Actor Josh Brolin: A Life in Vivid Color

Since the turn of the century, actor Josh Brolin has had quite a run. From No Country for Old Men and Hail, Caesar! from the Coen Brothers, to Inherent Vice from Paul Thomas Anderson, to Sicario and the Dune films from Denis Villeneuve.

His new memoir, From Under the Truck, contains stories about the life in between. We discuss his upbringing bouncing from Paso Robles to Santa Barbara (8:49), the influence of his mother (10:05), and his entry to writing (19:40). Then, Brolin reflects on his vivid early adulthood in the 80s (26:14), the power of a story (32:30), and what actor Anthony Hopkins illuminated about sobriety (34:35).

On the back-half, we get into his collaborations with the Coen Brothers (38:48), his challenging relationship to drinking (50:50), and why finally, after three decades of playing characters on screen, it was time to fill in some of the backstory (1:07:13).

This conversation was recorded at Spotify Studios. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [e-mail].

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This is talk Easy. I'm student Forgoso. Welcome to

(00:37):
the show today. I'm joined by actor and author Josh Brolin.
Since the turn of the century, Brolin has been on

(00:58):
quite a run. You have No Country for Old Men
and Hail Caesar from the Coen Brothers, and Hare and
Bis from Paul Thomas Anderson Milk from Gus Van sant Sacario,
and the Dune films from Denive and the Neuve. That's
not even including his work in the Deadpool pictures and
the rest of the Marvel cinematic universe. But what is
it about Brolin that keeps us coming back? The Guardian

(01:21):
had a pretty good description and a profile of the actor,
where they wrote, if you're looking for the classic outsider
on the inside, a study in friction, then Josh Brolin's
your man. He's the child of privilege who trails a
rough and tumble history, a twenty first century movie star
who's out of joint with his time. And It's true,

(01:41):
there's always been something about Brolin that feels of a
bygone era. Maybe it's the long shadow that his actor
father casts, the Great James Brolin, or perhaps it's his
spirit which reads on screen as searching and battled, but
it's the battles themselves that make up a majority of
his new book, From Under the Truck, a celebrity memoir

(02:05):
that's almost anti celebrity in nature. Instead, Brolin offers an
unflinching look at addiction and recovery, diving headfirst into a
tumultuous childhood, the son of a larger than life mother
whose alcoholism he inherited, either by nature or nurture. The
book is guided more by feeling than chronology, a series

(02:29):
of vignettes bound by an emotional logic, which is also
how we try to structure today's episode. And so we
begin with the early years of Josh Brolin, bouncing from
Passerobliss to Santa Barbara, where the role he was best
known for, outside of course of his turn in the Goonies,
was that of a juvenile delinquent prone to outbursts and barbrals.

(02:54):
That fact one of his story. From there we get
into his collaborations with the Coen Brothers, his challenging relationship
to drinking, and my Finally, after three decades of playing
characters on screen, it was time to fill in some
of the backs. This is Josh Brolin, Josh Brolin, nice

(03:31):
to meet you.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Nice to meet you.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
How you doing.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
I'm good man. I was actually really looking forward to
meeting you. A lot of podcasts that I do and
have done over a forty year career. Not that there's
been podcasts over forty years, but you just kind of
show I like the idea of just showing up and
not knowing, but with you. For some reason, I listened
to part of your Joaquin, who's you know, my good buddy,

(03:53):
and it's always fun with him. It always makes me laugh,
and it always actually makes me feel about anything that
can happen, and it's just how it is. And then
Willem Dafoe, I told you I listened to it, and
then I saw that Marina is somebody who you've interviewed
and her till this went. Are the two kind of heroes,
am I. But it's this unpretentious kind of we're just experimenting, man,

(04:16):
We're just looking for the vivid, truer you know, access,
which I loved.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
You're going to find. This whole podcast is one act
of experimentation. Good, So will we try to do it together?

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yes, let's do it.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Your agent, Kimberly Witherspoon. Yeah, she received the first fifty
pages of the book and she quote corrected hidden agendas
I hadn't told anyone about. I still don't understand how
you knew, and you always somehow found my hand through
the phone when I needed something true. So what were
the hidden agendas then that you didn't know at the time?

Speaker 2 (04:54):
The book kind of organically wrote itself. I mean there
were there. There was some moments in the process of
the book where she said, you know, you don't have
any of this at all, and I said, oh, no,
I definitely do. And you know I I just talked
to her this morning. You know, there's very few people
that I'll call and I'll say, like, I don't know

(05:15):
what I'm doing. I don't like and I said, I'm spinning.
I said it this morning. I said, I'm spinning about
what this is how I described it. I said, when
you do a movie, people think that you're on this
perpetual red carpet just waving at people your entire career, right,
and I go the truth of the matter, and you
can't even tell them. You can't go in a podcast

(05:36):
or go on an interview and you go listen, you
have no idea. How scrappy it is on set, and
how vulnerable you are, and you're trading ideas and you
don't really know which is the right idea, and you're
trying to design a scene within the scheme of the
bigger story and all this kind of stuff, and it
may work out and it may suck, you know what

(05:56):
I mean. Ultimately, you know, people see the movie. You
work your ass off, and the people see the movie
they go, yeah, it's all right. You know, when they
go up and octave, you know you've just blown it.
I said. Writing this book and promoting this book so
far not always has been like being on set all
the time. But in the public you know that that

(06:18):
dream that you have where you wake up in the playground,
it's school naked. That's what it feels like. And I
asked for it. Nobody did it to me, and I
can't go, oh, the director said this, or the other
actor did this, or this was the setting, or this
was this is so I was in the middle of
doing the audible and I was like, why the fuck
would I do this to myself? Why would you do this?

Speaker 1 (06:41):
We're just gonna have to dive in. Okay, eight years
old on a ranch pass a robe blest. Is that
how I say it? Five point thirty in the morning,
you're feeding fifty eight horses mowing acres of grass for
a dollar a week. In one interview, you were asked
what's one word to describe your childhood, and you used
the word fairal, What did that look like?

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Bruised? That's what it looked like. It looked purple and
bluish and a little yellow. It's all in hindsight that
it's romantic enough to be able to ride about, But
during it it's just I mean, everybody I grew up
around it was that. So it's normal. It's normal life.
It's a normal living. It's what you're expected to do.

(07:25):
Back in past robals at that time when our address
was Route one, box seventy one A, it wasn't even
a real address. It was bucolic enough where you would
take your kids out of school for two or three
weeks if they had to, if you had farming to do,
you know what I mean. It was back in that mentality,
like dust bowl mentality of like you have kids to
help you work. That wasn't necessarily the case with my family.

(07:50):
My family were raising horses. They were racing horses, they
were breeding horses. We had a very famous horse named
Stud Spider, who was a famous stud and all that,
But waking up at five point thirty in the morning,
especially with a mother that you know ran a wildlife
way station, it was it was, it was. It was

(08:10):
a pain in the ass, and it was feral, and
it was bloody.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
You said once that she was better with animals than
she was with people.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
For sure, anybody would tell you that. Anybody who knew
her would say that exact thing.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Did you understand that as a kid, No, what did
you think?

Speaker 2 (08:27):
There's two reactions, and my brother and I I can't
I think represent both reactions. One is why aren't you
paying attention to me? And the other is you will
pay attention to me?

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Which one were you?

Speaker 2 (08:38):
You will pay attention to me, I'll become an animal
for you, and therefore you will see an animal and
not a child and be able to relate.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
So you weren't just tending to the animals, You were
also becoming.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Becoming an animal. It was like what did they call it, lecanthropy?
That was the thing, like become more like her, which
she definitely was. Animalistic, become more like her, more reactionary,
less thoughtful, and therefore be able to share sensibilities. Thing

(09:09):
like that.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
Like her was a five foot three, one hundred and
ten pound woman who often smoked out of the corner
of her mouth. Cool kings. Yeah, you said, does she
raised you to be a drunk?

