The Oscar-nominated actor, Marvel villain and stepson of Barbra Streisand tells Audrey Ward how he survived his destructive childhood and finally got sober.
“I jump onto a group of people, young men, friendly, preppy boys drinking wine spritzers. They kick me. I swing wildly. I can’t feel anything.” This is the actor Josh Brolin describing one of his life’s many wild nights, on this occasion in Paris. “Find another bar. Blood on the face. Blood in the hair … More alcohol … Another fight. I fall in the Seine. I’m cold. I can’t remember where I live. I have a child.” Brolin was 23 at the time, and had spectacularly fallen off the wagon after three years of sobriety.
Movie stars are often damaged, but Brolin, now 56, is more damaged than most. His childhood was chaotic, reckless. He was nine when he first tried marijuana and 13 when he first dropped acid. Later he yo-yoed between raging alcoholism and sobriety. He has been in jail nine times.
“I love being sober. I have more fun,” he tells me now when we meet in a warehouse in downtown LA. He has been off the booze for a decade – but those years are never far from his mind. “There’s nothing that I go through that I am absolutely certain wouldn’t be worse if I was drinking.”
Brolin is today one of Hollywood’s most recognisable stars. He first hit the big screen as a teenager in the cult film The Goonies; then, much later, came the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for Milk in 2009. More recently he has played a dust-encrusted warrior in Dune, and Thanos, the destroyer of worlds, in Marvel’s Avengers franchise.
It could so easily have turned out differently. In his telling, the path to self-destruction was predestined. “I was born to drink. I was birthed to drink. My mother drank exactly like I did, and I was raised to be a man and drink like the male equivalent of my mother,” he writes in a new memoir.
He says the book’s title, From Under the Truck, is a nod to one of his and his mother’s drinking sessions. One night in his teens, Brolin and his mother, Jane, took part in a drinking competition with her new boyfriend, at the boyfriend’s instigation. “You don’t want to do that,” Jane warned the man, but he insisted. Fifteen or so drinks later, the boyfriend disappeared and the bar owner found him with his legs sticking out from under his truck, passed out. “You don’t f*** with us,” Brolin’s mother muttered under her breath.
Now he’s feeling anxious about how his memoir will be received. It’s not sanitised: there’s debauchery, asides on masturbation (“Push two pillows together: instant vagina”) and some sex, including with a prostitute in Paris “whose blonde hair I can still feel lying softly on my hand”.
“I’m at this place where I’m, like, ‘I have made the biggest mistake of my life,’” he tells me earnestly.
As we talk he is sweetly attentive, worrying I’ll be blinded by the Californian light and fussing over my rickety wooden chair, which looks like it might collapse at any moment. He is dressed in a faded black T-shirt and jeans and is softly spoken. He comes across as together and self-assured, which makes it harder to get your head around the carnage he has survived.
Brolin grew up on a ranch in Paso Robles, California, with his younger brother Jess. Their father is James Brolin, the actor and two-time Golden Globe winner, most famous for his roles in Marcus Welby MD and The Virginian, who went on to marry the singer Barbra Streisand in 1998 – “My dad has had a certain woman. She’s the least severe.” Their mother, Jane, was a Texan wildlife activist. Brolin tells me she was “clownish, funny, eccentric, authentic”, which is one way of putting it. Even Brolin snr was afraid of her and kept his distance, working long weeks away from the ranch.
As an 8-year-old Brolin was expected to get up before dawn to do his chores. “It was all about feeding horses and birthing foals,” he recalls. He’d deliver bales of hay to the horses in a golf cart or a Chevy truck, which his father had taught him to drive. The family kept a coterie of rescued wild animals – bobcats, cougars, coyotes, wolves and mountain lions – and he’d clean out the animal cages. “It was a lot of work,” he says.
Then there was the wild unpredictability of his alcoholic mother. She would think nothing of taking her son to bars, where she’d charm cowboys and truckers into buying her drinks, or of pulling him and his brother out of school and driving more than 1500km to Texas to buy a specific kind of burger. A favourite trick on the ranch was to shout, “Sic ‘em,” to whatever wild animal was close by to encourage it to tear after her small boys. “You knew if you didn’t get on the other side of that shut door within a couple of seconds, you’d be cleaning up fresh bloody marks somewhere on your body for the rest of the day,” he writes.
