I’m so used to reading Millennial and Gen Z interviews, I sometimes forget what it sounds like when a grizzled Hollywood veteran actually gives an in-depth interview. Enter Josh Brolin, the 57-year-old Oscar-nominated actor and former mess. He’s clean and sober now, but he was doing drugs at 13 and part of a gang in Montecito. That detail about the gang pleased the Independent, who interviewed Josh Brolin for his role in the third Knives Out movie. He talked about Donald Trump, how he loves Josh O’Connor, how and when he got clean, how he used to get into fistfights at the drop of a hat and a lot more. Some highlights:
His Trumpy role in Wake Up Dead Man: 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”.
He’s known Donald Trump for years: “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.
Trump’s real strength is marketing: “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.”
On Josh O’Connor: “I just love him. 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.”
On young actors nowadays: “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.
But he’s impressed with some younger actors: Actors like Jacob Elordi and Timothée Chalamet to O’Connor and Austin Butler. “They see it differently/ 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.”
His childhood in Santa Barbara: 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. 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.
He’s been sober for 12 years: 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.”
Preordained to drink: “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”.
While he doesn’t mention Diane Lane, he was married to Lane for nearly a decade, from 2004-2013, and that was the period of time when he was still drinking heavily and getting into fights constantly. I’ve never blamed Diane for getting out of the marriage, but it’s wild to hear him describe his rock bottom and putting together the timeline of “oh, his marriage ended that year too.” Now I feel sorry for Diane, my god. Anyway, I didn’t know that Montecito once had a gang of druggy street youths – that town has gotten a massive glow-up!! As for what he says about Trump… he’s not defending Trump, but he is minimizing what Trump is doing and how much harm Trump has caused. I agree with the idea that Trump is marketing bigotry, misogyny and hate to millions of gullible, horrible people though.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