Speaker 2 (09:24):
And I don't say that as a victim.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
How did you understand that as a kid?

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, I mean when you go to when you hang
out in cafes and when you're on CB radio's basically
half your life, if not more. Because we were on
the road fifty sixty thousand miles a year. She was
driving because she didn't fly, so we were always in
the car with her. I was always in the car
with her. You know, my dad even tells his stories.
He says, I remember you being in the passenger seat,

(09:51):
her driving, and me in the back with my hands
over my ears. So what does that mean that he
was the child and I was the surrogate husband or
whatever that was. So it was like I was the partner.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
Is that how you took it?

Speaker 2 (10:03):
When I look back on it, you're trying to define it.
You go, what is what is the what's the Freudian
you know definition of that, which I totally accept. It's
not even a look at and I go, oh, that's
horrible or what a horrible mother. I don't think in
those terms. That was the movie that was playing, and
it was Apocalypse Now and I was three, and she

(10:25):
was Kurts, and she was all the other characters too.
She was the one dancing for the guys, and that
was flown in, and she was the one dropping from
the helicopter, and she was at all. So for somebody
who appreciates, you know, a vivid experience, she was vivid
in every which way. What I think was lacking was

(10:47):
an emotional caress, do you know what I mean? So
when you wake up in the middle of the night
and she's had a blackout, but she was drinking Clypso coffees,
so she had to wake up because the alcohol wears
off and then now the coffee's starting.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
To is that what is it, rum.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Rum tia maria coffee with a little whipped cream on top.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
Unbelievad.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
I mean, it's a speedball. It's a speedball. So she'd
wake up and she'd wake me up, my brother, and
she'd say, you know what happened? What did I do?
So all that lends itself to your future in some way.
You either defy it or you accept it.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
The way your dad described you in the front seat
of the car as a kind of surrogate partner reminds
me of a section early in the book, I think
around page thirty five, which is you in the early seventies.
Your dad has just come home, I'm assuming from a
late night of shooting on a set or whatever else

(11:50):
one does one does working late at night set.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, right, the coffee mugs that mother had bought in
Mexico the summer before. We're just missing the father's head.
As he walked down the brick walkway of the home
where the family lived. The glass of the windows where
little Johnny was looking at the moon and the moon
was looking back at him were no longer there. The

(12:16):
windows were now in sharp pieces, all over the carpet
that looked like curly brown dog hair, and all over
the grass that had just been mowed earlier the day before.
The mother screamed and told the father to leave, even
though the father had just gotten there. The mother was
mad at the father that the father had just been
gone and now the mother was mad that he was

(12:38):
there in the home where the family lived. Little Johnny
watched and thought, how he learned about numbers in school,
how he knew that when you have one and one
that it makes two. But there was one of the
mother and one of the father, and one of him,
and he didn't know what that made. And there was
a bunch of numbers on the ground now, and he
felt bad for those numbers. All those numbers on the

(13:00):
ground didn't make more. Little Johnny thought to himself, he
liked the window when it was one, and he liked
the moon when it was one, And he thought of
himself as being, and he liked himself that way. The
father got back to his truck, and the red lights
came back on, and then slowly disappeared down the driveway.
The dogs barked. The mother wiped her nose and opened

(13:22):
the cupboards to make pancakes. Little Johnny fed the mother
of the mice and the plastic container in his room
and put a check on his blue chort chart. The
phone rang while Little Johnny ate his pancakes, and the
mother crushed across the broken numbers on the ground to
pick it up. There was talking and there was smiling,
and there was laughter, and the sun rose in the sky,

(13:44):
and the dogs stopped barking and lay down in the dirt,
resting their long chins on their crossed over paws. And
through the broken windows, little Johnny saw in the distance
the moon as she slowly walked down the driveway, disappearing
quietly like the red lights had done just moments before. Yeah,
I like that story because it's an innocent child, you

(14:08):
know what I mean. And it's written and I know
I wrote that story initially straightforward, and then I liked
the idea, the cadence of it. I liked the idea
of it being a little sing songy, almost a little
Doctor Seuss, and I loved the idea of seeing it
through a child's eyes. I used to have these dreams,

(14:28):
and I only had it like three times, and I
guess they were called They were like night tears of sorts,
where something would break in half. And it makes sense
to me because the family was kind of breaking in
half or broken in half. So I would see a
ship break in half, or I would see a rolodex
spin and then stop halfway, and then I'd wake up
in a terror.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
The fact that you were more used to seeing her
screaming than crying. Oh yeah, and that moment of consoling
her on her feet on the bed, did you understand
why she was crying?

Speaker 2 (15:03):
No? I didn't, And it was like you just said,
I mean, you pointed out very astutely that it's very rare,
very rare for her tears, you know, And then you
see yourself later on myself of like, you start to
mirror that, and then you realize you get into life,
into public life, you realize this is not necessarily how

(15:24):
people do things. So it's kind of hard to fit in,
meaning that the way my mother demanded that I speak
to her is not normal. My mother liked to be
put in her place because nobody would put her in.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Her place, and your father wouldn't, no.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
So she cultivated this relationship. So when I would see
her cry, it was confusing. And you want to be
a caretaker. I mean even at four years old, who
was at Morgan Stapleton. Chris Stapleton's wife read the book
and said, I want to give that little boy a hug,
you know, And it's one of those things that I
take sweetly as opposed to oh you poor thing, now,

(16:04):
we have to take care of you. Like, look, I've
taken care of it. I've definitely confronted all this stuff
in a big way. As traumatic as it was, it was,
you know, there was it was very normal. It was
all the time. So if it was if it was
a fight in the house, or it was a five
you know, three hundred pound, five hundred pound lion biting

(16:26):
somebody's thigh, it was it was relentless. It never let up.
It was always something heightened.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
But she could tame the lion. Oh yeah, she couldn't
tame you.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
Though. Maybe that's why I lasted as long as I did,
is that she couldn't. She couldn't figure me out because
I was more like her than any of those animals.
But I think that she instilled that in me, keep fighting,
fight beyond me, right, And it's so interesting. I'm literally
just thinking of this for the first time. My dad
said to me at some point, it was after my

(17:00):
mom died. He said, I remember when you went to war,
and I go, what does that mean? And he was like,
with your career, but I think my career it's always
it's a personal thing. He was like, I remember when
you just you wouldn't take no for an answer, was like, oh,
you should go do this, and I go, yeah, I
don't want to do that. I want to be you know,
I want to do more character stuff. I want to
do more theater. And you just fucking went for it,

(17:23):
just saturated yourself with it.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
I want to talk about that period. Yeah, but I
think one of the earliest instances of you going to war.
To bring it back to writing for a second, is
a formative piece of poetry that you wrote, I think
around the age of eight or nine, and it was
a poem about death, written in the shape of a circle.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Pretty good.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
I don't think it's in the book. And I wondered, one,
why is it not in the book? And two when
you showed your mom that piece, what did she say?

Speaker 2 (17:56):
I didn't show it to her. She found it okay,
and then she confronted me and she said, what is this?
I don't understand it? Why are you thinking like this?
And it was but it wasn't a It was a
death piece, but I don't It wasn't like, oh I'm
I'm feeling black and I want to die. It wasn't
like this.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
It was more abstract.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
It was more abstract. It was definitely more abstract in
a circle. In a circle. It was circular, and I
don't really remember what it was, but I do remember
that she confronted me about it. More curious than anything.
There was never like a you shouldn't behave like this,
I think later when I started going to jail. But
even then I told you it'd be like a smile

(18:35):
on her face. But then I remember I was in Tucson, Arizona,
and then I started really writing a lot more poetry
and a lot more pros. And she was sitting on
the floor in my little office and she was reading
through stuff and she looked at me and she said,
I don't understand you. And I go, no, you don't.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
When she said that, how did you feel?

