Page 128 - The Book For Men Spring/Summer 2024

“Was that selling out?
I don’t know. It’s a life, man.”
55 years old and did 20 minutes in The Silence of the Lambs. Then he had a whole different trajectory.” Brolin’s own trajectory is unique. “You have times when no one wants to hire you. In the middle of it, maybe you get a David O. Russell movie, and how did I get hired for that? And then maybe you get a big series, and your face is plastered all over Times Square, and then by the fifth episode you know it’s going to get cancelled. Those are the fluctuations of the careers of those who last.”
He dealt with those fluctuations by simply accepting them. He points to a piece of advice he once got from Robert De Niro. (Brolin, by the way, is not the kind of guy who ingratiatingly refers to De Niro as “Bobby.”) “De Niro once said, ‘Don’t take the highs too seriously and don’t take the lows too seriously. Just find yourself. Just keep working.’ Fluctuations are inevi- table — even with one of the greatest actors who ever lived.” He points out that there was a time when even De Niro was slumming it in an American Express commercial. “Was that selling out? I don’t know. It’s a life, man.” Or maybe De Niro got sick of doing dramas all the time, so he started doing comedies with Ben Stiller and got slammed with bad reviews. “And now he’s back to winning awards for everything he does.” Brolin has derived a lesson from that, too. “When you get older, you realize that everybody’s going to give you shit,” he laughed.
Things changed for Brolin when he starred in No Country for Old Men as Llewelyn Moss, the taciturn Texan who has the singularly bad luck of finding two million dollars in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Brolin, famously, was not the first choice for the part — it was meant to go to Heath Ledger, who ultimately turned it down — but managed to persuade the Coen brothers after enlisting Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, with whom he’d just worked on Grindhouse, to help him fashion a compelling audition tape. In retrospect, it’s almost impossible to imagine anybody but Brolin as Moss, a man whose gritty tenacity keeps him one small step ahead of the ultimate bad-ass Anton Chigurh, until it doesn’t. No one on earth could have embodied that perfect combination of fixity and haplessness — of barrelling headlong toward fate instead of just sidling up alongside of it.
Llewelyn Moss changed everything. Immediately. It led to an audition with Ridley Scott, for what would become the acclaimed drama American Gangster. It brought him to Oliver Stone, who cast him — some would say unexpectedly — as George Bush in the biopic W. And from there, the dominos kept falling. “I think directors started saying, ‘Why him?’” Brolin said. “It becomes like a snowball effect.” He also credits a certain interpersonal factor: “I had a way about me that was...it’s kind of hard to believe this, but I wasn’t so much of a people pleaser. I didn’t pander. I was like, ‘What’s up? Do you want to do this? Let’s get to work.’” (Talking to Brolin, it is somewhat hard to imagine that he isn’t a people pleaser, if only because he’s bending over backwards to make our conversation flow more easily, to be generous with his time and courteous with his answers, and to generally be easy to talk to.)
The movies that came in the aftermath of No Country were mainly auteur projects, art-house films and parts that seemed creatively challenging. He worked with Woody Allen on You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (“I didn’t particularly like that script, but I called the Coens and asked if I should do this, and they were like, ‘It’s Woody Allen!’”). He worked with Spike Lee on his interesting if somewhat badly received remake of Oldboy (“I was a major Spike fan, and I still am, but I think that was a transitional time for him,” Brolin says). What he didn’t do much of was flagrant garbage — he avoided the kinds of artistically bankrupt nonsense that are the de facto paydays for guys on the upswing in this business. “I was offered a lot of money to do certain things, and I needed it,” he said. “But I hated the idea that I can make this many millions now if I just do the pew pew pew thing.”
If he was going to do the pew pew pew thing, he wanted it to be special — he wanted it to be something like Dune, an action blockbuster but, he said, “a profound story from a profound director.” Working on Dune has brought Brolin back together with Denis Villeneuve, with whom he previously collaborated on the drug-running drama Sicario. The two have become, he said, “very close friends,” which he also said was part of a larger trend in his life of having opposites attract. “It’s the cool guys I don’t get along with. Woody’s not cool. Oliver’s not cool. The Coens aren’t cool.” When I suggest
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