Josh Brolin: ‘I wanted to punish myself in some way’

When Josh Brolin was cast in Woody Allen’s 2010 drama You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he wrote the director an email. Three pages long. The character needed a Serbian accent, he explained. A wheelchair, too. He laid out his reasoning assiduously. Allen’s reply was just one word: “No.”

Brolin had always been drawn to the bells and whistles – prosthetics, limps, “extreme versions of character”. But over time, he learnt that less can be more – not just from that exchange with Allen, but also from an earlier role, his laconic Vietnam vet in the Coen brothers’ 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men. “When you’re a lead in a film and have almost no dialogue, there has to be major inner dialogue going on,” the 57-year-old explains in his distinctive California rasp. “If you have something going on that’s dynamic inside, you don’t need a lot.” It allows people to lean forward, he suggests. “I always felt like I had to inundate, whereas now, I don’t generally feel I need to do that.” 

In person, though, the square-jawed star of Sicario, Avengers and Dune is pure inundation. Not an ounce of reticence. We meet in Mayfair to chat about his role in the upcoming third instalment of Rian Johnson’s puzzle-box series Knives Out – Wake Up Dead Man. He’s all compact, coiled energy in a navy long-sleeve polo. Midway through our conversation, his co-star Glenn Close bursts in, with her dog Pip in tow. Brolin grins and flexes his pecs for her. She feels them. They laugh.

His friend Imogen Poots, with whom he worked on the 2022 Amazon series Outer Range, recently told me that Brolin has “that gasoline bloodstream. He’s one of my favourites, an amazing storyteller, very mischievous and dangerous.” It fits. Talking to him is like gripping a live wire. He leans in when he speaks, eyes locked on mine, his words unfiltered and mercilessly blunt. “Actors aren’t artists,” he scoffs. As is the case in his brilliant, unflinching 2024 memoir, From Under the Truck, there’s seemingly no topic off limits.

But first: Knives Out. An archly engrossing whodunit, Wake Up Dead Man is a return to form for a franchise that began in 2019 with charm to burn. Gone is the bumptious self-congratulatory tone of 2022’s Glass Onion; this time around, it’s fun and satisfyingly macabre, with gothic overtones and more twists than a corkscrew staircase. It’s another seemingly impossible murder case for Daniel Craig’s Southern sleuth Benoit Blanc to solve. “It’s genius,” says Brolin. “It took me to a few different places that I really didn’t anticipate, and I love that. It’s a great labyrinth.”

The film is set in a small-town community in upstate New York, where Brolin’s tyrannical Monsignor Wicks preaches hateful rhetoric in the form of piety. Just as Edward Norton’s insufferable tech bro in Glass Onion has shades of Elon Musk, so the spectre of Donald Trump hovers over Wicks, a cult-like figurehead not unaccustomed to double standards and marginalising certain groups. Brolin says he didn’t base Wicks specifically on the US president. “I could make something up and say it was rooted in a kind of Trumpian greed” – but it wasn’t, he insists, although he notes that once “Wicks garners a sense of power, then there are no boundaries”.

Brolin and the US president go back a ways. “I’m not scared of Trump, because even though he says he’s staying for ever, it’s just not going to happen. And if it does, then I’ll deal with that moment. But having been a friend of Trump before he was president, I know a different guy.”

The Trump he knew was a builder and entrepreneur, whom he met and spent time with after appearing in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. “I’m sure there was a lot of corruption involved,” says Brolin. Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of someone building a $400m hotel “in the middle of a cesspool city during the late Seventies – that’s interesting to me. Now it’s power unmitigated, it’s unregulated.”

But, he adds, “there is no greater genius than him in marketing – he takes the weakness of the general population and fills it. And that’s why I think a lot of people feel that they have a mascot in him. I think it’s much less about Trump than it is about the general population and their need for validation.”

Wicks was a role Brolin didn’t have to audition for (“God, you know who we should get to play this not nice man? Josh Brolin,” he jokes). But the actor has a blast in Wake Up Dead Man, gliding between fire and brimstone and quiet menace. Sparring opposite him is an exceptional Josh O’Connor as Jud Duplenticy, a boxer turned priest sequestered to Wick’s parish of Chimney Rock. There he soon becomes both a murder suspect and Blanc’s second in command as the film slowly takes the form of a buddy movie, littered with references to everything from Vertigo and Black Narcissus to Scooby-Doo.

Brolin is a big fan of O’Connor. “I just love him,” he says of the British star, who played Prince Charles in The Crown. “He’s a stellar human being and an incredible actor. I didn’t love [the Luca Guadagnino film] Challengers – it felt presentational to me – but I loved him in it.”