Speaker 2 (19:01):
I can't say. I was devastated, because, as I just
told you before, I think there was something in her,
there was something silent in her that couldn't help express
and want me to be more than what she was cultivating.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
And what was she cultivating just.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
A cowboy fighting drunk. That guy being a man was
all encompassing. It was. It was very specific and it
was very like truck driver and cowboy and CBS and
you know. It was like every fucking old school country
western song you hear, yeah, you know with a beer. Yeah.

(19:44):
And then you have this poetry that came out of nowhere? Like,
where is that? Is that innate? Is that something that
I just kind of came out of me? Was I
the first person to ever create a poem? Because it
was like I didn't have books of poetry in the house.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
You know why I'm asking about this because she says,
I don't understand you. The two of you, as you've said,
are so we're so similar. And so when she saw
you at twenty, I'm like, did she not see what
you were going through your you know, newfound fatherhood and
you drinking? Did she not relate to that?

Speaker 3 (20:21):
Like?

Speaker 1 (20:21):
Did she not I don't know, empathize with where you
were at?

Speaker 2 (20:24):
I think, tell me if I'm wrong. But it's one
of those like emotionally you don't understand me. It wasn't
that it was I'm surpassing you. There was nothing that
she offered. There was nothing that I felt like I
wasn't getting from my mother until later, like when I

(20:44):
got sober and when I was looking at many years
in prison and my mother came you know those family things, right,
And my mother fought against it tooth and nail, And
she looked at me one day and she said, you're
doing this to me. You're gonna give me cancer again.
When was I was like nineteen before I had my kid.

(21:10):
My significant other, Debbie was pregnant at the time. That
was one of those moments like I go, there's no
support in what you're telling. You're saying that I'm hurting
you by taking care of myself, whereas the other one
is I don't understand you, And I'm like, yes, because
something in me wanted to graduate out of my family.

(21:33):
Something in me wanted to be more substantial, more well rounded,
more worldly than what my family represented.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
Was there a party that also wanted to leave behind
you and Santa Barbara in the Cito Rats Bottle Shop
parking lot on Coastal Village Road, hanging out with you guys,
you know, doing all the things that happened in the eighties.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
All of every part of me, in every milestone that
you're mentioning, always wanted to graduate. There was a part
of me that always wanted to graduate out of it.
The only thing I've never wanted to graduate out of
are my children. And I think I can confidently say
my marriage. It wasn't always the case, Yes, but I

(22:22):
think and I would be honest, that's all right. It's
all right because it is what it is. I never
understood the longevity of one thing.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Reading the book. The reason I think it's cathartic is
because there always seems to be two people warring with
each other. And the challenge of that, to me, is
wrapped up in you dropping out of high school. And
it's my understanding that your dad said to you, well,
it's fine, you wouldn't have made it anyway. This is

(22:54):
from the earliest interview you've ever done, from like nineteen
eighty eight.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
I was probably lying, I'm curious you have the interview.
No shit, I'm already really enjoying you. Yeah. Dad wasn't
pleased when the young rider dropped out, so he used
reverse psychology. You wouldn't have made it anyway. You don't
have it, he told his son. It worked. I went

(23:20):
back and graduated with honors in school. He became interested
in theater and in writing. His father gave him some
stern advice. It wasn't that he forced me. He was
just very persistent yeah, that's whatever reverse psychology that he used.
It worked. It was it was along the same lines
as when I became an actor or wanted to become

(23:43):
an actor and was pursuing becoming an actor and people
would say you should find a new profession. That just worked.
That was that was along the Jane Brolin line of defiance.
You go into war, me going to war, a version
of me going to war, going to real war didn't
happen later because the real war was with myself.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
When you think of that now, that wrapped in drinking
and drugs and all that.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Absolutely, absolutely, man. I mean like, who, like, how many
people you know that are sober now? And it's like, oh,
jerk off, you're a sober You're another sober guy, you know.
But I think in.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
My case, I don't really think like that.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
Well I think some people do though. I think some
people like, oh, that's cool, you're sober. But then I
also know that there are things that are trying. It's like, hey,
I'm sober and I'm doing pilates. It's like, oh, pilates
is like a new thing, and it's like, what's that.
You're doing ice baths? Of course you are nil I've
been doing ice bas for twenty years. It's just been
a thing that's always been in my life for a

(24:48):
very long time. I find massive benefit in it and
all that. So, you know, the sobriety thing before was
kind of maybe I'm just I'm expressing it in a
way that I thought about it before. Okay, it was
a ball and it was a ball and chain. Sobriety
was a ball and chain. It was keeping me from
doing the thing that came natural to me, which was

(25:10):
to act out. So if you're sober, that means you
can't be yourself. That's your old belief in that.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
That's how you thought about it in the nineties. In
the nineties, So when you're bouncing between New York and California, Yeah,
and you're wrapped up in drugs and all that shit,
you thought without it you wouldn't be Josh.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Yeah, you're not letting me be me. Like. I didn't
like the effect and how I was acting and who
I was hurting and how I was hurting myself when
I would act out on drugs and alcohol. But it
came down to the last time I went out, when

(25:53):
I finally went from sober for the second time to
going out for twelve years before I finally got sober
this time.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
And when was that?

Speaker 2 (26:00):
I think I went out when I let's say I
was twenty nine when I got sober. Five years later,
I went out and I stayed out for twelve years.
So and I went out for those twelve years. I said,
I will never get sober again. It was almost like
one of those leaving Las Vegas moments where I was like,
this is how I will die. I'm not I don't
want to die soon, but this is I will die

(26:24):
with this stigma on my back.

Speaker 1 (26:27):
When you're in New York and you're like picking up
between eleventh and twelfth Street, Avenue A.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
And B, how do you know that? Did you were
you there too? Did I see you there when you
were a little kid on a stoop?

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Not sure I was sure?

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Mother a dealer born?

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yet? Yes she was?

Speaker 2 (26:49):
She?

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Actually I don't know if I don't want to tell
you this, Josh, but this whole thing is about me collective.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
You owe me.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
There's back pay on on drugs you bought.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
From avenue between A and B, or between B and C,
between A and B on like tenth Street.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
Can I ask you what what do you like about heroin?

Speaker 2 (27:11):
I didn't. I never like I had God, I haven't
talked about this very much, but I was. I had
junkie friends, like severely you know, junked out friends, true true, true,
like strung out addicts. And they were like, what is
the matter with you, man? Because I was when I
was into that. For the short time that I was

(27:32):
into that, I was always sick. I was either sick
getting on it or I was sick getting off it.
So they were like, just be a junkie. I was like,
A can't. I don't want to.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
You always had a foot in and what.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
I did, that's exactly what it was, right because I
didn't want to be just that. I didn't want to
be defined as that thing. So something alcohol was different.
Alcohol was a total through line for me, whereas drugs
I was in and out of all over the place, and.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
It was any part of it pleasurable. Like what kept
the foot in? I guess probably the idea of it,
the romantic idea it.

