Josh brolin
If there’s a superhero on your screen this summer, Josh Brolin’s punching them in the face. Total Film goes head-to-head with the guy playing the iconic Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and Cable in Deadpool 2. Be afraid, be very afraid…
.... Thanos, the MCU’s ultimate baddie. He’s also set to kick Deadpool’s ass as mutant soldier Cable.
Josh Brolin has a face chiselled out of rock, a bulging, unyielding torso and a grip that’s like slamming your hand in a car door, but he sure knows how to sweet talk. “Man, you have a voice like Jason Statham’s,” he tells Total Film in his rumbling drawl on a bright LA morning in March. Total Film, strangely delighted to be compared to the granite Cockney geezer, thanks him for the compliment. “You take that and run with it,” says Brolin, his growl reverberating into a deep-chested laugh that concludes, abruptly, with a stentorian sniff you might expect to explode from an eight-foot-tall, purple autocrat with a hard bald head to put Statham’s to shame. Or perhaps such a thunderous sniff would issue from a pumped-up supersoldier with a glowing eye and a cybernetic arm.
We’re talking, of course, about Thanos and Cable, the two bad guys (or, as Brolin prefers it, antiheroes) who are set to own the summer by unceremoniously handing a shedload of superheroes their asses. First up,
in Avengers: Infinity War, Brolin plays lavender alien Thanos – the big bad who’s been lurking in the shadows of the MCU since Avengers Assemble and who we briefly glimpsed in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Expect him to get his shovel-like hands on the Infinity Stones to bend time and space, meaning the Avengers, Guardians, Doctor Strange et al are royally screwed. Not that Brolin felt especially badass on his first day of motion-capture…
“I thought, ‘What the fuck am
I doing here?’” he laughs. “Because you’re in a onesie, man. You’ve got to walk around in a onesie and imagine yourself as an actor with some impact. It starts messing with your head.
I’m Josh, who’s got dots on him, and a onesie, and a helmet-cam, and I’ve got Scarlett [Johansson, as Black Widow] right there, and I’ve got Brie [Larson, Captain Marvel], and Don Cheadle
[War Machine], and [Chris] Hemsworth [Thor], and Chris Evans [Captain America], and [Robert] Downey [Iron Man]… I’m sitting there and I’m looking like I look, which is not 700lb and purple and eight feet tall. I mean, I’m feeling about as far from Jason Statham as one can feel at that moment, and yet I’m acting like
I feel 10 times what Jason Statham is. I’m the man!”
HEART OF DARKNESS
But here’s the thing. Thanos is no join-the-dots lughead. When he was born on Saturn’s moon Titan, his misshapen form so horrified his mother that she attempted to kill him – and that’s just a handful of panels in a complicated backstory that maps out the fiendishly tortured psychology of this immensely intelligent being. Brolin, who knew nothing of the mythology, felt excitement swell as he started his research.
“They sent me over this bible, just all this information,” he says. “It was a massive thing, and yet even that was maybe a sixteenth of what there was to learn. The comic-book and Marvel world is not only extremely emotional to people, but so in-depth. There’s no way to learn it all. But you try to do what you can, like with any role, and you want to earn your place on set. I started reading and I was in awe.
It was like the Colonel Kurtz thing. Colonel Kurtz is one of the most evil guys out there, and at the same time, you see him sitting down and reading poetry. I couldn’t help but make the parallel. You’re looking at: where’s the sensitivity in the guy? Where’s the intelligence? Where’s the evil?
Is it a justified evil, at least in his mind? Is he constantly projecting something and manipulating? Or are there moments where he’s honest? It turned out to be one of my most favourite jobs I’ve ever had.”
Brolin has a lot of jobs to choose from. The son of double Golden Globe winner James Brolin and stepson of legend Barbra Streisand, he made a debut to treasure in The Goonies, aged 16. Then: two decades treading the boards and making forgettable TV and worse movies until a 2007 doublewhammy of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and the Coens’ western-thriller No Country For Old Men made Hollywood clamour for his cowboy charm. In the 11 years since, there have been more delights (American Gangster, Milk, True Grit, Inherent Vice, Sicario, Hail, Caesar!) than duds (Jonah Hex, Men In Black 3, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For).