Brolin has been working with a lot of younger actors recently, which sets him musing on his own generation – he emerged alongside the likes of Benicio del Toro and Mark Ruffalo – all of whom were eager to emulate the male stars making waves at the time. “Experimenting – you know, ‘Oh, I want to be Mickey Rourke, or Sean Penn, or Daniel Day-Lewis.’ And then you get a little older and start to refine your technique, and you get away from that; [develop] a different approach that doesn’t get in the way of the other actors.”

There’s just a hint of shade aimed at the perceived selfishness of the Method technique. Yet Brolin seems understanding when it comes to the younger generation. “I see some up-and-coming actors that are doing that and experimenting, and you go, ‘Oh, sweet,’ whereas Josh is not like that at all. He’s very conversational on set.”

I don’t have a relationship with fame. I live a normal life

I mention his Instagram post about Robert Redford, in which Brolin paid tribute to the late actor. “He never, from what I could tell, drank the Kool-Aid,” he wrote. “Too many people drinking the Kool-Aid nowadays.” He’s talking about the way that Instagram and social media can seep into an actor’s perception of themselves. “It was much different before; you didn’t have perpetual popularity or reminder of popularity.” Brolin thinks of the greats who would make a movie every two years. That was the mindset, he observes. “Leo [DiCaprio] is doing that now. You know, he’s done three movies since 2019.” Brolin says he’s constantly approached by emerging actors who insist they want the same kind of career he’s cultivated. Yet the moment he suggests tackling the great plays, their eyes glaze over. “Oh, so you just want to be famous?” he realises.

The danger with celebrity, Brolin suggests, is that you construct your own insulated reality and then inhabit it exclusively. He is sincere in his belief that acting is not art; in his eyes, it’s more of a “skill you develop and then refine”. But if you’re depicting the human condition, he says, and “then you ostracise yourself from that condition”, any verisimilitude goes out the window. “You’re simply famous people acting as if you’re normal. And that, to me, is fakery.”

Not that Brolin isn’t impressed by today’s cohort of “upper-echelon young actors” – from Jacob Elordi and Timothée Chalamet to O’Connor and Austin Butler. “They see it differently,” he explains. “Maybe it’s because they started in theatre, or maybe because they kind of harken back to another time that they’re trying to emulate, as opposed to this time, which I think is hard to base anything of weight on. But fame sneaks in there, even with those people.”

No chance of that with Brolin, he says. “I don’t have a relationship with fame.” The person here talking to me is a kind of construct, he explains – “a made-up character. I don’t put any weight into this part of the job. I make s*** up one day, and then I won’t another day. It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter to anybody.” He pauses. “I live a normal life.”

That seems a stretch. He is the son of James Brolin, the US TV star who married Barbra Streisand in 1998; his wild childhood was spent in Paso Robles, California, on a ranch that his mother, Jane Cameron Agee, filled with wolves, coyotes and mountain lions. A casting director turned wildlife activist, she was a fiercely erratic alcoholic who would seduce dodgy men and encourage her growling menagerie to attack Brolin and his brother, Jess. “It was total chaos back then and f***ing horrible sometimes,” he says. “I mean, somebody who has you go in a wolf cage and clean it at seven or eight years old is not a responsible human being.” But, he adds, she was also “fun, funny and full of character and colour”.

The family moved from the ranch to Santa Barbara when Brolin was 11, the age he lost his virginity. Two years previously he’d tried his first joint, and by 13, he was dropping acid (“I live right next to where that happened”). While a member of the Cito Rats, a notorious gang from Montecito – now the home of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – he would surf, skateboard, steal, and have sex with older women for coke. He would fight and throw bottles of booze at police cars. Of the original group of 50, he says, 36 are dead. The rest have been in and out of jail, Brolin included. “I still have Cito Rats call friends of mine and say, ‘Can you tell Josh, we’re not all dead?’”

Montecito now has a very different image as a celebrity enclave. “People now think of it, and they think f***ing Oprah, and that’s not what it was.” Back in the Eighties, he notes, it was a place of neglected kids, cocaine and too-young parents.

If Montecito has cleaned up its act, so too has Brolin, who has now been sober for 12 years. Yet for much of his teens, twenties, thirties and forties, alcohol was a crutch. He would oscillate between hardcore alcoholism and bouts of sobriety, often falling off the wagon in spectacular fashion. Take one night in Paris when he was 23. “I jump on to a group of people, young men, friendly, preppy boys drinking wine spritzers,” Brolin writes in his memoir. “They kick me. I swing wildly. I can’t feel anything. Find another bar. Blood on the face. Blood in the hair … More alcohol … Another fight. I fall in the Seine. I’m cold. I can’t remember where I live. I have a child.”

