Josh Brolin Tells Us How to Succeed In Hollywood

From "Hollow Man" to "Outer Range," the actor took a bumpy road to stardom.

The post Josh Brolin Tells Us How to Succeed In Hollywood appeared first on Sharp Magazine.

Josh Brolin had accepted that he wasn’t going to be in Hollow Man. It was the end of 1999, the last moments of a decade that had seen many career ups and downs for the veteran actor, and although he had auditioned for Paul Verhoeven’s big-budget, Kevin Bacon–starring sci-fi thriller, the studio didn’t seem to like him in the fairly thankless role of Dr. Matt Kensington, Elisabeth Shue’s boyfriend and Bacon’s second fiddle. It was a story that Brolin, who had just turned 30, was quickly getting used to: “They wanted new people. They wanted the Ben Afflecks and the Matt Damons — the people who blew you away right from the start,” Brolin told me. “I didn’t have that. They thought I was getting mouldy.”

Thirty is hardly old, but in Hollywood, it can be a decisive juncture: by that point, you’ve either made it or you haven’t. Although it’s hard to believe now — as Brolin rounds out a huge marquee cast in this season’s monumental blockbuster Dune: Part Two, kicks off the second season of the acclaimed Amazon Prime series Outer Range, and prepares to release his debut book, all while still reaping the rewards of having played the biggest and baddest villain in the Marvel Universe — there was a time when Brolin was perceived as one of the guys who never made it and probably never would. Brolin said that when he read for Flirting with Disaster, the loopy David O. Russell comedy starring Ben Stiller and Patricia Arquette, the studio, Miramax, was adamantly opposed to hiring him. “They were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we know that guy,’ ” Brolin said. “That guy is loser territory.”

So when the producers of Hollow Man called Brolin back to tell him they’d reconsidered, he was understandably skeptical. “We rewatched your audition tape,” the producer told Brolin on the phone. “And it’s really good.” Most actors would have been relieved, if not flattered. Brolin didn’t buy it for a second. “They were so full of shit,” he said, roaring with laughter at the bittersweet memory. “The only reason I got that part is that everybody else turned them down. They couldn’t find anybody to do it for cheap enough. Well, I’m your man!”

He got the job and gamely played the pretty-boy doctor next to Bacon in the goofy, lurid Verhoeven thriller, doing his best to react convincingly to empty shots that would be filled with CGI in the editing room. After one particularly rousing take, Bacon even told him he had “some real chops” as an actor. “I was like, ‘This is so sad,’” Brolin laughed.

It’s not that Brolin wasn’t grateful for the opportunity. He was living on his family’s ranch in Templeton, Calif., always struggling to scrape together enough acting work to pay the bills, and a prominent part in a flashy Kevin Bacon movie was a good gig for a working actor. But Brolin had grown up watching his father, the actor James Brolin, bounce from job to job, always hoping for a bigger break that never seemed to materialize; he “had no interest in following that trajectory,” he said.

Besides, Brolin was a self-confessed film buff whose north star was Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. His aspirations were a little higher than Dr. Matt Kensington or Derek Bates, the mustachioed, gun-toting treasure hunter he played in 2005 action flick Into the Blue. There’s a scene in that movie in which Brolin holds Jessica Alba at gunpoint. “She said the same fucking thing that Kevin said: ‘Wow, you’ve got some chops!’” Brolin remembered. “I was like, ‘Kill me, man.’”

That’s how Brolin was defined in those days: the bad guy, the boyfriend. Certainly not the movie star, and definitely not Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. Though he got his start in Hollywood early, playing older brother Brand in the beloved adventure movie The Goonies, he couldn’t seem the parlay that success into anything more substantial, finding regular but creatively unsatisfying work on TV in shows such as The Young Riders and Private Eye but not landing many large or interesting film roles. And the longer he languished, the less likely it seemed that things would change. “Especially as time went on, I was being perceived as the guy that should have hit but didn’t,” he explained. “I would go to my agent and I would say, ‘Are my legs too short? Is my head too big? Just tell me the truth! Why am I not working?’”

