When Josh Brolin returned to work 10 days after being stabbed: “I should have died”
It is often said that a person facing a severe test of character is going through a “crucible”. For Josh Brolin, that personal crucible came in 2013, an incredibly tumultuous year for the actor. He began it by finding himself in trouble with the law, managed to get sober, ended one relationship and began another, and starred in several films. Oh, and he was also stabbed in an attempted mugging that, in his estimation, should have been fatal. Instead of bleeding out on the street, though, he was back on set ten days later doing what he loves.
On January 1st, 2013, Brolin didn’t spend New Year’s Day with his family and friends at home. Sadly, he was found on a Santa Monica footpath so drunk that he couldn’t care for himself, and he was arrested for public intoxication. It was a wake-up call for the star, who had struggled on and off throughout his life with substance abuse. He checked into rehab and hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since. In March 2014, he told The Guardian, “It was another turning point. It made me think of a lot of things…I realised that I was on a destructive path. I knew that I had to change and mature.”
Only a month after this arrest, Brolin’s nine-year marriage to Diane Lane ended, with a source close to the couple telling Us Weekly, “It was a mutual decision. It is very amicable. It’s not ugly, it’s just over.” The following month, though, Brolin began dating his former assistant Kathryn Boyd, and she would become his third wife in 2016. The happy couple have two children, Westlyn Reign and Chapel Grace, born in 2018 and 2020.
Unfortunately, the year – which began with Brolin at rock bottom before rays of hope crept in – took another severe turn when he and Boyd were on vacation in Costa Rica. When the couple were walking the streets one night, a stranger asked Brolin for money, but he only had two dollars cash in his pockets. The next thing Brolin knew, the guy stabbed him in the stomach with what he described as a “straight-armed death blow”.
Brolin admitted, “I should have died right away,” but lady luck was on his side. Miraculously, the assailant had stabbed Brolin in the belly button and hit the umbilical ligament. In his memoir From Under the Truck, Brolin revealed, “The umbilical ligament is the densest ligament in the body, and it slowed the knife down enough to stop it from hitting any vitals.” Amazingly, the blade missed his aortic artery by less than two millimetres. To put that into context, if it had struck the artery, Brolin was told he would have been dead within two and a half minutes.
Once the assailant had run off, Brolin and Boyd called an ambulance and waited for it to arrive outside their hotel. At this point, he was unsure if he would make it, so he called Alice Adair, his first wife and the mother of his first two kids, Trevor and Eden. She reassured him that he was going to be fine, but in his memoir, he was adamant that she tell his children some important things if he didn’t survive. He wanted her to “talk to the kids about what I loved most about them, about what they meant to me, and how I know they’ll grow into a future that they can feel proud of, and not spiral into shame because of.”
Brolin is a firm believer in fate and destiny, and he insists that it’s no accident that his umbilical ligament, which once connected him to his mother, was the thing that saved his life. Perhaps he was also fated to survive the encounter because bigger success in Hollywood was awaiting him on the other side. After all, many of his most successful films have been made after he survived the stabbing, including all his Marvel Cinematic Universe appearances as Thanos, two Sicario films, and two Dune epics.
Ultimately, as absurd as it sounds, after finding his way through the crucible of 2013, Brolin showed up to work on the set of Inherent Vice only ten days after being stabbed. He joked on The Howard Stern Show that Joaquin Phoenix, his co-star in the film, and director Paul Thomas Anderson were both astonished that he was working so soon after narrowly averting tragedy.
In fact, their energy was so brimming with excitement and gratitude that he confessed, “I fed off that”.
