Page 131 - The Book For Men Spring/Summer 2024

that Villeneuve, the French-Canadian auteur responsible for some of the most stylish and cerebral blockbusters in recent memory, might actually qualify as cool to most people, he laughs. “Denis is not cool in that way. He’s not Mickey Rourke cool. He’s like...on the spectrum cool.”
Brolin doesn’t have an especially large role in the Dune movies. He plays Gurney Halleck, the baliset-playing war master who serves as a kind of mentor figure to Paul Atreides, the troubled saviour played by Timothée Chalamet. But the experience of working on the movie, Brolin said, was invigorating, and a much more intimate thing than the usual blockbuster set. “I was very inspired on that movie,” he said. “The feeling is that you’re doing a 40- or 50-million dollar movie. It’s very personal; it’s familial. And it’s a little naked, which I like — it’s revealing.” That intimacy and inspiration moved Brolin to spend his downtime on set writing verse about the experience, which has now been turned into a book of poetry (and set photography by Greig Fraser), Dune: Exposures.
In the days before Brolin and I spoke, one of the poems from the book was posted online, and social media was whipped into a frenzy by its almost sensual descriptions of Chalamet. (“The way you hold my gaze makes me fear my own age,” reads one of the stanzas.) “People thought I wanted to sleep with him,” Brolin laughs. When I explain to Brolin that I read it as a reflection on aging among a cohort of much younger actors, he says that the interpretations likely “say a lot more about the person than about my poem.” But he does of course see the reading I suggest. “It’s the fact that I’m coming to terms with my age with some grace,” he said. “I’m not fighting it. I’m not. I’m just noticing it, and it’s a transition of acceptance.” A kid like Chalamet only casts that age in relief — and draws attention to the new generation.
Watching Chalamet, as well as Dune: Part Two co-stars Austin Butler, Zendaya and Florence Pugh, is a matter of witnessing the new wave of super stars. “They’re at the beginning of the trajectory of being the ‘It’ person and celebrity and what’s to come and the humbling of that,” Brolin said. “I’ve seen a hundred people come and go and be where Timothée’s at. And I would never want it back. I would never want to start over.” Brolin said
that he deeply admires the work that actors like Pugh and especially Butler have been doing, and that watching them on the set of Dune, he got “really excited” about their potential. It’s just that sometimes the admiration comes off the wrong way. “Once in a while someone will get creeped out and think I’m just a creepy old man that wants to get in with the young kids, which is not particularly true.”
But Brolin also can’t help but feel old in part because, at least these days, he’s playing old: Paul calls Gurney “old man,” even in the trailer. In Prime Video’s Outer Range, Brolin is Royal Abbott, a steely Wyoming rancher who discovers an anomaly on his land: he’s not only the elder family patriarch with a world-weary scowl and a chipper grandchild, he’s actually a reluctant time-traveller born in the 19th century. It doesn’t get much older than that. “I let the goatee grow out. I’m the old man on the ranch,” he said of the role. “So when did that happen? Literally overnight. And it doesn’t mean that I can’t dye my beard to play this age, or shave my beard to look a different age again. But I’m just noticing it.” With Outer Range returning for its mind-bending second season in May, it seems certain that the rabid fanbase will continue admiring Brolin for his heavy-duty performance. And of course continue thinking of him as the old man on the ranch.
Younger actors, aspiring actors, sometimes ask Brolin for advice. He always tells them the same thing: “Read plays. Go study. Go do theatre. Challenge yourself. Read a bunch of books. Obsess. Watch movies over and over. Watch plays where they have no money and they’re experimenting.” That was Brolin’s own path to success: diligent, unflagging work, more hard work than you can possibly imagine. That’s how it was for his generation, for guys like Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, “all these people who, as crazy as they were, or are, were really into the work, deeply emotionally into it.” But when he gives the young actors this advice, they always look at him funny. “‘No, no, no,’ they say. ‘I mean, how do you become famous?’” And for Brolin, that’s a very different thing.
“They don’t want to obsess,” he said. “They want to know how to gain followers. They don’t want to do the work.”
“They want to know how to gain followers. They don’t want to do the work.”
131