Speaker 2 (28:09):
The romantic idea of it, and also that I came
from a culture that did a lot of it.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
When you were a kid, when you first started all this,
you're in Santa Barbara teenager. You do some acid in
the beginning, and that turns into heroin and that.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Stuff way later, way later, for me, for.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
You, yes, for your friend. Most of whom it should
be noted and should be on the record, are not
here now, no, and their lives are in some ways
embedded in the stories of this book.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
For sure.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
You said about that group, they were the impenetrable group
that you always hope for, romanticized wish for when you
were a kid. But the dysfunction was on a massive scale.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
There was nothing romantic about it. And I'm not saying
it was morbid or anything. It was super There were
so many great times, but it was you know, somebody
said the other day, they were like, well, you know,
tell me about this Sherat gang. And I was like,
there was no gang. It was a group of people
that became known and are still known as the Seat
the Rest and Seat the Rest don't exist anymore. Some

(29:18):
people will say they do. They're not. They're us old school.
Most are dead, some are still around, you know. I mean,
it's like there's a fluctuation of the people who have survived.
The romantic side is I'm into story, I love story. Again.
We keep saying it, the vivid nature of a story,
whether it be I love the idea of hybriding emotional

(29:41):
content and heavy, heavy visual. You know, I don't want
it just to be technically brilliant. I don't want it
to just be me going, you know. I want there
to be something that's driving it forward, like the thing
that I feel. But that's the thing about that group
of guys is that it was always driving forward and

(30:03):
we could always lean on each other. And it's something
that I've now noticed my self recreate again and again.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
That driving, that desire to drive forward together into some
great unknown. It seems to me, and I could be wrong,
that there was a period of time where you thought,
in order to be a great, dynamic, interesting and interested
actor you had to experience everything totally. Is that what

(30:34):
you thought the job required in your twenties, And that's.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
What I wanted it to require because I didn't want
to be a personality. I didn't feel like even had
enough of a personality to be a personality and to
have my profession rely on a personality I wanted to be.
I was somebody who was not interested in acting as
a celebrity as a conduit to celebrityism. I was interested

(30:59):
in behavior because it was curious to me, because I
grew up round a fucking bunch of crazy people that
I couldn't figure out, and then I had my guy,
and even then, behaviorally they were all over the place.
There's still be stories being talked about about Cito rats
or about my mother. People are still God, I miss
your mother so much because they missed that story in

(31:22):
their life, because it made their life bigger than how
it is, than what it was, and acting to me,
was absolutely fucking useless if we didn't get into inside
the behavior of what people do and why they do it,
and how curious and how chaotic and how nutty it is,
which I think is the manifestation of this book. If

(31:45):
there's anything to me to identify with, it's the fact
that instead of a self help book that used to
be as big as the poetry section, about a foot
wide and about six feet high, is now seventy five
percent of the bookstore. And it's fine, But why do
they all? Why are there so many? Because they don't work.
Most of them don't work, so you go buy another one,

(32:06):
and you go buy another one because they say, find
the solution and then just live in the solution and
breathe and you go. Life is way more chaotic and
messy than that. Do you really exercise the demons in you?
Or do you get to a point where you actually
just accept them and you learn to direct them? As

(32:27):
Anthony Hopkins told me, it was one of the greatest
things I ever heard in sobriety.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
He was like, how great is it that we're like this?
And I was like, what the fuck does that mean?
And he was like that we're alcoholic, and we're edgy,
and we're driven, we're angry. And I was like, why
is that a good thing? And he was like, because,
left to its own devices can be the most destructive,
hurtful personality. Behavior ever directed.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
In the right way can have such a profound and
positive impact, And it's just that it's learning and acquiring
tools to be able to direct it in a way
that engine that engine in a way that is show
room ready. And I'm kidding, because I will never be

(33:14):
showroom ready, but you know what I mean in the
most positive sense. And I was like, oh, so I
don't have to be somebody else in order to be
good or in order to be productive in order to
have a positive impact. And I'm not even looking to
have a positive impact, but I'm looking to be able
to find things in myself that shine a little bit,

(33:38):
that might be sparkle a bit.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
After the break, why don't we talk about what that
engine is and what it produced. Okay, and that's the
work itself. Yeah, okay, we'll be right back with Josh Brolin.
We're going to the bathroom.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
I just for the audience. We just urinated together, separate urinos.

(34:21):
I didn't look I had the lower one. I didn't
look either. You're taller than I am, I think so
if anybody looked, it was Youwards.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Coming back from the bathroom break here. When you're a
young actor, in all the years leading up to No
Country for Old Men, you would go on all kinds
of auditions and uh, there's one woman who used to
work a Mirror Maax named Meryl Poster, and she said,
you and Benisio del Toro were the worst auditioners we

(34:54):
ever experienced in all the thousands we saw, by far,
the two of you were the worst by far, by far.
Why add that, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Why not just say you were bad auditions? What we
call insult injury, insult Andrew for sure.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
And yet, yeah, did you think you were that bad?

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yes, Benny, I don't think did I think Benny thought
he was being pretty fucking good because he's a great actor.
But I hated auditioning. I hated auditioning. Man. You're behind
a couch and you're in the black forest in Germany,
and you know, and you have a gun and everybody's
sitting in their chairs, and you come up from behind

(35:36):
the couch and you go, don't fucking move, you know.
I mean, it's super humiliating. It's just fucking awful. You're
sitting there and you're like, they're like, do the thing,
and you're like, what thing? You know, dud be a
good actor?

Speaker 1 (35:51):
How And you seem pretty reluctant about the whole thing
in the first place.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Reluctant about acting kinda It makes me want to cry
when you say that, because it makes me so It
makes me so happy when you're sitting there telling the truth.
It's a rarity. That's what was a great thing with
alcohol is that you know, if you needed information, just

(36:19):
alcohol is somebody up and you probably would find out
a lot more shit than they were presenting. But I
do think that we all have that kind of contrasted thing,
and that's supervit. Yeah, I think that I have a
love hate relationship with it. I just did something with
Ryan Johnson, It's Knives Out three. There was a pleasure

(36:44):
that I found in doing that movie with him that
I have not experienced for quite a while. I've found
pleasure for other reasons doing movies. Denis is a really
close friend of mine and that, but from an acting
standpoint and scaring myself and living up to something that

(37:06):
was something that I that I just experience for that
and that keeps me going. It's like hitting the golf
ball well once in a great while, and you go,
I guess I'll just keep playing fucking golf.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
The first time you hit the golf ball, well, yeah,
was flirting with disaster.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
It's funny. I was going to say, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
You opposite Richard Jenkins, genius actor. The second time, I
think is no country for old man. When you think
of this period now and you describe yourself once as
a guy who was always on the verge of making.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
It, that was other people's perception, right.

Speaker 1 (37:44):
You didn't think that? No, tell me about the distance
between those two, how you saw yourself and how they
saw you.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
There was a process in me just admitting that I
was a working actor. You know. So if Alan Mindel
called and said, hey, can you put on pantyhose and
play it? You know, I'm like, sure, we just need
you Milwaukee for two days.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
Great, it was a paycheck.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
It was just what you do? You act? You know,
you choice, yep, what you were going to act. I
had two kids at the time. Sometimes I wouldn't work
for twelve sixteen months, and it was nuts, man, and
that in hindsight, looking back on that, I got to
spend so much time with my kids and I had
this amazing time during my kid's childhood, which I was

(38:27):
I'm so pleased with now. But the frustration, Like I
went into my I won't say who the agent was,
and he's my good friend now still, but I went
in and I was like, is my head too big?
Are my arms too short? Like, like, just tell me.
I could just be honest with me and then we'll
go from there. Like I don't understand how I'm not
getting so much work.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
What did he say?

Speaker 2 (38:50):
He put in a tape and he had played both
parts from the big scene in Heat between Denier and
Paccino at the diner. He played at the diner, and
he played me the version of him playing both parts.
So his response was showing me how well he acts.
He's an agent, he's no longer an agent. It was

(39:14):
amazing to me. And we tell I tell that story
because it was such a fallsy move. Wow, it's such
an insult, and I know he didn't mean it like
that in the least. I've seriously and I go, God, man,
my fucking agent is showing me a tape of how
good he is acting. He's so pleased with the tape.

(39:36):
I'm fucked.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
I did find it weird when you walked in here
and gave me a tape of the podcast you're gonna
host next.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
That's what I mean. It's basically the same thing, the
same thing. It's like, hey man, by the way, like,
I can't wait to do this. I'm so psyched. But
I have a podcast too.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Is it long form and minds where you get into
trauma of your past?

