How Josh Brolin almost stole Johnny Depp’s whole career: “I wanted any job”
It’s always fun to imagine what might have been had things gone differently in Hollywood. You could have had Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, Will Smith as Neo in The Matrix, or even Josh Brolin having Johnny Depp’s entire career, as we’ll discover.
That’s because Brolin and Depp were both not just up-and-coming young wannabe actors in the mid-1980s, but also good buddies vying for some of the same roles in Los Angeles – both men had managed to get a foothold in the industry, Depp having played a major role in Wes Craven’s 1984 horror Nightmare on Elm Street despite having no prior acting experience, and Brolin playing the elder brother in The Goonies the following year.
Despite that relative early success, both actors were still looking for their next main parts when auditions began for a new network TV show called 21 Jump Street, a police procedural drama based on a group of young officers who could pass for teenagers, allowing them to do undercover work in places like high schools – both Depp and Brolin tried out for the series, but Brolin was left disappointed.
He told USA Today, “I wanted any job at that point. They had fired the initial guy and auditioned three other guys, and it came down to Johnny and me. The network wanted me, the producer wanted Johnny. He and I were at his apartment hanging out; our girlfriends were best friends at the time.”
Adding: “Johnny had just finished a small part in Platoon and was talking about what it meant for him to work for this great director, Oliver Stone. The phone rings, it’s Johnny’s agent. He listens, hangs up, stuffs his clothes into his Platoon duffel and just walks out. The next time I saw him, I was doing a guest role on the fourth episode of 21 Jump Street.”
Brolin might have missed out on the character of Officer Thomas ‘Tom’ Hanson Jr, but it didn’t affect his friendship with Depp, which would last long after the show had aired, Depp going on to make four seasons until he was released from his contract in 1991, by which point he was a fully-fledged movie star thanks to his performances in films like Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands.
Unfortunately for Brolin, his career didn’t take the same path for quite some time. He made a film in 1986 called Thrashin’, a skater drama in which he felt his acting was ‘horrendous’, and then made just one movie in the next ten years, concentrating mostly on bit parts in TV shows instead. Ten years after that, Brolin had stepped away from Hollywood completely and was about to pursue a career in trading stocks when he managed to book the lead in the Coen brothers’ crime thriller No Country for Old Men.
That transformed his life for good; he would go on to star in a string of hits, including American Gangster, the George Bush biopic W, and 2009’s Milk, alongside Sean Penn, for which he would pick up an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
Over the past fifteen years or so Brolin has become one of the highest-grossing actors in movie history thanks to his part in the Avengers franchise as Thanos and in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy, the last of which will come out this December, ironically within a week of the blockbuster epic Avengers: Doomsday, which we don’t know whether he will appear in or not, although he has said he would be there in a shot if directors the Russo brothers asked him to.