It must have been pretty terrifying, but he’s loath to say that today. He clearly admired his mother and, crucially, identified with her. “You know, she was a pain in the ass. I mean, there’s nobody who would contest that – nobody – but you don’t not want her around,” he says with a shrug. She made “everything a little more powerful, a little more vivid … It’s just kind of falling into that place [for me]. Like, ‘Oh, you’re definitely your mother’s son,’” he says.
He found refuge from the chaos around him in books, which made him realise that “I don’t have to live in this all the time. I can be transported. I think that prompted this idea that you can write your feelings down.” He’s kept diaries since he was a child.
When he was 11 the family moved from the ranch to Santa Barbara, where he went fully off the rails. He joined a crew of neglected kids, the Cito Rats, short for Montecito – the upmarket district where the Duke and Duchess of Sussex now live. The boys surfed and skateboarded, snorted coke, took LSD. “I’d do [drugs] when somebody had it or I’d steal it.” He regularly got into fights, stole cars and threw bottles of gin at police cars. Brolin would often wake up on the pavement half-naked, T-shirt wrapped around his waist, wondering how he had ended up there.
Underneath the bravado, though, Brolin was insecure, worried that people might see him as he clearly saw himself. “I was paralysed with what I thought other people saw in me: a nothing, an invisible, worthless of word,” he writes.
The Rats came from all backgrounds, rich and poor: what bonded them was rage at their self-absorbed parents. They were desperate for parental attention. Of the original group of 50, 37 are dead. “I grew up with a lot of guys that died from the heroin epidemic” – and a handful of others are in prison.
Somehow a jot of self-preservation kicked in during his teens. He now realises the urge to act came from “a necessity to not go to jail, because I was on that track”.
His parents divorced when he was 16 and it was a relief. “My mom was going out with another truck driver and my dad was doing his thing, and it made perfect sense to me. I was, like, ‘Finally.’”
He went to live with his father in Los Angeles, yet he says he’s no nepo baby. The family connection didn’t prise any doors open – far from it. “When I started it was, like, ‘Oh, you’re Brolin’s son,’ but not in a good way. You know, this idea of nepotism and all that, it’s, like, ‘Oh no, there’s people out there that want you to not get the job.’”
He had a lengthy CV, brimming with copious theatre work that “was 100% bullshit”, he says. And in 1984, when he was 16, he landed a role in The Goonies. “It was the greatest – I will never have an experience like that. It was an accident. It never should have happened.” Acting next to Corey Feldman, fresh from a role in Gremlins, and Ke Huy Quan, who had just appeared in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Brolin had imposter syndrome. “[I was] a fish out of water but I just kept trying to keep my mouth shut. I ruined the first half-day of filming because I was laughing so hard out of nerves,” he says.
The movie was a hit at the box office and with critics. All my female friends had a crush on him, I tell him, but he says he was still so lacking in confidence that he could barely chat to a girl unless he’d had a drink.
“I don’t know if that was just a lack of ego or an insecurity or whatever.” Even now, 40 years later, ruggedly handsome (“neanderlithic” is how he puts it) and married to the third of his beautiful wives, he maintains nothing has changed. “I was never a chick magnet,” he stresses.
It wasn’t just girls who were elusive after The Goonies. Further Hollywood roles didn’t transpire. “I was working here and there. I mean, I wouldn’t work for 12 or 16 months.” Eventually he all but gave up on acting, taking work as a landscape gardener. Shut out of Hollywood, the drinking and drug-taking got worse. Then his mother died.
She was 55 and in a relationship with a 30-year-old who had a fiery temper and dished out insults. One day, when her boyfriend threatened to leave her, she pulled a rifle on him and, when he drove off, she chased after him in her car and crashed into a tree. She had been drinking and Brolin suspects she was going at her typical speed of 110km/h in a 55km/h zone.