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Exactly? Interesting? Yeah. All the things that we're going to
talk about I've already talked about on my podcast. It's good.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
We're getting laughs in here because it's been no serious
I know, but back and forth. It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
It's the it's the oscillation, it's the fluctuation that makes
it makes for a good life.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
I'm trying to think of which part I want to
talk about with the movie, what matters most to you
and telling the story of you getting it and doing it.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
It was such a light set. We had a lot
of fun. Me Woody. Javier was depressed off on the side,
but we'd always pull him out and drinks and he
ended up doing karaoke. And Joel and Ethan I got
very close with, you know, especially Ethan. I mean I
got close with both of them, but Ethan, I you know,

(40:44):
that was a friendship that you know continues.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
On the set. Did you notice Ethan's quiet torture?

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, I would make fun of him all
the time. Well I still do.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
What would that look like?

Speaker 2 (40:55):
First of all, he hums all the time, I mean
he would. I mean that's a form of insanity, and
it's not an affectation. That's what's so great about Ethan
Angel but especially Ethan, is that he's he doesn't even
understand affectation. He couldn't do He couldn't think of a
romantic version of how you wanted to how he wanted

(41:16):
to be perceived by you. He just can't help but
be organically dumbly himself. Like it or not, he probably
likes it the least.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
There was one project you wanted him to maybe work
on with you, and you said something like, would you
want to revisit that? And he said to you, yeah,
I'd love to revisit it when it's done.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
It's what was that Quasimoto? What's that? Hunch fat? Something
like that. Yeah, I'd love to revisit it when it's done,
and I see it in the theater.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
I mean, these are the kinds of people that, after
having worked with you on several projects before casting you
in Hale Caesar called around and ask people if they
thought you could handle that.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
That's the truth, man, that's literally the truth. I know.
I go, why would you do that? Like I confronted them,
I go, why would you do that?

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Asking them? They were asking people if you could handle
that dialogue?

Speaker 2 (42:18):
What a fucking what an asshole thing do? But they're practical.
That's what I appreciate about them, is they're practical.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
When you're making no country two thousand and six. There's
a page in this book, and I tell you it's
the page that has stayed with me since I first
read it. Okay, and it's you on set, and I
thought maybe you could read this page.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Okay, let's see two thousand and six the El Camino Hotel.
I don't remember what the room number is, but they're
all the same. Room eight looks like Room twelve looks
like Room six. A queen bed, pulsing plastic alarm clock,
beige carpet, paper, thin sheet rock, a sliding aluminum and
glass door to the shower bath. Small knobs on a

(43:08):
small sink on either side of a small spigot. My
hat sits on a cheap wooden chair, and my blue
jeans seem foreign against the dirty flooral print of the
beds duvet. My boots stand alone next to the door,
with socks draped over the tops of them, as if
they belong to somebody else. A film script sits open
on the small from mica table to a scene where

(43:31):
I hitch a ride from a stranger and he gets
shot by the bad guy. The minute I climb in
and close the truck's door with a metal crunching slam.
I don't work until it's dark tonight. Outside it's hot,
it's summer. I hear high heels against concrete, and I
pull back the curtain and there she is standing in
front of me, at the other side of the window.

(43:51):
I unlocked the door, let her in. She doesn't even
look at me, just walks right past, wafting in a
scent of plain food. She puts her bag down, walks
into the bathroom, and closes the bathroom door behind her.
I hear the shower turn on. My stomach cringes, contracts.
I feel the heat of the day behind me and

(44:11):
the heat of what's to come. I wish it were
nighttime already. I wish my kids were here. I wish
there were some things I just didn't have to do.
That's hard for me to read, dude, Yeah, the context
is being at the El Camino Motel where I stayed

(44:35):
with the prop master and somebody else, and somebody was
coming to visit me.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
I wish there were some things I just didn't have
to do. What is that?

Speaker 2 (44:47):
It's the life that feeds. It's the life that feeds
all that kind of stuff. It's like, what makes the
you know, is it the fact that I broke my clavicle,
you know, two weeks before I did No Country and
he gets shot in the right shoulder and that's the
only way I was able to do the film. And
did that create a pain? And did that have an
impact on the movie? And do you know what I mean?
My character and all that? So I think that my

(45:09):
in my past, and I'll get back to that. But
in my past, everything had to be earned. It was
like everything had not a torture. You know. You brought
up Beniso del Toro before, and I remember him. I
did a series a long time ago when I was
nineteen called Private Eye and it didn't go anywhere, and
it was the guy's from Hill Street Blues and sant

(45:29):
Elsewhere and Miami Vies and it was Tony Yerkovich and
this whole thing. And and Benny did a two part
episode called Barrio Knights, and I remember him. I think
they kept it in like he fucked up a line
or something, and then he just started slamming that, you know,
And I knew it was from that. He was so
hard on himself. He expected so much of himself, being

(45:56):
a student of Stella Adler and all that kind of
stuff and we were all that was our group. You know.
It was like not that we were hanging out, but
me Benny Ruffalo, it was you studied with her too,
and I studied with her too. And it's one of
those things that it's like it was back in the
old days where it's kind of like it meant everything
you had to go through the shit you had to

(46:17):
like get at least that's how we felt. And it
was fairly cosmetic. But we're you know, we're like, we're
an actor.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
We want to be brand owned, we want to be
James Dean, and we want to be all these people.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
And your life outside of the frame also needed to
be full of material.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Yeah, material like writeable material. Everything was a story. Everything
was a story. And I say that about alcohol, by
the way, you know, I go if I speak at
a meeting or something, I go listen without with alcohol,
I had a personality. I had it. I was I
was identified.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
Who were you drinking? Because the identity and personality you
and I just met today, there's a personality.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
There's enough of a personality.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
I didn't say there was enough. I said it'sity and
I like it.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
I appreciate that. Thank you. I like yours. By the way,
I think my perception of it was it was I
have a different relationship with it. Now. I was racked
with fear. I was racked with how I was perceived.
Not that I wanted to be perceived as cool, but

(47:33):
I wanted to be perceived as something substantial. So I
was racked with this heady thing that would make me
trip over my words, that would make me shake, that
would make me do all these things. And alcohol disintegrated.

Speaker 1 (47:51):
That and turned you into what it just.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
It didn't turn me into a monster. I was super
fun sometimes, you know. It just it's like I think,
I write it in the book what t Roll said.
He said, shark eyes, I would literally blink and become
somebody else, you know, which is fairly well known in
the sober community. It's like doctor Jekyl, mister.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Hyde, he wrote. I was nice until I wasn't. Shark guys,
my buddy Troll called it. And the snap of a millisecond,
you went from charming to dark. The next morning, I'd
lie there, crawling through the black molasses of my memory
and desperately searching for any evidence of what I'd done.
The night before.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
Yeah, that's pretty bright one, I know. And then it
became which is an absolute parallel with my mother, which
I know right before she died, which I'll get to.
But there was a guy who took me out and
a friend of his was visiting him and he said,
do you want to go out tonight? I said, yeah, sure.

(48:55):
I had gotten in some trouble or drank too much
a few days before, so I was deciding not to drink.
And when I decided not to drink, he was like,
you know, what can I get you? We went to
bar or something and he said what can I get you?
And I said, he it's water. I'm fine with water.
He was like what do you mean? And I go,
I'm just going to drink water tonight. I don't think
I'm gonna drink and he was like, but I have
my friend here, and I was like, what do you mean?

(49:19):
You have your friend here? What I told her about you?
And I was like, what fuck does that mean? It
was like I told her how you know? And I
realized it's like, oh no, no, I want you to.
I want you to song and dance for her. I
was like, oh, I'm a freak to you. I'm a
side show to you.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
It was why stay home and watch a show on.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
The couch when you can experience one out the bar
in real life. And its name is Josh Brolin. Its
name is Josh Brolin.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
Not even with the side card.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
I don't even know what, doesn't even need a sad card.
And all you got to do is buy it a
few drinks and it will dance for you, and it
might even go to jail, and we'll go home and
talk about how crazy that was. That guy's crazy him
him him, him him, And that's what my mother was her.

