A look back at Josh Brolin’s career journey from childhood to some of the most iconic characters who marched to the beat of their own drums.
Editor’s Note: This cover story originally appeared in the January 2011 issue.
Josh Brolin was raised on a 100-acre ranch in Central California, and his choices of rugged and individualistic roles in both television and films reflect his early lifestyle. From starring roles in The Young Riders TV series and his Oscar-nominated turn in Milk to No Country for Old Men, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and the remake of True Grit, Brolin frequently portrays characters that march to the beat of their own drum and usually have to pay the consequences.
At 17, Brolin made an indelible impression as Brandon Walsh in the 1985 teen classic The Goonies. His first western role came four years later when he was cast as a young and cocky James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok in The Young Riders, a television series about the early days of the Pony Express. Next came almost two decades of offbeat and eccentric films that included Flirting with Disaster, Hollow Man, Slow Burn, and Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda. Then in 2007 Brolin shot to the top with No Country for Old Men. That year he also starred in American Gangster, In the Valley of Elah, and Grindhouse.
Two thousand and ten turned out to be that kind of busy, successful year as well. In the Oliver Stone-directed Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Brolin stars opposite Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf as Bretton James, the head of an investment company who is ultimately punished for the financial destruction he helped to cause. Brolin also managed to find time to star in the Woody Allen-directed romantic comedy You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger opposite Naomi Watts, which was released in late September.
The year wrapped up in a big way for Brolin with the remake of True Grit — directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, the brothers who helmed the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, which starred Brolin as well — and the role of Tom Chaney, the character that audiences will love to hate. Chaney is a bad-as-they-come villain who has murdered 14-year-old Mattie Ross’ (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) father in cold blood. Ethan and Joel Coen bring a love of story and character to each project they produce and direct, and True Grit is no exception. Opening on December 22, this version of the western classic uses the 1968 novel by Charles Portis as its foundation more so than the 1969 movie, in which John Wayne played the cantankerous Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn. Jeff Bridges now stars as Cogburn, who, along with Mattie and Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon), chases Chaney deep into Oklahoma Indian Territory during the 1890s.
Brolin read Portis’ novel several times as a young boy on his family ranch, and the cowboys in True Grit were the kind of men he grew up with. After a hard day’s work, there was a lot of sitting around the campfire and telling stories. “One of the local storytellers was Edgar Weavy, who was probably 70-something at the time,” Brolin remembers. “He tried to outdo old-man Berman, who was at least 80, by telling a better yarn. This was where my love of great storytelling came from.”
At first glance, it seems like Cogburn, Mattie, and La Boeuf have the true grit that carries the story and that Chaney is the antithesis, but Brolin has a very different take on his character. “To me, all the salt-of-the-earth characters in the book represent true grit,” Brolin says. “I see these men as meat-and-potatoes guys with their finger girth about three times the size of anyone else’s. These are the guys who till the dirt, understand land, and work with horses intuitively. They have no interest in town or cosmopolitan living — it’s a foreign planet to them. To me, this is the definition of true grit.”
Chaney was a difficult character for Brolin to master, and it was hard for him to understand where the ruthless outlaw was coming from. “No one except Mattie has an ounce of integrity in the movie, and all three main male characters are manifestations of the same rock we all crawled out from underneath,” Brolin points out. “We’re just trying to survive any way that we can. But I do think that Chaney is the most primitive or Neanderthal of the characters in the film.”
During rehearsals, Brolin and the Coen brothers realized that Brolin’s initial take on the role wasn’t working. Getting extremely frustrated, the actor went into improvisation mode, literally trying out a new voice for Chaney. “This voice evolved into this extremely gorilla-like character,” Brolin says. “Portis wrote in the cadence and vernacular of the time, and I had to find that niche in order to not make my dialogue almost laughable.”
The role of Tom Chaney was offered to Brolin when he was deep in production on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. After starring in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, Brolin knew he was going to accept the role — even without reading the script. In No Country for Old Men, Brolin starred with Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones as Llewelyn Moss, an everyman who finds an illegal fortune, getting embroiled in a cat- and-mouse chase through West Texas. This was the movie that put the actor on the map, but the role almost didn’t happen for him.
Brolin was filming the Planet Terror segment of Grind- house with Robert Rodriguez when No Country for Old Men was being cast and couldn’t get to the Coen brothers’ office for a reading. He had been passionate about landing the part of coldblooded killer Anton Chigurh ever since discussing the book with playwright/actor Sam Shepard while working in Austin, Texas. That role ultimately went to Bardem.
“I called my agent and asked him to get me in,” Brolin says. “But when it came down to it I couldn’t leave my location and asked Robert and Quentin Tarantino, who was directing [the Death Proof] segment of Grindhouse, to put together an audition tape for me. Robert ended up shooting my audition tape with a million-dollar Genesis camera, and Quentin decided to direct it.” Regardless, the Coens were still not interested in Brolin for their movie.
After weeks of outreach to them, including a letter written in character, Brolin was resigned to not being cast. “Finally they called my agent, first saying, ‘Quit calling us,’ and gave me an audition time; I showed up the next morning and got the part of Llewelyn Moss. He was such a great, great character. Every character in the movie was great. Working with the Coens is a very blue-collar experience, and we all just showed up and did our work without a lot of praise or conversation,” Brolin says.
“I still remember Ethan coming up to me and mumbling in the middle of a scene: ‘No one’s going to see this movie.’ I asked what was the matter with him and told him to go away.”
Luckily Ethan was wrong, and No Country for Old Men went on to win four of its eight nominations at the 2008 Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Bardem.
