Josh Brolin Fears the Summer of Josh Brolin
On April 29, two days after the commencement of the Summer of Josh Brolin, his agents called him. “Oh my God, dude, biggest opening of all time!” they shouted. Mr. Brolin had never been the star of a Number 1 movie. “Just enjoy it for a second,” he told himself after he hung up.
He doesn’t usually allow for victory laps. It’s important to him that every role he takes allows him enough success to feed his family and continue to work. But he doesn’t want to become that guy who starts looking at his work self- consciously, grooming his persona until he becomes someone who makes small choices and stays safe.
But then the Summer of Josh Brolin came along. Who ever predicted that he would ever be in two of the biggest blockbusters of a summer? Who ever predicted that they — meaning a bunch of headlines and publicists — would name the entire summer after him?
And yet here we are. The Summer of Josh Brolin has seen Josh Brolin, 50, star in both the Number 1 and Number 2 movies at the box office at the same time: as Thanos, a population- control activist in Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” the featured villain of that movie, and as Cable, the vengeance-seeking bot from the future in “Deadpool 2.”
In its opening weekend, “Infinity War” took in almost $ 383 million internationally. “Deadpool 2” made an estimated $176.3 million internationally during its opening weekend, and it hadn’t opened in China yet. And now comes “Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” where he resumes the role he played in the first “Sicario,” a grizzled military operative on an extraction mission.
Now, nobody is more surprised about the Summer of Josh Brolin than Josh Brolin. But it also leaves him with a problem, which is to figure out how to handle success that he never expected.
“How do you treat this moment?” he asked, sitting on the couch of the suite at the Greenwich Hotel where he always stays when he’s in New York City. “This guy’s got two movies out, and he’s got one more. They’ve already made over $2 billion. That means that something’s shifting for him. O.K. So then you go, what is that for me? Do I work less hard?”
All this can sound like too much thinking until you understand. He’s just gotten his life in order. He’s five years sober, two years married. He had found a career that worked for him, which was doing not- quite- blockbuster movies (“No Country for Old Men,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”). He found a woman — the former Kathryn Boyd, 32 — who doesn’t activate in him all the codependence of his prior relationships. He was expecting a child — his third. He had just excised so many demons, and he wasn’t sure how the Summer of Josh Brolin might affect his newfound peace.
He is 33 years past his film debut as the shorts- over- sweatpants brother in “The Goonies.” Even as the son of the actor James Brolin, success seemed unattainable. After “Goonies,” he did the skater flick “Thrashin’” and after that, a million auditions. He turned down the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello resurgence vehicle, “Back to the Beach.” He had a self- consciousness that precluded him from taking jobs that he thought he couldn’t do well. And so in 2002, Josh Brolin began working as a day trader.
By then he had two kids — born in his early 20s, with his first wife, Alice Adair, an actress. He had a stepdaughter, courtesy of his second wife, Diane Lane. He took them to school. He’d wake up at 5 a.m. and work around the New York trading schedule. Which is a surprise. “You think of me as now, and I was never now,” he said.
Mr. Brolin took out a tiny Nicorette dispenser. He stopped smoking five years ago. “I was just done. I just reached an age. There was something about 45.” He started stealing cigarettes when he was 9. He was smoking regularly by 13. It was time.
The thing about staying in the same hotel suite for all these years is that it remains a museum of the things you’ve left behind. He drank a lot. He suffered a lot. His history here, he said, “was really severe.” He remembers waking up in the bathtub. He remembers waking up in a bowl of macaroni and cheese. “I just created a lot of havoc,” Mr. Brolin said.
Now, in sobriety, he said, “I want to live more drunk. I want to live drunkenly. I just don’t want to take the drink.”
Two weeks later, at his office in Los Angeles, California, Mr. Brolin thought of all the ways he had been careless with his life. He doesn’t forget that the old chaos was awful.
That’s the problem with the Summer of Josh Brolin. It is a many good things, but it is also a threat to the life he had just realized was good enough.