On Sunday, April 29, two days after the commencement of the ‘summer of Josh Brolin’, Josh Brolin’s agents called him. “Oh, my God, dude, biggest opening of all time!” they shouted into the phone. Brolin had never been the star of a No. 1 movie before. He hung up, and it occurred to him that maybe he could let it all in. “Just enjoy it for a second,” he told himself.
He doesn’t usually allow for victory laps. But then the ‘summer of Josh Brolin’ came along.
- Josh Brolin | Actor
Who ever predicted that he would be the common denominator of two of the biggest blockbusters of a summer? Who ever predicted that they — meaning a bunch of headlines and a publicist here and there — would name the entire summer after him?
And yet here we are. The ‘summer of Josh Brolin’ has seen Josh Brolin, who is 50, star in both the No. 1 and No. 2 movies at the box office at the same time: as Thanos, a veiny purple attractive-to-some population control activist in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War (so-named for its running time), the featured villain of that movie, which stars every other living male actor; he’s Cable, the vengeance-seeking dadbot from the future in Deadpool 2. And on June 28, here comes Sicario: Day of the Soldado, where he resumes the role he played in the first Sicario, a grizzled, seen-it-all military operative on an extraction mission. In its opening weekend, Infinity War took in a reported $258.2 million domestically, almost $383 million internationally. Deadpool 2 made an estimated $125 million domestically and $176.3 million internationally during its opening weekend, and it hadn’t even opened in China yet.
Now, nobody is more surprised about the summer of Josh Brolin than Josh Brolin. But it also leaves him with a problem, which is to figure out how to handle success that he never expected — or at least learnt to stop expecting and even to stop hoping for.
“How do you treat this moment?” he asked.
He is very concerned about becoming a self-obsessed monster and accepting only certain kinds of roles to perpetuate the momentum. How did that happen to his cool, down-to-earth friends who will now never take a risk and never deviate from what he calls the movie star “manual”?
He hadn’t fully unpacked yet. In the bedroom of his suite, there were gold, star-shaped mylar balloons that he’d given his wife, Kathryn, whom he hadn’t seen for 10 days because he was in Europe on his bromantic Deadpool 2 press tour with Ryan Reynolds. There was no point in unpacking. They were going to Tahiti the next day for two weeks, his reward for surviving the European leg of the press tour.
But afterward, he hated himself for even allowing that.
“It’s like, does it make me a better person? Does it make me invincible?”
All this can sound like too much thinking until you understand. He’s just gotten his life in order. He’s five years sober, two years married. He’d found a career that worked for him, which was doing not-quite-blockbuster movies (No Country for Old Men, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), interesting roles with directors and co-stars who excited him and not-quite-leading-roles in movies he thought could really work. He found a woman — the former Kathryn Boyd, 32 — who doesn’t activate in him all the codependence of his prior relationships. He had a home and another home and was even expecting a child — his third. He had just excised so many of his demons, and he wasn’t sure how the ‘summer of Josh Brolin’ might interact with his newfound peace.
He was happy before the ‘summer of Josh Brolin’. Really. The money wasn’t great, relative-movie-star-wealth-wise, but Brolin grew up on a ranch. He’s self-sufficient.
That Sunday, after the call with his agents, he banished the enjoyment after its allotted second, and something else crept into the space it had occupied: Fear.
“He’s extremely honest,” said Benicio Del Toro, his friend and co-star in the Sicario movies, among others. This is the Josh Brolin of Sicario and True Grit and No Country for Old Men and Milk, for which he earned an Oscar nomination.
But then there’s another version of Josh Brolin that turns his face on its head. It’s the one he used in Inherent Vice and Flirting With Disaster and is certainly the one on display in Deadpool 2, where he takes the assumptions inherent to his monument of a face and winks at them — a postmodern Josh Brolin.
Can you believe the choices he’s suddenly presented with? He is 33 years past his film debut as the shorts-over-sweatpants brother in The Goonies. Even as the son of actor James Brolin, he spent so long with his nose pressed against the glass. After Goonies, he did the skater flick Thrashin’ and after that, a million auditions. It all felt so out of reach: He did an episode of Highway to Heaven. He lost the lead on 21 Jump Street to Johnny Depp.
He did a few series. He had a self-consciousness that precluded him from taking jobs that he thought he couldn’t do well. The money would have been good, but the process — the auditions, the compromising — was so humiliating and awful that he felt like he should make his money some other way. And so in 2002, Josh Brolin, the movie star, began working as a day trader.
He says he made so little money in Hollywood (relative to other people we know as movie stars), that the Time’s Up pay equity discussion was a surprise to him. He’s not an idiot. He just couldn’t imagine that all those amazing women were making so much less than the men. He’s been surrounded all his life by alpha women — his late mother was a screaming, hard-drinking firecracker of a woman. His stepmother is Barbra freaking Streisand. Josh went “head-to-head” with both women, he said, both of whom he loved and loves dearly.
“I’ve always been the one that’s been paid the least,” he said. “I’ve always been the one that didn’t get what my co-stars got.” He says he received union scale for most of his work. He was paid $100,000 flat, no back end, for No Country ... After agent fees and taxes, that’s maybe $36,000. He laughed.
His mother, a Texan named Jane Cameron Agee, was “really severe,” too, he said. She was a casting director and an animal activist who, 12 days into knowing James Brolin, said something Texan like, “So, are we going to get married or what?”
Brolin said he confined his drinking to binges, away from home where his kids couldn’t see. He was settling down after a childhood that included drugs, drinking, participation in a punk band, an intentional frost-tipped mohawk, theft, arrests, at least one stint in juvie and emancipation from his parents at 16. He needed breaks from the pressure, so sometimes he’d leave for Los Angeles for a few days or come to this suite in New York, when it was being paid for by a movie or by his production deal with Warner Bros., which ended in 2012. Then he would binge drink. It was a sanctuary in time, he said, in which he wasn’t responsible for anything.
Now, in sobriety, he said, “I want to live more drunk. I want to live drunkenly. I just don’t want to take the drink.”
His approach to relationships with women had always been to try to ascertain what they’re looking for and then try to be that thing.
It was the same with his ex-wife Diane Lane, he said. “I loved Diane,” he said. “I loved being a father figure to her daughter. It just wasn’t attainable, and in that hero mentality, you get exhausted, and then when you get exhausted, you get resentful.”
He and Lane had something like an Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton existence, he said, until they split in 2013. In 2004, Lane called the police, saying that Brolin had hit her, and he was arrested. The case was later dropped.
Five years ago, when Brolin decided to stop smoking, he decided to stop drinking, too.
He finalised his divorce with Lane. He went through the steps. He wrote poems, like he always had. He wrote in his journal, like he always had. One day, four months after his divorce, he looked up and he saw Kathryn, his assistant, just there, fully formed, no emotional need for him to graft onto and try to fill. “She doesn’t need me. She never needed me.”
They married in 2016.
Earlier this morning, as they sat at the breakfast table and read the paper, he looked over at her and his eyes filled up. She came over to sit on his lap. He thought of all the ways he had been careless with his life. The drinking, the arrests, the horrible days spent in this suite. He doesn’t forget about that.
That’s the problem with the ‘summer of Josh Brolin’. The ‘summer of Josh Brolin’ is a great many good things, but it is also a threat to the life he had just realised was good enough.
Don’t miss it
Sicario: Day of the Soldado releases in the UAE on June 28.
