitioning to change his name to ‘Maddox Chivan Jolie’.

Maddox was born in 2001 in Cambodia and was then adopted by Angelina Jolie in 2002 during a previous marriage. He was later adopted by Pitt in 2006, two years after Jolie and Pitt began dating. Since then, he has worked as an actor and an assistant director.

He’s the second child of Brad Pitt to legally drop his father’s surname. His younger sister, Shiloh, officially dropped “Pitt from her last name by filing a legal petition on her 18th birthday in 2024. The request was approved in August 2024, and Shiloh went from ‘Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt’ to ‘Shiloh Nouvel Jolie’.

Pitt and Jolie got married in 2014, but split and filed for divorce shortly after in 2016. Since then, several of Maddox’s siblings have begun distancing themselves from their father.

Maddox’s decision to drop the “Pitt” from his surname legally comes not long after he dropped the name professionally. In the credits of Angelina Jolie’s latest film, “Couture”, Maddox is listed in the credits as simply ‘Maddox Jolie’. He worked on the film as an assistant director.

Maddox has listed the reason for the name change as “personal”, echoing his sister Shiloh, who said that she had made “an independent and significant decision following painful events” to change her surname.

While it is unclear if any of the other Jolie-Pitt children will follow suit in legally changing their names, two of them have already informally and professionally stopped using the “Pitt” name.

The couple’s eldest daughter, Zahara, recently graduated, her name being announced at the ceremony as ‘Zahara Marley Jolie’. Pitt was not present for his daughter’s graduation.

Vivienne, the couple’s youngest daughter, was also simply referred to as ‘Vivienne Jolie’ in the Playbill for “The Outsiders”, a Broadway musical in which she worked as a production assistant.

The tension between Pitt and his ex-wife and children has only increased since the couple’s messy divorce. Pitt also sued Jolie for selling her share of a winery they owned together to a third party, and she filed a countersuit, accusing him of having physically and verbally abused her and their children during an incident on a plane in 2016 which allegedly triggered the divorce. Jolie alleged that he choked one of their children and hit another in the face, and that he’d grabbed her by the head and shaken her.

In an Instagram post in 2020, Pax Jolie-Pitt, the couple’s second son, called his father a “world class a-hole” and a “terrible and despicable person.”

Pax wrote, “You have no consideration or empathy toward your four youngest children who tremble in fear when in your presence.” He continued, “You have made the lives of those closest to me a constant hell. You may tell yourself and the world whatever you want, but the truth will come to light someday.”

It is unclear whether the couple’s other two children, Pax Jolie-Pitt and Knox Jolie-Pitt, have any plans to drop their father’s surname.