(50:12):
It's easy to point the finger at those people are
allowed and do that song and dance and all that,
and then you get caught up into being everybody's freak show,
and that becomes its own kind of you know, Hamster Wheel.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
The book is so much about you and your mother
and the relationship you had and the one that got
cut short. It's tough because on one end you're talking
about how she was this larger than live figure in
a positive way, like people loved her, and then on
the other end, she was this larger than life figure

(50:48):
they rendered her a drunk cartoon essentially, and thinking about
her now, like, how do you hold those two how
people perceived her versus who she was.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
I don't think that she knew who she was period.
I remember this one moment where she was crying at
the end of her life and she had been taken
seriously about this idea that she had thought of. And
I remember her crying and I said, what are you
crying about? And she said, I've never been taken seriously before.

(51:21):
That was a moment that I'm so glad that I
had before her death, because it was a reveal of
you're not happy in this place. You do feel like
a freak show, you feel like this side show, this
dog and pony thing. And so when I felt that,
I went the opposite direction. I said, I don't I

(51:43):
don't want to. I don't want to see what happens.
I can either have that life or I can see
what this other life is going to be like. And
that's sober life. I didn't have to self destruct completely.
I tried, I'm not supposed to be dead, you know whatever,
for whatever reason, and I did a lot of things.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
This all to me comes to a head. Yeah, we
do keep kind of oscillating back and forth between the
past and present, and the structure of the book is
such that you go from nineteen seventy three to two
thousand and three without much explanation, and that in some ways,
the reason I'm structuring our conversation like this is because
I like the idea of holding these moments and the

(52:30):
way they sit next to each other in and of
itself is telling a story. So the personal and the
professional seemed to dovetail. In twenty thirteen, in the summer
of that year, you're making Inherent Vice and you're playing
this detective Bigfoot who's a hard nosed detective on one

(52:54):
end and a desperate, aspiring actor on another end. I
wonder when you think about that performance and that time
in your life, because it's the year that you decide
to get sober. Making that movie, did it feel like
an inflection point?

Speaker 2 (53:12):
No, the trajectory of my alcoholic life, let's call it,
was not a you know, it's like, oh, it started
fun and then it just got worse, and when it
gets bad, it never gets good again. And then it
just gets worse. And then it turned into this fiery,
you know, hell hole, and it's not it was bad.

(53:33):
At fifteen. There were things that I was doing at fifteen,
which totally you know, earned my seat, as they say.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
Right, but was it also fun at forty four, forty five.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Super fun, super fun, and then super not, which was
always the case.

Speaker 1 (53:51):
Right, So you're making this movie and your hot.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
So I'm making this movie and I would I don't
think I've ever said this. I would write text to
Paul that literally are totally nonsensical, Like I have them
on my phone, and it looks like I'm trying it
looks like a recipe for goulash, you know, for an
infection together. Just like while I'm doing the movie, say

(54:17):
I have a couple of days off and I miss Paul,
So I'm like, you know, obviously Josh is out having
a good time but unable to communicate, which is why
I would wake up in the sidewalk, because I would
I wouldn't know how to get the key in the

(54:37):
door to open the door so I could sleep inside.
That's not didn't happen once or twice that many, many, many, many,
many many many times. I just went brain dead. So
I'm doing this amazing movie that I care so much about,
given that I was just stabbed before I started, and
Costa Rica. Ten days later, I'm beating joaquinap in some

(55:00):
scene where he's walking out. It's literally the first scene
that we have, and I think my stomach's going to
rip open. And that's my life, Man's that's the whole point.
It's like, and I'm not sitting here and praising it.
I'm not celebrating it. I'm saying that that is. That
was the moment where the normalcy of that thing, where

(55:21):
you'd see other people go holy shit, dude, oh my god.
Joaquin came up to me, it was like, dude, you know,
and I'm like, yeah, it's a Tuesday. The chaos was
at a point where anything could happen at any time,
and it did often, and it didn't phase me.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
And watching the film, if you feel that anything could
happen at any time, and none of it phased me, right,
it all amazed me, especially knowing your story. Are you
watching it last night?

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Really?

Speaker 1 (55:55):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (55:55):
That's funny. You know it's improvising. And even Paul to
this day wouldn't show me. There's so much stuff that
we did for that film that you don't know, that
you haven't seen, that I haven't seen. And I would
ask Paul once in a while, I'd say, you want
to Tom and Jerry this one? I remember can't getting mad.
At some point he was like, you guys talk more

(56:15):
like within This was like the first week of filming.
He goes, you guys talk more than Paul and I
have ever spoken. Because we'd go back and forth, we'd
have this bantern. I go, do you want to Tom
and Jerry this? He goes, yeah, let's do it, and
we just heighten everything, just you know, do crazy shit.
And maybe it was just too over the top, maybe
it took away from the story or whatever it was.
But I had a great time doing that film. I

(56:38):
have brilliant memories of doing that film. I absolutely and
have always been in love with Joaquin and I know
this is not what you're asking, but working with him
felt so right because it was like it played into
that whole thing, especially at that time of not knowing
what's going to happen at any moment, that it was

(57:00):
all very dangerous and with a perpetual smile.

Speaker 1 (57:05):
When I play a clip film and hair and Vice.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
After a long and busy day of civil rights violations,
I found myself in the neighborhood and compelled to drop
in just to check and see the current state of
affairs my old stomping grounds, seeing as your effort to
keep lines of communication had been limited to say the least. Oh,

(57:32):
I've and busy trying to figure out which side of
the zigzag paper is the sticky sign. Give it to me. Listen,

(58:13):
I'm sorry about last night you why should give me? Sorry? Weird?

(58:44):
Mhm uh Are you okay? Brother? I'm not your brother?

Speaker 1 (59:08):
How about you?

Speaker 2 (59:09):
Could he use a keeper?

Speaker 1 (59:14):
That was unbelievable, unbelievable?

Speaker 2 (59:17):
He goes, Oh, man, it's so genious.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
You just ate all of the weed, which is a
pothead's worst nightmare. When you're done with that movie and
on your two days off you're doing god knows and
you're coming back and having to do this job, which
is an unbelievable job. You find yourself in Halloween twenty thirteen.

(59:43):
What happens that night?

Speaker 2 (59:46):
My wife now and I uh put on onesies and
then get on the bicycles and go down the boardwalk
at Venice Beach and go look for you know, other
people with iridescent onesies. But there was nobody out, and
I remember the sunset took forever and it was this long,

(01:00:08):
gorgeous sunset. We were riding back and I looked over
at the Venice Alehouse, which we'd been to many times,
and I knew everybody down the boardwalk. I knew all
the homeless, the homeless community there. We were all close.
It's all changed now, it's all gone totally berserk, but
back then it was still intimate. And I've been in
Venice since I was sixteen. So we saw the Venice

(01:00:29):
Alehouse and I go very innocently, should we have a beer?
And she was like, yeah, let's try. Yeah, I mean,
let's do it. And my grandmother was in the hospital.
Her grandfather had just had a stroke in Georgia, so
she was flying to him that night and I was
supposed to drive her. So we stopped for a beer,

(01:00:49):
which turned into five beers, and five beers always turns
into O'Brien's, which is no longer open, which is on
Main Street, which was a scrappy hard bar, and I
had been eighty six out of every other bar on
Main Street except for O'Brien's, because O'Brien's doesn't eighty six
to anybody. You can do anything at O'Brien's so I

(01:01:10):
never got to take her and we went home. We
rode bicycles home, might have crashed time or two on
the bicycles. And then she took an uber and she said,
don't leave home, don't leave here. And I said okay.
And then she said when you respond, why does it
sound echoey? I said, I don't know. I think it's

(01:01:32):
my phone. I was already in the car going to
a bar back. I mean, there was no way I
was going to What was I going to do? Stay
home and go to sleep. The gas had been ignited,
and the engine took me back to O'Brien's. I think anyway,
there was a lot of things. There was like some
fairly innocent hit and run at Del Taco. There was
a fight at O'Brien's. And then I woke up on

(01:01:56):
the sidewalk, and then I was supposed to be at
my grandmother's. I was two hours late.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Do you remember waking up on the sidewalk that morning?
I do, what did it feel like?

