The Prince of Sober Anarchy: Josh Brolin is The Rake's Issue 101 Cover Star

Round two with Josh Brolin felt a bit like a friendly psychological experiment, or what marketing people call control and test. Full disclosure: this was round two between us only in the sense of a formal interview. I first talked to Josh for the December 2020 issue of The Rake, and since then we have developed a friendship that has been profound, amusing and fulfilling. Also, an awful lot has happened in the past few years: Donald Trump was in the White House for the first time in 2020, and we were all diligently doing as we were told when it came to vaccines, lockdowns, and ultimately our re-emergence from our front doors. The world began to open up again, and while it has returned to some degree of normality, there is more to unpick.

The first interview between us was retrospective in its content. There was plenty of the distant past — Josh’s youth on his mother’s ranch in Paso Robles, trying to avoid (sometimes unsuccessfully) bites from the pet wolves; his time as a Cito Rat, a skateboarding gang whose life expectancy was pretty poor, and of which he remains one of the few survivors. A cracking career with early roles in The Goonies and grown-up ones in No Country for Old Men and Sicario as well as blockbuster villainy with Marvel as Thanos. In other words, a life well lived; a career well established. Perfect material for a Rake cover.

With no laurel-resting to be indulged, the Brolin train is like the Polar Express, always five minutes till Christmas, always great excitement just around the corner, one terrific professional and personal opportunity after another. There is, interspersed between his day jobs, a host of extracurriculars that have given him just as much satisfaction in life as has his work. So it is with a contented Josh Brolin that I sit down to discover more.

The best place to start is with his 2024 book. From Under the Truck is not so much a biography as a non-fiction novel that moves peripatetically through time and serves as a portal into the mind of our cover star. It is a train-of-thought narrative that is sometimes runaway but would make Jack Kerouac proud, with visceral moments that are enough to make one wretch, would raise eyebrows at an N.A. meeting, and in the blink of an eye encapsulate love, tenderness and the value of fatherhood and friendship. The child Josh, and often the adult Josh, in this book is reckless, irritable and discontent, but unlike a lot of people in similar situations — both in and surrounded by addiction — Brolin did not seek the easier, softer way; instead, he was a chaos agent of his own. A virtue has recently been made of chaos agents in America, and Brolin beautifully epitomises a timely cautionary tale.

The book does not so much create a journey in which redemption is the shedding of rebelliousness but the embracement and incorporation in his life of said rebelliousness in a constructive rather than destructive way. He credits his recovery for this. “I think that has to do with getting sober, finally looking at the most naked version of yourself and being O.K. with it,” he says. “Even though it’s naked, it’s cold, it’s embarrassing, it’s all the things that you want to hide, then you go, ‘This is me, for better or worse’. I threw myself into the abject terror of being myself. So, in true Brolin form, I go for it. I try and challenge it as much as I possibly can until I get through it. And that can look really messy and violent and bloody, but that’s what I needed to do for whatever reason in order to get to a place where I feel like in the book we got to a redemptive place.” He articulates his ‘journey’ beautifully, but he stops short of romanticising the chaos, which is rare, as plenty others would have dined out on it.

It is worth saying that you cannot understand Josh Brolin without being cued by literature, even if it isn’t his own. Reading is everything to him because it is in words and stories that he finds inspiration for more life, better life, deeper life. It also explains the hair, beard and tattoos that you see in the photoshoot. These were part of the character for his role as Mitt in Whalefall, a film adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s acclaimed novel. In fact, our interview was sans tattoos, hair or beard — it had all gone — and the film inspired the reset. “With Whalefall, a film set around scuba diving, I kept wondering how I could go deeper,” he says. “Oscar Isaac turned me on to somebody named Kim Gillingham. She is a Jungian dream analyst through whatever creative platform that you’re coming to her [about]. I spent three days with her, talking about fathers and sons, crying; it was unbelievable, man. Nothing that I expected — a depth and just a trough of fucking emotions that I did not expect. So having had a long beard and long hair and all this kind of stuff and tattoos all over me, it was my way of trying to cleanse.”

Read the full story in Issue 101, available now.