Brolin had that child, his son Trevor, at the age of 20. Why all the fights? “Oh, because I wanted to punish myself in some way, shape or form,” he says. “It was like somebody who gets used to pain and then doesn’t have that pain all the time… and that was my way of recreating the pain.”

Sean Penn, presenting Brolin with an award from the New York Film Critics Circle in 2009, introduced his Milk co-star to the stage with a quip: “He goes harder than anyone I know,” he said. Quite the feat given that Penn is friends with Charlie Sheen. “I remember feeling proud when he said that, because I was drunk,” says Brolin, who ended up making a speech so garbled and graceless that afterwards his publicist couldn’t even look at him. “It was the worst speech in speech history,” he shudders. In an unlikely twist, though, Penn now sends people he thinks need assistance his way, “which is very funny”, says Brolin. “This is a guy who saw me as the most destructive guy, and now sees me as helpful in some regard.”

Things had come to a head in 2013, an eventful year that also saw him stabbed in Costa Rica one night by a stranger hustling for cigarettes and money. The reckoning, however, came in Santa Monica. He’d woken up on the pavement outside his house, having been in a fight at a fast-food drive-through in the early hours. Debilitated, he hauled himself to his 99-year-old grandmother’s deathbed, the stench of alcohol enveloping him. As she smiled up at him, he knew he needed to kick the habit once and for all. He went into rehab and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. “I shouldn’t have ended up where I ended up,” says Brolin. “And that doesn’t mean successful; it just means survived.”

His path to self-destruction may have been preordained, he says. At least to some degree. “I was born to drink. I was birthed to drink. My mother drank exactly like I did, and I was raised to be a man and drink like the male equivalent of my mother,” he writes in the memoir. Today, he says that “some of it is genetic and a lot of it is conditioning”. At the same time, he adds, “when I look back on it, that very thing that created such self-destructive tendencies within me is the very thing that gave me the gasoline to want to not be that any more”.

I’m one of the lucky ones

Amid all that nihilism, it’s astonishing that Brolin was able to amass such a lengthy CV. He started early, landing a role in The Goonies aged 16. “For 10 years, it was really fun to have done a movie that was appreciated,” he says, “but then when you don’t have another movie to lean on, it becomes a pain in the ass. I don’t have a problem with it now, though. I can celebrate it.” That’s because, he continues, after a stop-start early career that included becoming a day trader, he now has enough other films of which he’s proud. There’s Ridley Scott’s American Gangster and No Country for Old Men, which won the Oscar for Best Picture and served as a turbo-boost. He remembers being asked by a reporter, “How do you feel having done C minus work, now doing A standard?” It irked him. “I was like, ‘F*** you, man. I wasn’t doing C minus work. I was doing the best work I could do for what was offered.’”

In quick succession, he then starred as George W Bush in W, received an Oscar nomination for playing the politician who assassinated gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk, in Milk, and collaborated again with the Coen brothers in True Grit. Since then, he’s established himself as one of Hollywood’s most versatile and intriguing actors, possessing a gift for moral ambiguity and a sort of weathered gravitas with something simmering beneath the surface.

As Thanos in the Avengers films, Brolin lent an unexpected melancholy to the villain’s twisted convictions. Marvel’s cachet has diminished somewhat in the years since Thanos bowed out in 2019’s Endgame, the climactic movie in the Avengers series. But Brolin was pleased with how it concluded. “There just seemed to be a perfect trajectory of 10 years,” he says. He loved doing those films. “You’re in a f***ing onesie, and you have dots all over your face, and it’s a joke, and you’re having to totally rely on your imagination. It’s so great.”

I bring up Denis Villeneuve, who directed Brolin in 2015’s narco-thriller Sicario, as well as in Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024); he will also be at the helm of the next Bond film. “I think it’s going to be f***ing fantastic,” Brolin says. “I love spending time with him. I would do anything with Denis. Talk about a guy who hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid.”

We come back to sobriety. Brolin, who does a daily gratitude list every morning as part of his 12-step programme, says it has been about “keeping the focus on my s*** and not trying to convince other people that I’ve changed”. His advice to his 21-year-old self? “Hang in there,” he says, smiling. “I’m very happy with the way things have transpired. I’m one of the lucky ones.”

‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’ is in UK cinemas now, and on Netflix from 12 December