Josh Brolin reflects on how his life path shifted unexpectedly

When Josh Brolin was cast in Woody Allen’s 2010 drama You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he wrote the director an email. Three pages long. The character needed a Serbian accent, he explained. A wheelchair, too. He laid out his reasoning assiduously. Allen’s reply was just one word: “No.”

Brolin had always been drawn to the bells and whistles — prosthetics, limps, “extreme versions of character”. But over time, he learnt that less can be more — not just from that exchange with Allen, but also from an earlier role, his laconic Vietnam vet in the Coen brothers’ 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men. “When you’re a lead in a film and have almost no dialogue, there has to be major inner dialogue going on,” the 57-year-old explains in his distinctive California rasp. “If you have something going on that’s dynamic inside, you don’t need a lot.” It allows people to lean forward, he suggests. “I always felt like I had to inundate, whereas now, I don’t generally feel I need to do that.”

In person, though, the square-jawed star of Sicario, Avengers and Dune is pure inundation. Not an ounce of reticence. We meet in Mayfair to chat about his role in the upcoming third instalment of Rian Johnson’s puzzle-box series Knives Out — Wake Up Dead Man. He’s all compact, coiled energy in a navy long-sleeve polo. Midway through our conversation, his co-star Glenn Close bursts in, with her dog Pip in tow. Brolin grins and flexes his pecs for her. She feels them. They laugh.

His friend Imogen Poots, with whom he worked on the 2022 Amazon series Outer Range, recently told me that Brolin has “that gasoline bloodstream. He’s one of my favourites, an amazing storyteller, very mischievous and dangerous.” It fits. Talking to him is like gripping a live wire. He leans in when he speaks, eyes locked on mine, his words unfiltered and mercilessly blunt. “Actors aren’t artists,” he scoffs. As is the case in his brilliant, unflinching 2024 memoir, From Under the Truck, there’s seemingly no topic off limits. But first: Knives Out. An archly engrossing whodunit, Wake Up Dead Man is a return to form for a franchise that began in 2019 with charm to burn. Gone is the bumptious self-congratulatory tone of 2022’s Glass Onion; this time around, it’s fun and satisfyingly macabre, with gothic overtones and more twists than a corkscrew staircase. It’s another seemingly impossible murder case for Daniel Craig’s Southern sleuth Benoit Blanc to solve. “It’s genius,” says Brolin. “It took me to a few different places that I really didn’t anticipate, and I love that. It’s a great labyrinth.”

The film is set in a small-town community in upstate New York, where Brolin’s tyrannical Monsignor Wicks preaches hateful rhetoric in the form of piety. Just as Edward Norton’s insufferable tech bro in Glass Onion has shades of Elon Musk, so the spectre of Donald Trump hovers over Wicks, a cult-like figurehead not unaccustomed to double standards and marginalising certain groups. Brolin says he didn’t base Wicks specifically on the US president. “I could make something up and say it was rooted in a kind of Trumpian greed” — but it wasn’t, he insists, although he notes that once “Wicks garners a sense of power, then there are no boundaries”.

Brolin and the US president go back a ways. “I’m not scared of Trump, because even though he says he’s staying for ever, it’s just not going to happen. And if it does, then I’ll deal with that moment. But having been a friend of Trump before he was president, I know a different guy.” The Trump he knew was a builder and entrepreneur, whom he met and spent time with after appearing in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. “I’m sure there was a lot of corruption involved,” says Brolin. Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of someone building a $400m hotel “in the middle of a cesspool city during the late Seventies — that’s interesting to me. Now it’s power unmitigated, it’s unregulated.”

Patrick Smith, The Independent