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#690 - Josh Brolin
Full original episode. Highlights below summarise the discussion; claims and opinions are attributed to the speakers.Sobriety creates common ground
Von and Brolin begin by acknowledging their shared experience with alcoholism and the relief they feel talking with another sober person. They describe alcohol and drug use as ways they once escaped self-criticism or changed how they felt, while both say they now enjoy life more without using. Brolin recalls getting sober at 19, remaining so for several years and then consciously returning to drinking. Later, he says he has been sober more than once, resisting the idea that recovery divided his life into only a simple before and after.
Reworking the Cito Rats’ legacy
Brolin describes the Cito Rats as a Montecito surfing community, not a gang, that offered companionship to young people whose parents were often absorbed in their own lives. He says the group’s camaraderie eventually became entangled with drugs, missed school and the deaths of many friends. By reviving the name, Brolin says he hopes to retain its scrappy, punk character while replacing self-destruction with an emphasis on survival. He and Von frame the project as refurbishing the past rather than denying it.
A childhood defined by animals and vigilance
According to Brolin, his mother rehabilitated wild animals on the family’s California ranch, where wolves, a lion, a bear and a chimpanzee were temporarily housed. He says the household’s intensity left little room for children to process fear, fostering constant alertness instead. Brolin characterizes his mother as impulsive and more comfortable caring for animals than people, but also remembers her affectionately. He suggests that only later did he learn to regulate the energy and habits formed in that environment.
An early breakthrough followed by years of uncertainty
Brolin says The Goonies was his first performance before a camera and that nerves made him repeatedly laugh during the opening day of filming. That prominent debut did not lead to steady success: by his account, he spent roughly 22 years struggling for momentum, studying theatre and supporting himself through landscaping and nearly five years of stock trading. He identifies No Country for Old Men as the project that finally changed his career after years of difficult auditions and limited work.
Why Whale Fall struck an emotional nerve
Brolin says Daniel Kraus’s Whale Fall affected him so strongly that he agreed to participate in the film before reading its screenplay. What moved him was the relationship between a severe father and a son who rejects his lessons, then needs those teachings to survive after being swallowed by a whale. For Brolin, the story gradually reveals that the father’s harshness contained genuine care. He also praises Austin Abrams’s performance and the challenge of sustaining a story whose protagonist spends much of it inside a whale.