“I just think he’s the shit”: Josh Brolin names the single best actor in the business
Although you wouldn’t consider him part of the conversation, Josh Brolin has worked with enough of Hollywood’s finest actors to have an opinion on who sits at the very top of the performative pile.
Yes, he’s an Academy Award nominee, and he’s good at his job, but Brolin has never been someone regarded as a truly generational talent. He’s shared the screen with a lot of them, though, but there’s only one who he believes can be called the best in the business.
Coming from a guy who’s sparred with Denzel Washington, Robert Downey Jr, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Sean Penn, Michael Douglas, Benicio del Toro, George Clooney, Glenn Close, and Will Smith, to name just a few of the top-tier talents he’s co-starred alongside, that’s quite the honour.
Admittedly, there’s a faint scent of bias in the air because they’re a long-time friend of Brolin’s, and he even issued a roundabout apology for weaponising that friendship to convince his pal to sign up for a movie that the No Country for Old Men star would subsequently regret as the biggest piece of shit he’s ever appeared in.
Talking to GQ, the second-generation actor spun off on a wild tangent that saw him hypothesise his dream role: starring in a film about the life and times of John Malkovich. “I would, too,” he insisted. “But I would want it to be a TV movie, not a regular movie. I would only agree to do it as, like, an after-school special. Or Hallmark.”
Since Being John Malkovich is already a thing that exists, even if Brolin got his theoretical biopic off the ground, the best he could hope for would be that it wound up as the second-best picture ever made about the prolific veteran and character man who cornered the market in playing intelligent psychos.
“He’s a guy I’m obsessed with, and he knows it,” the Marvel veteran added. “I just think he’s… You can’t do any better than that, as a human being and an actor. I just think he’s the shit.” However, what he could do was accidentally fuck Malkovich over, with Brolin confessing that he managed to talk the Con Air scenery-chewer into the risible Jonah Hex.
It’s a movie that Brolin has shit on at every available opportunity, and one of the many sins the comic book adaptation committed was luring Malkovich into its maw. “That was my fault. That was my fault,” he atoned. “It’s OK. Our friendship is still intact. But yes, I did. I did. It was very important to me that Johnny did that role.”
Malkovich is arguably one of modern cinema’s most underrated actors, since he’s spent decades showcasing virtually endless range and versatility, but as far as Brolin is concerned, there’s nobody else who comes close to lacing his boots.