He learned, if nothing else, that these things are unpredictable. “I know brilliant actors who have only done an El Pollo Loco commercial, and I know shitty actors who are stars. It can happen to anybody at any time. It’s so random.” He uses the example of Anthony Hopkins, who, Brolin said, “was a fine actor who did amazing work, but nobody took any notice until he was 55 years old and did 20 minutes in The Silence of the Lambs. Then he had a whole different trajectory.”

Brolin’s own trajectory is unique. “You have times when no one wants to hire you. In the middle of it, maybe you get a David O. Russell movie, and how did I get hired for that? And then maybe you get a big series, and your face is plastered all over Times Square, and then by the fifth episode you know it’s going to get cancelled. Those are the fluctuations of the careers of those who last.”

He dealt with those fluctuations by simply accepting them. He points to a piece of advice he once got from Robert De Niro. (Brolin, by the way, is not the kind of guy who ingratiatingly refers to De Niro as “Bobby.”) “De Niro once said, ‘Don’t take the highs too seriously and don’t take the lows too seriously. Just find yourself. Just keep working.’ Fluctuations are inevitable — even with one of the greatest actors who ever lived.” He points out that there was a time when even De Niro was slumming it in an American Express commercial. “Was that selling out? I don’t know. It’s a life, man.” Or maybe De Niro got sick of doing dramas all the time, so he started doing comedies with Ben Stiller and got slammed with bad reviews. “And now he’s back to winning awards for everything he does.” Brolin has derived a lesson from that, too. “When you get older, you realize that everybody’s going to give you shit,” he laughed.

Things changed for Brolin when he starred in No Country for Old Men as Llewelyn Moss, the taciturn Texan who has the singularly bad luck of finding two million dollars in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Brolin, famously, was not the first choice for the part — it was meant to go to Heath Ledger, who ultimately turned it down — but managed to persuade the Coen brothers after enlisting Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, with whom he’d just worked on Grindhouse, to help him fashion a compelling audition tape. In retrospect, it’s almost impossible to imagine anybody but Brolin as Moss, a man whose gritty tenacity keeps him one small step ahead of the ultimate bad-ass Anton Chigurh, until it doesn’t. No one on earth could have embodied that perfect combination of fixity and haplessness — of barrelling headlong toward fate instead of just sidling up alongside of it.

Llewelyn Moss changed everything. Immediately. It led to an audition with Ridley Scott, for what would become the acclaimed drama American Gangster. It brought him to Oliver Stone, who cast him — some would say unexpectedly — as George Bush in the biopic W. And from there, the dominos kept falling. “I think directors started saying, ‘Why him?’ ” Brolin said. “It becomes like a snowball effect.”

He also credits a certain interpersonal factor: “I had a way about me that was… it’s kind of hard to believe this, but I wasn’t so much of a people pleaser. I didn’t pander. I was like, ‘What’s up? Do you want to do this? Let’s get to work.’” (Talking to Brolin, it is somewhat hard to imagine that he isn’t a people pleaser, if only because he’s bending over backwards to make our conversation flow more easily, to be generous with his time and courteous with his answers, and to generally be easy to talk to.)

The movies that came in the aftermath of No Country were mainly auteur projects, art-house films and parts that seemed creatively challenging. He worked with Woody Allen on You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (“I didn’t particularly like that script, but I called the Coens and asked if I should do this, and they were like, ‘It’s Woody Allen!’”). He worked with Spike Lee on his interesting if somewhat badly received remake of Oldboy (“I was a major Spike fan, and I still am, but I think that was a transitional time for him,” Brolin says). What he didn’t do much of was flagrant garbage — he avoided the kinds of artistically bankrupt nonsense that are the de facto paydays for guys on the upswing in this business. “I was offered a lot of money to do certain things, and I needed it,” he said. “But I hated the idea that I can make this many millions now if I just do the pew pew pew thing.”

If he was going to do the pew pew pew thing, he wanted it to be special — he wanted it to be something like Dune, an action blockbuster but, he said, “a profound story from a profound director.” Working on Dune has brought Brolin back together with Denis Villeneuve, with whom he previously collaborated on the drug-running drama Sicario. The two have become, he said, “very close friends,” which he also said was part of a larger trend in his life of having opposites attract. “It’s the cool guys I don’t get along with. Woody’s not cool. Oliver’s not cool. The Coens aren’t cool.” When I suggest that Villeneuve, the French-Canadian auteur responsible for some of the most stylish and cerebral blockbusters in recent memory, might actually qualify as cool to most people, he laughs. “Denis is not cool in that way. He’s not Mickey Rourke cool. He’s like… on the spectrum cool.”

