Josh Brolin’s greatest role was supposed to be Heath Ledger’s: “He pulled out”
Success is never guaranteed in Hollywood, even after one sizable hit. While he was a hero to teenage boys everywhere with his charismatic role as Brand Walsh in The Goonies, Josh Brolin struggled to find his place in the industry for over 20 years after his memorable acting debut, being only cast in bit parts or in low-budget projects.
Although he, too, would come to play the part of a remorseless villain in a superhero-invested world, his career couldn’t have been more different from that of Heath Ledger, who was met with a near-constant string of successes after 10 Things I Hate About You and The Patriot turned him into a star.
Ledger had already proven himself to be a capable western star with Brokeback Mountain and Ned Kelly, so he was attached to star in No Country for Old Men, the highly anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed neo-western crime novel that would make Javier Bardem the nightmare of every household as Anton Chigurh, and the cherished source material alongside Joel and Ethan Coen at the helm, who were on an incomparable winning streak, were reasons enough to be excited about the film.
To that end, adding a Coen brothers collaboration to his repertoire only made sense for Ledger, who had already worked with acclaimed names such as Ang Lee, Catherine Hardwicke, Todd Haynes, and more, but the pressure of so many demanding roles began to weigh on the actor, who had recently become a father, so understandably, he had to pull out.
In an interview with Dax Shepard of Armchair Expert, Brolin recalled that with a tight shooting window approaching, the Coens “were really frustrated and they were looking everywhere”, which is when he managed to enter the picture as a replacement to play the unlucky welder Llewelyn Moss, appearing alongside award-winning actors like Tommy Lee Jones, Bardem, and Woody Harrelson, changing the course of his career for an indomidable rise.
Brolin’s performance as a grizzled, cowardly Texan who makes the mistake of taking in a tainted stash of cash became the heart of a very dark film. Moreover, in casting him in a role unlike his previous work, the Coens were able to make the twists and turns of No Country for Old Men even more effective and cement the actor as someone great even in his adult years who was being unjustly overlooked.
Considering the sizable expectations, the film went on to reach a shocking degree of success, and in addition to winning four Academy Awards (including ‘Best Picture’), it also became the highest-grossing of the Coens’ career until they returned to the genre with True Grit three years later.
Brolin may have been overlooked by awards voters that season, but he was not lacking in attention, which saw him spend 2007 appearing in American Gangster, In The Valley of Elah, and Planet Terror, ironically, matching in the footsteps of Ledger as the only other actor capable of making so many great films in such a short window of time.
