Interview: Josh Brolin, actor

Josh Brolin emerges from a fancy bathroom in a fancy suite in a very fancy hotel looking discombobulated. “I just had a really surreal moment in the bathroom,” he says, a little worried. “I forgot where I was.”

He’s remembered now. He’s in London for the premiere of Men in Black 3. It’s easy to see, however, why he might momentarily lose track of his surroundings. By signing up to play the young Agent K (to Tommy Lee Jones’ older, craggier version) in the third film of the much-loved franchise, he’s been sucked into a vortex of publicity and premieres, schedules and jetlag that would test even the most frequent of famous fliers.

Coming ten years after the release of the second film in the trilogy, MiB3 cost a table-thumping $375 million to make, placing it firmly in the “most expensive films of all time” bracket. Brolin may have starred in a string of critically acclaimed hits over the last four years (No Country for Old Men, W, True Grit, Milk) and worked under the kind of directors who need no introduction (Gus Van Sant, Ridley Scott, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, the Coen brothers), but when it comes to mega budgets and sheer scale, this is on another level.

However, Brolin, at the eye of the MiB3 storm, is quite relaxed. All ease and friendliness, he looks pure Southern gentleman in his pale summer suit and neat brown tie, chewing gum with gusto and rocking his chair forward when he wants to make a point. With his hair pushed back and a weighty goatee softening what can only be described as a chiselled jaw, the 44-year-old is exceedingly handsome in a practical, capable, cowboyish sort of a way.

Or, as he puts it, “I have a very big skull.”

“I get it,” he says, holding his hands up and laughing defeatedly. “There’s a look I have and I know that. I have a big skull and I have more of a ... primitive demeanour.” I pull an oh-no-you-don’t face. He laughs some more. “It’s alright,” he says. “It’s the truth.”

The strong jaw, heavy brow and large frame have been well-utilised in roles which call for an alpha male presence. There was the Vietnam veteran and hunter in No Country for Old Men (winner of best picture among its four awards at the 2008 Oscars), a murderous ranch hand in 2010’s True Grit and the 43rd president of the United States in W (pronounced “Dubya”, naturally). Then there was Dan White – the man who assassinated San Francisco politician Harvey Milk – in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, a role which earned him an Oscar nomination.

Raised on a California ranch, he is the son of actor James Brolin, Barbra Streisand’s husband. His mother, Jane Cameron Agee, a wildlife activist who died in a car crash when he was 27, deliberately brought him up away from the bright lights of Hollywood.

He has taken a similar approach with his own children. He has two, Trevor, 23 and Eden, 19 from his marriage to actress Alice Adair, and is stepfather to 18-year-old Eleanor, the daughter of actress Diane Lane whom he married in 2004. In their downtime, of which “there isn’t much” at the moment, the couple like to retreat to their ranch outside Los Angeles.

It’s easy to imagine Brolin kicking back on a ranch. He looks like a 21st-century Marlboro man. I put it to him that he’s played quite a few alpha males on screen. He corrects me, mentioning his role as a bisexual cop with an armpit fetish in 1996’s Flirting With Disaster. Fair enough. Anyway, he’s pretty dismissive of “the alpha male thing,” referring back to his big skull by way of an explanation.

“I’m sure it’s just a body type,” he says with a shrug. “It’s funny, when I was a kid I wasn’t a big guy. I was a little kid and I was picked on, so maybe what helped me was having to cultivate a furrowed brow to keep people away. It worked in school after a while so maybe it works in the movies. Sometimes it really works in my favour because it gives me really interesting work that I like.”

Now there’s the role of Agent K, for which he had to wear oversized prosthetic earlobes to match Tommy Lee Jones’ distinctive lugs. The film sees Will Smith’s character, Agent J, travelling back in time to 1969 to save the world from impending alien invasion and his partner, K, from an encounter with a particularly nasty non-earthling, Boris the Animal.

Brolin looks a little like a young Tommy Lee Jones in person, and a lot like him on screen. It’s not a comparison anyone’s ever made previously. He gets Nick Nolte sometimes, and Jeff Bridges told him that he looks like Jeff Bridges.

“Some people have said to me, ‘you know you do the voice and the gestures well but thank God you didn’t have to wear make-up [for the role].’ I go ‘honestly? I don’t have earlobes that long!’ ”

Despite appearing onscreen with Tommy Lee Jones in both No Country for Old Men and In the Valley of Elah, he watched the first two films around 50 times to get the accent, the mannerisms and the tone of the 21st-century Agent K’s voice down. To describe his approach to researching roles as “thorough” would be an understatement, and he’s undoubtedly a perfectionist. Despite an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones impression on screen Brolin says he “never felt like I nailed it”.

