Brad Pitt may have spent seven years married to Jennifer Aniston, but he says since shacking up with Angelina Jolie, "I haven't known life to be any happier."
The 49-year-old actor recently opened up to Esquire magazine, admitting that pre-Angelina he was more of a "drifter."
“For a long time I thought I did too much damage — drug damage. I was a bit of a drifter," Pitt explains. "A guy who felt he grew up in something of a vacuum and wanted to see things, wanted to be inspired."
“I spent years [bleep]ing off,” Pitt continued. “But then I got burnt out and felt that I was wasting my opportunity.”
Then, “about a decade ago,” when he was still married to Aniston, he says he made a “conscious change” in his life.
“It was an epiphany — a decision not to squander my opportunities,” he explained. “It was a feeling of, ‘Get up.’ Because otherwise, what’s the point?”
Pitt told Parade in 2011, “I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic ... I think my marriage [to Aniston] had something to do with it; trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn’t.”
Cue Angelina.
After getting together on the set of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" in 2005, the couple have since had (or adopted) six children together.
"I always thought that if I wanted to do a family, I wanted to do it big. I wanted there to be chaos in the house," the actor says of his home life. "There's constant chatter in our house, whether it's giggling or screaming or crying or banging."
"I love it. I love it. I love it. I hate it when they're gone. I hate it. Maybe it's nice to be in a hotel room for a day - 'Oh, nice, I can finally read a paper.' But then, by the next day, I miss that cacophony, all that life."
"I have very few friends," Pitt says of his life today. "I have a handful of close friends and I have my family and I haven't known life to be any happier."
One of those friends is Jean Black, Pitt's makeup artist since 1990, who tells Esquire that Jolie was able to "unleash" the star's full potential.
Black told the magazine, "I think Brad was ready to soar when he met Angie."
Pitt, for his part, says simply, "Angie is ... the best person."
Another of Brangelina's pals, Frank Pollaro, told the magazine: "This is a guy who has tried not to do any sexy scenes with other women since he's met Angelina. He's crazy about her, and she's the same way about him."
He recalls a recent memory in their home: "Once I walked in and Angie was standing there and Zahara walked up and said, 'Daddy, you're not going to start making out with Mommy again, are you?' And it's like that."
SEE ALSO: Brad Pitt: Angie's Double Mastectomy Was 'Absolutely Heroic' >