Brolin doesn’t have an especially large role in the Dune movies. He plays Gurney Halleck, the baliset-playing war master who serves as a kind of mentor figure to Paul Atreides, the troubled saviour played by Timothée Chalamet. But the experience of working on the movie, Brolin said, was invigorating, and a much more intimate thing than the usual blockbuster set.

“I was very inspired on that movie,” he said. “The feeling is that you’re doing a 40- or 50-million dollar movie. It’s very personal; it’s familial. And it’s a little naked, which I like — it’s revealing.” That intimacy and inspiration moved Brolin to spend his downtime on set writing verse about the experience, which has now been turned into a book of poetry (and set photography by Greig Fraser), Dune: Exposures.

In the days before Brolin and I spoke, one of the poems from the book was posted online, and social media was whipped into a frenzy by its almost sensual descriptions of Chalamet. (“The way you hold my gaze makes me fear my own age,” reads one of the stanzas.) “People thought I wanted to sleep with him,” Brolin laughs. When I explain to Brolin that I read it as a reflection on aging among a cohort of much younger actors, he says that the interpretations likely “say a lot more about the person than about my poem.” But he does of course see the reading I suggest. “It’s the fact that I’m coming to terms with my age with some grace,” he said. “I’m not fighting it. I’m not. I’m just noticing it, and it’s a transition of acceptance.” A kid like Chalamet only casts that age in relief — and draws attention to the new generation.

Watching Chalamet, as well as Dune: Part Two co-stars Austin Butler, Zendaya, and Florence Pugh, is a matter of witnessing the new wave of super stars. “They’re at the beginning of the trajectory of being the ‘It’ person and celebrity and what’s to come and the humbling of that,” Brolin said. “I’ve seen a hundred people come and go and be where Timothée’s at. And I would never want it back. I would never want to start over.” Brolin said that he deeply admires the work that actors like Pugh and especially Butler have been doing, and that watching them on the set of Dune, he got “really excited” about their potential. It’s just that sometimes the admiration comes off the wrong way. “Once in a while someone will get creeped out and think I’m just a creepy old man that wants to get in with the young kids, which is not particularly true.”

But Brolin also can’t help but feel old in part because, at least these days, he’s playing old: Paul calls Gurney “old man,” even in the trailer. In Prime Video’s Outer Range, Brolin is Royal Abbott, a steely Wyoming rancher who discovers an anomaly on his land: he’s not only the elder family patriarch with a world-weary scowl and a chipper grandchild, he’s actually a reluctant time-traveller born in the 19th century. It doesn’t get much older than that. “I let the goatee grow out. I’m the old man on the ranch,” he said of the role. “So when did that happen? Literally overnight. And it doesn’t mean that I can’t dye my beard to play this age, or shave my beard to look a different age again. But I’m just noticing it.” With Outer Range returning for its mind-bending second season in May, it seems certain that the rabid fanbase will continue admiring Brolin for his heavy-duty performance. And of course continue thinking of him as the old man on the ranch.

Younger actors, aspiring actors, sometimes ask Brolin for advice. He always tells them the same thing: “Read plays. Go study. Go do theatre. Challenge yourself. Read a bunch of books. Obsess. Watch movies over and over. Watch plays where they have no money and they’re experimenting.” That was Brolin’s own path to success: diligent, unflagging work, more hard work than you can possibly imagine. That’s how it was for his generation, for guys like Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, “all these people who, as crazy as they were, or are, were really into the work, deeply emotionally into it.” But when he gives the young actors this advice, they always look at him funny. “ ‘No, no, no,’ they say. ‘I mean, how do you become famous?’” And for Brolin, that’s a very different thing.

“They don’t want to obsess,” he said. “They want to know how to gain followers. They don’t want to do the work.”

FEATURE IMAGE: PANTS AND JACKET BY FENDI; SWEATER BY FALCONERI.

The post Josh Brolin Tells Us How to Succeed In Hollywood appeared first on Sharp Magazine.