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Normal? Like? You have your shame? What I do you know?
And then I and I think Deacons because Deacons lived
fairly close by Roger, and he would run in the morning.
He would run. It's so wrong, dude, it's so wrong.
He would run past in the morning. He would never

(01:02:26):
look at me, and he always put up his hand.
There you go. And I would always see him and
I'd be like, he was not looking at me, because
it's shameful. It's like, it's not like waking up with
a pillow and a blanket. It's like waking up and
dirty and you know, scratched up and all that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Early nineties, you get into a fight with your first wife.
You walk down New York, you're in New York, down
the street, you have no shirt on. You walk further
down and you spot Philip Seymour Hoffman. He knew talking
to you, definitely high or drunk or whatever. Did he

(01:03:10):
mention anything about you not wearing a shirt?

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
No? I did know him. I knew him. He had
done a movie with my wife in Poland, his first
but he had just started taking off. He was like,
he started doing a lot of independent films and was
getting a lot of praise. And I said that, I
say in the book, He's got his feet always makes

(01:03:36):
me laugh, like Charlie Chaplin feet. It's like the one
that has to deal and the one where the one
wants to go, and he just he didn't want to
have anything to do with me. And I don't blame him,
because I had seen him a lot. I'd see him
on the street in New York and sometimes he was
super nice to me. But at that point, it was
like he was getting some real traction around his career,

(01:03:58):
and I just represented something that he was getting away from.
He was sober, he was really focusing on doing the
best work he could do, and I was this guy
who was auditioning a lot, not getting a lot of things,
and then taking it out in ways that were not helpful.

(01:04:19):
My life was an absolute chaos. Even though I was
a dad and I was a good dad. I was
always a good dad. I did things like there were
drunk episodes in my kid's life that my older kids
would talk about now that are super unfortunate and that
I've apologized for and that I hate knowing exist. But

(01:04:40):
the truth of the matter is is I was pretty
present for my kids, and then these things would happen,
you know. And that's the thing. It's like, when you
watch a movie, it's really interesting to watch somebody who is,
you know, fairal and chaotic and all that kind of stuff,
and there was never an attempt at me trying to

(01:05:02):
emulate that kind of thing. It just existed in my
life and it was really a tractive in film like
you do a movie like Inherent Vice, and that's how
it reads.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
We fold this into such a this is like the
way we're putting this together.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
It seems chaotic and abstract, but it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
It's design. Yes, Philip Seymour hoffins if he pointed the
other direction, but there was also some part of him
that was letting you be you in the same way
that Deacons that morning on the thirty first is running
past you. This is a man who's worked with you
many times at this point, who respects you as an artist,

(01:05:45):
who's your friend, and is doing his morning run, which
of course Roger Deacons does a morning run, and he
waves that to me is significant. There is an acknowledgment,
but he doesn't want to pry, and he's giving you
the space to do whatever you were doing. I don't know.
Waking up in front of the door, I think there

(01:06:07):
is something to this.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
There's an acknowledgement of that part of me that they respect,
and I don't know if that's right. Or not. And
then there's the other part that they don't want to
have anything to do with that. They realized that it
comes in one package, you know, I did. I did
a speech for Bradley Cooper at one point. There was

(01:06:30):
one point where people were kind of they like how
I wrote. So I became this go to guy to
write people's.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Speeches, the ghost speeches.

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
It's unbelievable, dude, like talk about add insult to injury,
like I'm not really working as an actor, or.

Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
Josh, we know you'd like to maybe be in these
movies and then some of these awards.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
But we you write one of those amazing speeches for
me or whatever. And but I gave this speech to
Bradley Cooper, and I had just gotten out of jail,
and I had seen a couple of actors backstage and
they were all like, again, it was the freak show.
They're all it was like that guy with the Canadian
girl that they were like, yeah, you no way, you're crazy,

(01:07:18):
you know. And then they'd go back and do their work,
and Leo was going back to do Wolfe of Wall
Street and you know whatever. It was. So I was
living these parts that they were playing. But Phil. There
was always a respect because there was a lot of
history there. And then when Phil went up, and you know,

(01:07:38):
I've had a lot of people in my life pass
and die. And when I was in the hills of
Italy and Michael Kelly came out with a glass of wine,
I'll never forget and I walked in and the mountains,
walked into this little chalet and he came out and
he said, did you hear about Phil? And I go, what?

(01:08:02):
And he goes, you didn't hear He's dead? That It's
the only time I've ever believed, which I thought was
a lame description of when your knees buckle. I could
not believe Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the great actors
of the stage and screen, somebody who had beat the odds,

(01:08:23):
every odd there was to beat, was dead from a
drug overdose. Impossible. And I think that was the end.
That was the beginning of the end for me. I
think I probably would have stayed sober for a couple
more years and probably gone back out and justified it somehow,

(01:08:44):
and you know, I would have found my I'm really
good at like deluding myself. And that was like that
hit me so hard, and I was like, yeah, no thanks,
no thanks. The chaos train ends, and I'm not interested

(01:09:06):
in an ending. I want to try and string this
thing out as long as I can, as long as
I can.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
So tell me about November one, twenty thirteen.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
So November one, I woke up and I went and
I saw my grandma because I was late picking up
my brother and I she was in the hospital and
the whole family was around, and I had been in
charge of the whole family and kind of who can
be there at what time and when, and I had
been pretty dry. And I went in there and my
fan all their heads went straight down immediately, like they

(01:09:38):
because I'm sure I smelled bad. I hadn't taken a shower,
was scratched up. And then my grandmother lifted her head.
She turned her head toward me, ninety nine years old,
and she smiled just the most, the biggest. She was
so happy that I was there, just this huge smile,
and it just that was it went off in my head.

(01:10:00):
So that's what I'm done. How dare me a woman
who had lived ninety nine years on life's terms and
I have everything it might beck and call for the
most part, like I have my health, I have my wit,
I have my intelligence, I have my kids, I have
my this, and I'm throwing it all away in the
name of the Freak Show, carrying on the legacy of

(01:10:23):
the Freak Show. Done, and I was done.

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
I'm curious, you know, because you've talked so much about sobriety.
You had had periods, like you said, where you were
sober for a while. What about now with your two
new kids? What about now? Says no? This is it no?

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
Because of what I said Tony Hopkins had mentioned. You know,
this is the rebel way. This is the defiant way,
the most defiant. This is the most defiant way. What
if you get to live two lives in one life
pretty severely. This is respecting my mother and saying you won.
You won the war. The war is is that you

(01:11:09):
don't adhere to other people's expectations. There's a singer for
a fairly famous rock band and he said, surprise everybody
with a happy ending. And it affected me when he
said that. I still think about it because what that

(01:11:29):
means is nobody expects a happy ending. And then when
you get sober for a little while, I've been sober
for a little while. I mean literally within the first
couple of years, and then people would come around like,
oh my god, this isn't just a thing he's going
through that it's actually like he's taking this seriously. And
then people would reveal how they really, you know, what
they what they thought was going to happen, or what

(01:11:51):
they were expecting in the fact that it was pretty
bad sometimes and they were pretty certain I wasn't going
to make it. So I had gotten to a point
where it became kind of a through line that now
we're at the end and this is and it's going
to look bad. And I like the idea that I
was given the opportunity to say nah, because I do.

(01:12:15):
I don't think there was ever a death wish of
my mother's, of mine, of my dast that. I think
it was just needing to live life on a very
vivid plane, which I still am. I just do it
in a different way now.