Several years after his attention- grabbing role in The Goonies, Brolin, the son of television star James Brolin and animal rights activist Jane Cameron Agee, was cast in The Young Riders. A fictionalized account of the heyday of the Pony Express in the years leading up to the American Civil War. The ABC western series focused on a group of young Pony Express riders based at the Sweetwater Station in the Nebraska Territory. Television has always been a difficult medium for Brolin because of the inherent redundancy of doing a weekly series, but The Young Riders changed his mind as he felt at home starring in an ongoing western.
“I’m comfortable on horses,” he says, “and was probably the only guy in the series who had grown up around them. If you look at us in the opening credits, riding in unison, we are all up high and out of our seats; there was so much room between our butts and the saddle, you could tell that none of us knew how to ride.”
At the beginning of the second season, the cast had learned how to ride a bit better, so they filmed the credits again. “For me, the difference between the first and third year on the air was substantial,” Brolin says. “By then we knew who the characters were, and that year became a great lesson in not overthinking the role. I really loved how my character evolved, and by that time his evolution was very organic. When guest stars tried to get in character, I would be lassoing their feet and got really good with a gun because I was constantly playing with it on the set. It was an amazing three years.”
Mescal, Arizona, 45 minutes east of Tucson, doubled for the Nebraska Territory. The historic town was literally in the middle of nowhere, and Brolin relished its remoteness and the authenticity it brought to the period portrayed in the series. More than a decade later, he tackled the role of the frontier explorer Jedediah Smith in the Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries Into the West. The 12-hour miniseries tells the epic story of westward expansion from the contrasting perspectives of a Native American family and a family of white settlers from the East.
“It was great being out in the West again,” says Brolin fondly. “I feel so comfortable with these guys, and there were a lot of wranglers I’ve known through the years. These kinds of roles feel like going home to me. The characters in these projects are all different, but the settings are all the same, and much more to my liking than, say, Wall Street.”
Brolin should know. Two years before his banner year of 2007, his acting career wasn’t adding up to the living he wanted for his family, so he turned to day trading stocks and started his own trading company. “I decided to sell the ranch and used the profit to learn how to trade,” Brolin says. “It was becoming so unsatisfying to do movies I didn’t want to do. Even if the outcome wasn’t great, I at least wanted to work with filmmakers like the Coens who went into the project with a great intent.”
Brolin sold his ranch at the height of the real estate market and went into trading full time. “I had a knack for it and did really well,” he says. “Partially because of acting I was willing to be totally humiliated and asked the same questions a million times until I got it from a guy who was really patient and [I] learned strong enough trading skills to make some decent money.”
Perhaps this financial freedom was just what the actor needed to give him the breathing room necessary to make the right movie choices, and he’s definitely been making them for the last several years. Still trading during No Country for Old Men and American Gangster, he began to develop projects as well and gradually returned full time to film work. Then work imitated life when Brolin was cast as Bretton James in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. “The trading experience allowed me to ask the right questions when I met with these investment bankers,” he says. “Once they start to trust you, they tell you their real feelings about what they’ve done or what they do. That’s the reason I’m in this industry, to hear the real story about the characters I write about or portray on-screen.”
For Brolin, life has come full circle. Although selling the family ranch caused great emotional hardship for him, its sale enabled him to get back on track with his acting career. He recently bought back the property. His ranch is just three miles away from Oak Country Ranch, where he was raised in Central California. “The ranch is where I feel comfortable,” he explains. “I get very caught up in what I’m doing in Los Angeles and need an escape so I can always have a level of objectivity.”
When Brolin was growing up in Paso Robles in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the area was considered horse country, not wine country, and the main crop was not grapes but alfalfa. “We were truly seven miles from town without dozens of houses and many vineyards in between,” he says.
“The family ranch raised horses, and we had as many as 65 head at one time. We bred a lot, and our big claim to fame was an Appaloosa stallion named Stud Spider. I had my own horse, Tiparillo, but didn’t always love riding growing up as the ranch was real work; as a kid, real country living was about dirt bikes.”
It wasn’t until The Young Riders that Brolin started to enjoy riding, and his love and respect for animals came from his mother, who passed away 15 years ago. “My mom was an animal activist who worked with fish and game [officials], rescuing animals that had been illegally taken out of the wild. We would nurse those animals back to health, and if they hadn’t been defanged or declawed, release them back into the Mojave Mountains or Desert. If they couldn’t defend themselves in the wild, we would search for a proper place for them to live in captivity.”
Working with rescued wolves, coyotes, and bobcats caused not only a back full of scars, but heightened animal intuition. Getting on the back of a horse became a relationship experience, not just mounting up and running across the plains. “I learned the technical moves and skills as well, but riding for me was more about the intuitive relationship between the rider and the horse,” Brolin says. “I recently watched my wife’s (Diane Lane) movie Secretariat, and there is a scene where she walks up to the horse and stares into his eyes. I thought, Please don’t talk to the horse — and she didn’t.”
Lane rides as well, and when she and Brolin first started to date, she loved the ranch so much that the couple purchased two horses, Chief and Estrella, so that they could ride together. Now, spending time on the property close to where Brolin grew up, the couple easily escapes the demands of Hollywood. “There is always a feeling that you could get shot at any moment up there, and I think it’s a good way to keep reporters away,” Brolin laughs.
Despite his affinity for the trappings of ranch life, Brolin acknowledges that, when it comes to westerns, he is drawn more to films that focus on the man, like Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz and Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks. “Most of my favorite westerns don’t feature horses, but are more character driven. I was never into the typical western, and that’s why I love the Coens so much — they direct more like poetry than a linear narrative.” If True Grit receives both the accolades and awards that No Country for Old Men was honored with, Brolin may just have found his western niche.
From the January 2011 issue.
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Photography by Brian Bowen Smith
Additional photography provided by: Paramount / Miramax / The Kobal Collection, MGM Media, Lorey Sebastian © Paramount Pictures, Getty Images Entertainment