Josh Brolin’s indignant response to being called a below average actor: “F**k you, man”
It doesn’t seem quite possible that Josh Brolin could be the same actor who played both Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and the eldest member of 1985’s classic The Goonies and still only be 57 years old, but it is, in fact, the case.
What’s more surprising is that for a long period of time, almost 20 years in fact, Brolin could barely get hired by anyone, for anything. By 2006, he had essentially given up on acting as a career and was instead trading stocks to earn money before the Coen brothers pulled him out of obscurity and cast him as the lead in No Country for Old Men, the iconic crime thriller that features one of the finest movie villains of all time, courtesy of Javier Bardem.
It proved a huge turning point for Brolin, who made the most of the success of the film by putting in superb performances in big movies like American Gangster, playing the president in the George W Bush biopic W, and then earning a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination for his work in 2008’s Milk alongside Sean Penn.
It was an astonishing comeback for a man who, while the son of famous actor James Brolin, had not had the easiest time as a young man, battling heroin addiction and the death of his mother in a car crash in his 20s.
Acting had started off so well for Brolin, having landed the part of Brandon Walsh in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster The Goonies, but rather than propel him into superstardom, it seemed to have the opposite effect. He told the Guy Raz podcast, “I had done a lot of auditions, I got Goonies, and that never should have happened. I just fit the role perfectly at that time, you know? Next to Sean Astin, I looked right. I looked dumb and buff and blonde and whatever it was that was needed. I didn’t know what I was doing. It worked, but I thought that’s how movies were done. I thought every movie was gonna be like The Goonies. So success-wise, you know, we were in a different time, too.”
Between 1990 and 2006, Brolin struggled badly and only managed to get the occasional bit-part on TV or in small-budget films. However, he still feels he put his all into each role he did, something he underlined in a conversation once he had booked No Country for Old Men.
He recalled, “I remember somebody said to me in an interview, ‘How does it feel to be doing A+ work now, when you were doing C- work?’ I was like, ‘F**k you, man. Who said I was doing C- work?’ It may be perceived as a C- movie, but I was bringing an A-game to everything I could, with whatever ability I had. I did nothing different in No Country than I did in the one day I did in Milwaukee, Minnesota, when I put on the G-string and the pantyhose.”
In 2014, Brolin made his first appearance as Marvel’s Thanos in a cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy and followed it up with another in Avengers: Age of Ultron before the character took on a major part in the next two Avengers movies, Infinity War and Endgame. Brolin received significant critical acclaim for his performance in the films.
He then went on to appear in both Dune reboot movies and as the lead in The Outer Range, a supernatural western series. Next, he’ll be seen in the Edgar Wright-directed remake of The Running Man, starring Glen Powell, in which he takes on the role of Dan Killian, the demonic game show host played so brilliantly in the 1987 original by Richard Dawson.
Things are only on the up for the man, and let’s hope it stays that way.