When he was offered the role, one of a younger version of an existing, rather iconic character, he said “whoa, that’s freaky, that’s kind of cool. That scares me. I started questioning myself. Can I do it? Do I have the skills to pull that off? This symphony, this weird cadence of Tommy’s voice ...”

He babbles a little, questions his abilities, but can’t take himself that seriously. At one point he gets giggly trying to imagine himself delivering an iconic line, a “go ahead, make my day” or an “are you talking to me?” He fixes his gaze on the middle distance, frowns and then loses it in a moment of mirth before he can get his “line” out.

He is committed to whichever role he embodies, describing the research as “the most interesting part”. The obsessive research, he says, is “out of pure fear. Totally. Because I pick roles that you can’t not research. You can’t just show up and do it.”

“The acting is the hardest,” he adds firmly. “But the research is actually the puzzle. It’s fun and it’s just like anything else; acting or producing or trading stocks [he has worked as a day trader alongside his acting career in the past]. It’s all the same thing to me. It’s all this massive puzzle that you try to figure out every day. It keeps it interesting.”

Brolin has been figuring out the puzzle for quite a while now. He has been in the industry for nearly 30 years, but only became a household name in the last four and, until fairly recently, enjoyed and was perfectly satisfied with a career that was relatively under the radar by Hollywood standards.

Much has been made of the extraordinary trajectory of Brolin’s recent career. At 17 he starred in cult children’s classic The Goonies, and for the next 20-odd years roles were regular if not headline-grabbing.

There was plenty of theatre work, of which he is very proud, a few duds (see 1986’s Thrashin’) and various film and television roles. He brought in extra cash with that job as a day trader, had to sell his ranch at one point and was dropped by an agent along the way. But he was content.

He sums it up thus: “I was able to feed my kids and go on a trip once or twice a year and my career was OK. I wasn’t unhappy with it. I wanted more choice but I wasn’t a bitter actor. I was actually very happy. And then things changed.”

He was 40 when he starred in No Country for Old Men, a role that seemed to make half of Hollywood sit up and ask themselves why they hadn’t cast him before. He has packed in as many critical and commercial hits in the past four years as many A-list actors see in a lifetime, and has had to quickly get used to being the one taking calls offering roles instead of making calls asking for them. Was that disconcerting? He nods: “To be in a position where nobody cares and then somebody cares? And why do they care? Because I’m suddenly of monetary interest, I’m suddenly a valuable asset to them? Or do they actually respect what I do?”

He was famously once asked how he feels about doing A-grade work now compared to the C-minus work he tackled before. “Ouch,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I was doing C-minus work. I was doing theatre, I think I did some of the best work I’ve ever done and I try to live up to that work now. I was given an opportunity to do a lot of great character work and it gave me a little more confidence to do it in film once I started to get offered that kind of thing.”

He was, he says, a “blue collar actor”. In terms of his demeanour, if not his pay cheques, nothing much has changed. He has a straightforward way of talking, punctuated with only very occasional Hollywood speak (I’m not quite sure what he means when he uses the phrase “disrespect the moment”).

Having been admitted to Hollywood’s upper echelons, Brolin has observed that the higher you climb, the less stereotypically “Hollywood” it all seems to get: “I’ve realised that with these guys, Ridley Scott or the Coens or Gus Van Sant or Oliver, there’s such a lack of pretence. These other movies that I was doing before, when I was just happy to have a job, there was a lot of pretence, there was a lot of ego, a lot of need to be more than these people were. And that wasn’t fun to be around.”

Being catapulted into the A-list at 40 seems to be something he’s handling well. How might he have handled it had the Big Time come knocking earlier in his career? “I don’t have to worry about it. It didn’t happen and I can make up how I would have dealt with it. I think in my twenties and part of my thirties I was proving something to myself. I didn’t feel good about just mellowing out. I always felt I needed to push the envelope and I didn’t have a place, creatively, to push it. And now it’s a much mellower time because I’m able to do that creatively. I think that’s why I pick the parts that I pick. They’re terrifying to me, so I go OK, that’s going to be all-consuming. That’s good.”

He’s not too proud to admit that he’s still learning, that he treats all his films like classes. The learning outcome for Men in Black 3? Fun. “Will has so much fun doing it and that’s a great lesson for me too. It’s like ‘oh I can laugh and I can really have a good time doing this’ and a lot of good can come out of that.”

Brolin certainly looks like he’s having fun, even if he’s having so much fun that he occasionally forgets where he is. Next up is slick LA flick Gangster Squad opposite Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn, and once the Men in Black hoopla is over it’s time for a holiday with his wife. To Scotland as it turns out, though he won’t say where, just that he’s looking forward to some bad weather. And, I imagine, to being in one place long enough to remember where he is.

Men in Black 3 is out now in cinemas nationwide