“I enjoyed [my career] the whole time,” he shrugs. “I really did. I mean, I had accepted the fact that I was a working actor, and I was making enough money to live. It was a little stressful sometimes where I wouldn’t work for 12 months or 16 months, and I wasn’t in any kind of demand, which is always hard – you want people to want you. Then suddenly I was in a position with choice. What I did with that choice is I wanted to work with the best people out there. There is a lot less tension and a lot less chaos with people who are really good at what they do. Once you get together with Joel and Ethan [Coen] and Oliver [Stone, on W.] and Gus Van Sant and Ridley Scott and people like that, you’re just like, ‘Wow, this is so much easier.’”
WEIGHTIER PARTS
As to the oft-floated argument that Brolin found a certain gravitas that aided his performances when he got older, he offers a snort. If he looks better, he says, it’s again down to the people directing him. “They behaviourally understand how to utilise the camera, what type of lens to use, when to move the camera, when not to move the camera,” he states. “I’m not doing anything different. It’s just that they’re people who understand their craft much better than the people who I worked with before.”
What Brolin says is probably true – he’s a straight-shooter, and who’s going to dare contradict him anyway? – but he’s never worked as hard as he’s doing now. Partly it’s the punishing back-to-back schedule, with a muchanticipated return to the Tex-Mex border for drug-trafficking thriller Sicario 2: Soldado also in the can and the untitled ‘Avengers 4’ having shot back-to-back with Infinity War. Largely it’s because he had to spend so
damn long in the gym getting ready to do battle with Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) in Deadpool 2, the follow-up to 2016’s irreverent, fourth-wall-obliterating smash hit. Pumped-up Cable is the future-warrior son of X-Man Cyclops and Jean Grey’s clone Madeleine Pryor, and if anyone’s going to shut the Merc’s mouth, it’s this brute.
“It was really important for me to see if I could do this without any chemical help,” he begins, typically frank. “And I hit a goal that was far and beyond what I thought I was capable of. It was like, ‘Can we do this in 12 weeks?’ ‘No.’ ‘OK, excellent – that’s all the incentive that I need…’ And we pulled it off. I was very, very, very disciplined, even though I got a frozen shoulder from it and my knee got jacked-up. I’m a little bit older now, so it’s starting to hurt. But we did most of the fight sequences ourselves. We did a lot of the stunts ourselves.”
But it was Deadpool 2’s brains, more than its brawn, which appealed to the 50-year-old actor. “When it was offered to me, I was tired, I was doing Avengers, and I was kind of irritable. I was like, ‘Why would I want to do this right now? I’m already doing Avengers. Isn’t that enough?’ My wife goes, ‘Why are you complaining? Why don’t you just read it?’ And I did. And she was right. I cracked up. It was really fresh.
The first one was an anomaly and everybody was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing,’ but Ryan’s smart enough to know anomalies don’t last. You have to keep it fresh. You have to still be innovative if you’re going into a second or a third or even a fourth one.”
Talking of innovation, how has Brolin found taking to Twitter for some hilarious back-and-forth with the rapier-sharp Reynolds? “It’s fun for me. His [tweets] are a bit smarter than mine – he’s the one-liner guy. Mine are more crude. I don’t really care if I lose followers. I went 22 years where nobody gave a shit.” He considers. “And his are very Deadpool, so you never really know what’s Deadpool and what’s Ryan. Whereas if it’s me, you know it’s me 100 per cent of the time.”
OK, and let’s end by seeing just how much of a straight-shooter he really is. No PR-friendly fudging of the answer, please: who did he like playing more, Thanos or Cable?
“Look, I really like doing Cable, and it’s practical,” he says without so much as a pause. “But I think if I was to have a preference, it’d be Thanos, just because my expectation was pretty low, given that I just thought I was a prop. And it was quite the opposite, having seen enough of the movie and realised how cutting-edge this technical process is, y’know? I was watching me. I was watching every twitch, every blink. I was watching my eyes. My actions. I was living through my intentions.” He sighs. “At the beginning, before I said yes, I called Mark Ruffalo [who mo-caps Hulk] and I said, ‘What do you think of this?’ He was like, ‘It’s going to be really uncomfortable in the beginning, and then you see the movie, and you’ll just be absolutely blown away by the stuff you were doing.’ And that was then. They’ve made huge leaps and bounds in mo-cap territory since then. There’s nothing not authentic about it.”
Yep, those puny superheroes are in for a real beatdown.
AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR OPENS ON 26 APRIL, DEADPOOL 2 OPENS ON 16 MAY.
‘I WAS WATCHING ME. I WAS WATCHING EVERY TWITCH, EVERY BLINK. I WAS WATCHING MY EYES’ JOSH BROLIN ON MO-CAP