Speaker 1 (01:12:32):
The expectations people had for you, Yeah, there was no
bigger expectation than the man that your mom set you
up to become that guy we're talking about, the cowboy
who drinks and has a story not with a happy ending.
I wanted to read from the page seward at the

(01:12:53):
end of the book, which I think talks about where
you are now and where she is now, and you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
Oh, she was funny, she was unique, She was all
the things most have become so deathly afraid of becoming
today different not as an affectation, but as a mineral.
I see her and my children the way they accentuate
a point or discover awe on what would otherwise seem mundane,
but in ways a little less destructive, a little more

(01:13:22):
at peace. My mother at peace. Imagine. Just recently there
were several Super eight reels revealed with her running around
as a little girl. To see my mother as a
little girl confused me in my mind. She had always
been an electric child. And as I watched those scratchy,
faded colors with her smiling she ran about, I looked

(01:13:44):
to my left and right, and there were my little
girls doing the same, with similar smiles and similar glints
of mischief in their eyes. I like it. It moves me,
knowing that they have inside them what freedom she demanded.
It was her lack of grace in that freedom that
drove her insane, or at least right to the edge

(01:14:06):
of insanity. I don't see that. In my case, there's
so much to write about, there's so many stories to tell.
I guess I'm looking for a deeper sense to it all.
That world was huge and the world is now more literal.
I haven't decided which I like better. The only thing

(01:14:27):
I don't like about that last line is because it
involves my kids, and my kids are always the preferred.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
What do you not like about the line?

Speaker 2 (01:14:37):
You know? I don't know which I prefer better? Which
is obviously you know about that big of a life
where things were that dangerous and that unpredictable, You know
what I mean. I miss that. I miss that level
of unpredictability, but less now than I did. I think
the longer I stay sober, I find my moments of

(01:15:00):
unpredictability and how to be able to live within that
and it not be threatening to my sobriety.

Speaker 1 (01:15:08):
For a time, yeah, for a long time, the unpredictability
was in drinking, It was in Heroin for a moment,
your flinch when I said that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
I just don't talk about it often. I hate it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
What would you like me to do?

Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
No, I'm not asking you to do anything differently. I
just don't like it. I don't like that I was
subservient to that drug for any amount of time, even
if I was the shortest of all my buddies. Yeah,
I just don't like it. It's like such a to me.
It's such a checkout. But then again, so is alcohol,

(01:15:47):
you know, in some way. But keep going, you were dismounting.

Speaker 1 (01:15:51):
Do you feel like now the work itself, whether it's
on screen or in this book, or in the play
that you've recently written, you're directing that episode of your
show out of Range, whatever it is, do you feel
like the unpredictability is most interesting you in the art
that you're making.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
Barna, for sure. It is the thing that I have
found that I think I had a real hate for
in the beginning, that I had a big curiosity about
because of how I found my way in it, that
has now become a great solace and something that I
respect highly. And if this book is anything, it's a

(01:16:35):
human being finding a great release in creativity in the
manifestations of those creativities. I see it in my kids,
I see it in my friends. And I never had
a respect around the idea of the art because I
couldn't see it beyond the idea of celebrity, and now

(01:17:01):
it's hard for me to find the celebrity, and if
I do see the celebrity, I try and snuff it
out pretty quick, even though it does maybe get me
work that I need and want.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
You know what it is, You and I have never
had a drink together, you and I will. I don't
think I ever have a drink together. Probably not the
guy that you were, that your friend wanted you to be.

Speaker 2 (01:17:32):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
I brought you here to watch Josh Give Me Season
eight of Josh Broland, here at the bar at O'Brien's.
Whatever that person was, what I imagine him to be,
is what I have seen growing up watching your work,

(01:17:53):
especially in the last decade, like every part feels like
some extension of whatever that person was with a few
drinks in the unpredictability, how alive and vulnerable and raw
and uncomfortable your performances can be all of those things
you thought you needed alcohol to be in public. I

(01:18:18):
have seen, as someone who's never met you and never
saw a drink. I've seen in the work. I've felt
it in the work.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
I literally can't think of a better compliment, at least
professionally and personally that I have broken that chain, you
know what I mean, with the help of many other people,
I have broken the chain that thinks that he exists
only in the chaos that he creates in the Freak Show.

(01:18:52):
And if whatever anomalies creative anomalies exist in me can
come out in more pure form, then I beat the system.
You know. Again, nature nurture, you know, and the nature
would suggest otherwise, And because of what I was surrounded by.

(01:19:13):
But I think through the nurturing of a community that
I was lucky enough. I'm not just saying the sober community,
but really really interesting, good, empathetic, inspired people, Ethan Tilda,
a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
My last question, yes, the first thing you said when
you walked in today, you and your agent who you
talked to this morning, and you said you're going through
a disaster. I think it was or what did you
what did you call it?

Speaker 2 (01:19:44):
Spinning?

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
So you were spinning. Now that we're at the end
of this, how you feel.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
I feel strangely good. I don't know how to feel
about that yet. I think that there's something about this
process that means a lot to me, and that's being
able to, like you pointed out, manifest things not distilled,

(01:20:11):
but a clean water with all the minerals in it.
That it's productive, that it's healthy in some sense, but
it reads as chaotic and dirty and messy and all
that stuff that we all are.

Speaker 1 (01:20:26):
Why does that make you emotional?

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):
M Because that's the showing up that I respect, you know,
it's the showing up that I you know, you put
yourself on the fucking firing line, you know, And this
scared the shit out of me, to use my own
crude language. It's scared. It scared me. And that's why

(01:20:52):
I didn't want to talk about being a writer, talk
about writing in journals anymore, talk about the books that
I've written and put in a dark corner and just
do it, man, do it. And I can't blame anybody
else here. I can't blame a director, I can't blame setting,
I can't blame Timeline, I can't This is all me.

(01:21:12):
This is one hundred percent me, for better or worse.
And for somebody who was close to Cormac who didn't
want to talk about any writing ever. You know, there's
there's a small part of me that's like almost embarrassed
to celebrate the attempt. But even then I'm like, I'm

(01:21:33):
more okay with the fact that that means something to me.
Is okay with me.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
I appreciate the attempt.

Speaker 2 (01:21:42):
Thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:21:43):
I think you have been more than generous today, going
through some uncomfortable pockets. What I said about the work,
I hadn't written that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:54):
In my notes I got that was from you in
the moment.

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
That was from me in the moment. Josh Bolin, appreciate
the time.

Speaker 2 (01:22:03):
Dude. You will go down as being maybe the most organic, funny,
unpredictable person that I've done an interview with.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
That's that's the aim for real.

Speaker 2 (01:22:21):
What a pleasure, what a true pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:23:18):
And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be
sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever
you do your listening. If you want to go above
and beyond, share the program on social media, tag us
at Talk Easypod. All of this really does help us
continue making the program each and every Sunday. I want

(01:23:38):
to give a special thanks this week to the teams
at Relevant PR, Rachel Alinsky at HarperCollins, iHeart, and of
course our guest today, Josh Brolin. His memoir from Under
the Truck comes out this week on November nineteenth, will
include the link to order a copy in our show
notes at talk easypod dot com. For more episodes like

(01:23:59):
this one, I'd recommend our talks with John Burnhaal, Tom Hanks,
Willem Dafoe, Marina Abramovich and Well, since you mentioned it,
Joaquin to hear those and more. Pushkin Podcast listen on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you like to listen. If you want to
purchase one of our monks they come in cream or Navy,
you can do so at talkasypod dot com, slash shop.

(01:24:23):
Talk easy is produced by Carolyn Reebok. Our executive producer
is Jenick sa Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Lindsay
Ellis and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our music is by
Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Shanoy. Photographs today
are by Maria Alvarez, with assistants from Ethan Newmeyer. I
also want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, justin Richmond,

(01:24:45):
Kerry Brody, Jacob Smith, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey, Joinna McMillan,
Amy Hagadorn, Sarah Bruguer, Owen Miller, Sarah Nix Malcolm Gladwell,
Greta Cohen, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm san fragoso. Thank you
for listening to Talk Easy. We'll be back next Sunday
with another episode. Until then, stay safe and so long

(01:25:10):
things as the SA