“Back then I go, ‘Wow, she’s 55, she lived a nice long life.’ You know – it’s, like, it’s a bummer,” he says glibly. Now, having crossed that age himself, he sees how young she was to die. “I had no idea. The fact that it’s been 30 years and my dad is still thriving and moving and sharp …” he trails off.
A year after her death Brolin’s father got together with Streisand. She was, Brolin says, “just a little confused” by him and his erratic behaviour. One day he walked into his father and Streisand’s house and asked for a glass of red wine. She didn’t sugarcoat her reply: “But aren’t you a drunk?”
“There’s nothing I ultimately appreciate more in anybody than an ability to just say it, regardless of the reaction,” he says.
Alcohol was his crutch throughout much of his 20s, 30s and early 40s, though he would manage bouts of sobriety. He says he always tried to keep the drinking separate from his two eldest children, Trevor, 36, and Eden, 29, whom he had with his first wife, Alice Adair, but he didn’t always succeed.
They had divorced and he had joint custody when, he says, he hit a life-reckoning moment after his drinking “crossed a line” into his children’s lives. “It was about taking care of animals and not being there to take care of an animal for a moment.” I ask him if one of the children’s pets died. “No, but close. And I was, like, ‘That’s because of me.’”
In 2006 he finally got another crack at Hollywood when he landed an audition for No Country for Old Men. “At the audition, Ethan Coen, the co-director, said, ‘Can you do a West Texas accent?’ and I said, ‘I just did,’ and he goes, ‘okay.’ I left thinking, ‘That’s not going to happen.’” But at midday he got the call offering him the part of the steely but hapless cowboy Llewelyn Moss, who finds a suitcase of cash in the wake of a drug deal gone wrong.
His career snowballed from there. Two years later he played the lead role of George W Bush in Oliver Stone’s W and in 2009 he got an Oscar nomination for his role playing Dan White, the politician who assassinated the gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk, in Milk. (In an unlikely parallel, his Goonies co-star Ke Huy Quan was out of work for decades before he won best supporting actor at the Oscars in 2023, for his role in Everything Everywhere All at Once.)
But for Brolin this still didn’t change much. He couldn’t bask in his success. “I wasn’t in the greatest frame of mind then. There was a lot of attention all of a sudden – I’d been doing it a long time with no attention. Suddenly it was calls from amazing people, people I respected … wanting to talk.” He felt “really confused by it”. He was still drinking heavily – but now people were watching.
A reckoning came in 2013. He woke up hungover on the pavement outside his house, with a vague recollection of being in a fight at a fast food drive-through in Santa Monica. He had to drag himself to his 99-year-old grandmother’s deathbed, reeking of drink, as she smiled up at him. It struck him that he was at the midway point of her life and he still had half his life to live. There and then he decided to live it sober. “I knew that was going to be the last time I drank,” he says. He went into rehab, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and is faring well. “I like getting older. It’s like a great excuse to finally go, ‘okay, just mellow out, you don’t need to constantly spin.’”
Chaos seemed reluctant to leave him behind. On a surfing trip to Costa Rica in 2013 he was stabbed one night by a drugged-up stranger hustling for cigarettes and money on the street. It happened just before he was due on set for the crime caper Inherent Vice. He says the director Paul Thomas Anderson understood it was just part of the deal, part of the chaos that defined Brolin’s life.
These days Brolin lives in Santa Barbara with his third wife, the actress Kathryn Boyd. (His second wife was the actress Diane Lane, whom he married in 2004. They divorced nine years later.) He and Boyd have two children – Westlyn, 6, and Chapel, 3, and they live on a ranch. “My wife was, like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so great,’” as she started to envisage their life there. Meanwhile he was imagining his youngest two children in prison. “I was so afraid to move back there. I was freaking out. I contracted a minor case of Bell’s palsy – I had paralysis in my face,” he says, eyes widening. They’re now settled happily.
I have to smile when he tells me that recently, a few days before we meet, he attended an exhibition opening for a friend of his, the artist Brian Bowen Smith. “I had to deal with drunk people who get super-close to your face and need to enunciate everything that they’re talking about,” he complains.
- From Under the Truck by Josh Brolin (HarperCollins)
Written by: Audrey Ward
© The Times of London
