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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe email arrives on Friday, from a publicrelations firm in Los Angeles, on behalf of Josh Brolin: \"Josh wants to take you up the PCH on his motorcycle.\"\n\nI write back, Okay.\n\nI think, I'm going to die.\n\nI'd talked to Brolin on the phone a few weeks earlier. I knew about the motorcycle. It's a Ducati, and back in 2006\u2014right before shooting began on Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, in which Brolin had been cast as Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam vet who stumbles upon a valise of misplaced drug money and, subsequently, a world of hurt\u2014Brolin rode it into an intersection, only to discover, and collide with, an oncoming car. He told me how he'd sailed through the air before hitting the pavement, thinking of his kids, thinking, Fuck, I really wanted to work with the Coen brothers.\n\nHe walked away from the crash, sustaining only a broken collarbone he would lie to the Coens about. He shot the movie\u2014rolled down hills, got chased by a pit bull. All that activity helped the break heal, he says. But that's not the point. The point is I'm not a real man. Burning up the Pacific Coast Highway on two wheels beats tea and crumpets at the Chateau Marmont from a journalistic perspective, sure. And I'd feel really good about that if we died. I Googled \"motorcycle passenger safety\" and was convinced that we would. That I'd lean left when I was supposed to lean right and we'd Thelma &amp;amp; Louise it off a cliff.\n\nYou couldn't script it better: Brolin's very first film performance\u2014in 1985's The Goonies\u2014ensures that he'll always play the lead in the cavediving fantasies of women of a certain age. But despite his rugged charisma and stagehoned chops, he never quite clicks with audiences as a leading man and spends decades bumming around in the kind of unprestige movies that compete with golf on midafternoon basic cable (\"Next on TNT: Josh Brolin stands near Invisible Kevin Bacon in\u2026Hollow Man!\")\n\nThen, at the tender age of 39, not long after he's launched a daytrading career and sold his ranch near Paso Robles so that he'll never have to take another pickingupapaycheck acting job, he gets a moviestar moment. He works with the Coens, in No Country. Plays a malevolently mustachioed cop for Ridley Scott in American Gangster. A zombiebait doctor in Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse. He plays men swaggering unshaven toward their doom, men you suspect smell like sweat and booze and gun oil. He brings to these parts\u2014and other, less iconically badass ones, in The Dead Girl and Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah\u2014a lowkey, hangdog magnificence, as if he's bartered some hunkiness for confidence, presence, gravitas.\n\nAnd then he bites it on some Dead Man's Curve before taking his place on the Alist. Oh, and SOME WRITER ALSO KILLED.\n\nPlus, there was the whole holdingon issue. How does a dude ride with another dude, exactly Grab his hips Wrap my arms around him like a Jersey girl trying to show Bruce Springsteen that her love is wild and/or real before this town rips the bones from our backs Was there a protocol regarding screaming\n\nSo when Brolin shows up\u2014on a Monday morning, on a street corner in west L.A., near but not too near the house he shares with his second wife, actress Diane Lane\u2014I try not to seem too relieved that he's driving a blue Chevy Silverado pickup. There was a chance of rain, apparently. Plus, last night he had this dream:\n\n\"We're speeding down PCH. And all the brake fluid has drained, unbeknownst to both you and me. We're going about fiftyfive, sixty, and there's no brakes. So I yell to you to hold on to the back of the bike. And I\u2014kind of like I'm on a horse\u2014I pop my legs around. I'm thinking about the shoes that I've chosen to wear, and if I can dig the soles in deep enough to actually stop us before we hit a car, and if I can steer\u2014if you stay straight, if you don't panic and lean either way, can I get us to stop before we hit something\"\n\nHe's not the kind of guy who sifts his dreams for clues, but this just seemed too explicit to ignore.\n\n We hit the freeway and get out of town. Brolin wears sunglasses and a TEAMSTERS baseball cap. Puffs Winstons. Rhapsodizes about William Burroughs and Hunter Thompson. He tells funny stories about embarrassing himself in front of Tilda Swinton, geeking out during a recent meeting with Martin Scorsese to talk about a role (\"I thought, Fuck trying to get a job\u2014I just want to ask him questions\"), and living in a crappy Hollywood apartment building whose penthouse tenant was Billy Zane (\"I was like, Let me do one more Highway to Heaven episode so we can move\"). His memory is spotty when it comes to proper nouns\u2014PETA, Tilda Swinton\u2014but he does an extraordinary Nick Nolte impression.\n\n His dog, Milo\u2014whiskered like the Lorax, with the barrelchested bearing of a much larger dog\u2014hops up on the center console, as if to protect us. Milo learned a lot, Brolin says, from Cody. Cody was Brolin's old dog, a cowdog. He died; his collar hangs off the Silverado's rearview mirror.\n\nBrolin tells me more about his accident. About the 300pound guy who materialized out of nowhere\u2014as Brolin stood there with his arm hanging loose, going into shock\u2014and demanded that Brolin apologize to the woman whose car he'd hit, leading Brolin to wonder if he'd actually died and the afterlife was an absurd Coen brothers movie.\n\n\"My wife makes fun of me constantly,\" Brolin says (he's been married to Lane for almost four years). \"She says it's always fucking something. 'Why do you have to make it so hard on yourself' I didn't. But it's an interesting question. Because you're like, Was it fear Was it getting this part, and going, Can I really do it, now that I've gotten it\"\n\nWe're driving fast through postcardapocalyptic Southern California\u2014freshly wildfirescorched hills on the right, glittering ocean on the left. Brolin's glad to be out of town. We don't stop until we're somewhere near the L.A. County line, at a little seafood place called Neptune's Net.\n\n \"I love that it's kinda in the middle of nowhere,\" Brolin says. When Brolin asks the cashregister guy if they allow smoking, the cashregister guy asks if he means cigarettes. It's that kind of place. Patrons with Harleys sip prenoon twentyfourouncers of Corona on the patio. Provided you obey the posted noshoesnoservice policy, Mr. Spicoli, you can buy a cake of Mr. Zog's surfboard wax at the counter. Brolin picks one up, holds it to his nose and breathes in deeply, like the Irish Spring guy. We place our order\u2014fish tacos, fried shrimp\u2014and I ask Brolin how far we are from the city. He says maybe half an hour, and I remember that this is L.A., where distances are measured in minutes. I ask how many miles.\n\n\"I'm trying to get my bearings,\" I say.\n\n\"The point is not to get your bearings,\" Brolin says.\n\nTHIS IS BROLIN'S thing\u2014he gets away. Whenever possible. Takes the wife, and the kids, or doesn't. He got this from his mom. He got a lot from her. It's the father, James Brolin, who tends to loom larger in discussions of Brolinrelated matters, because he's an actor, too. (Tonight, floating around the syndicated ether: James Brolin stars in Hotel, in Marcus Welby, M.D., as The West Wing's dim fauxDubya, as silvermaned arm candy to Barbra Streisand, Josh's stepmom of almost ten years.) But the part of Brolin that feels at home on the road, the part of him, he says, that's not unlike Llewelyn Moss\u2014that's from Mom.\n\nMom was Jane Agee, who died in a car accident in 1995. She'd grown up poor in Texas and aspired to act. Ten days into their relationship, she looked at James\u2014they were drinking scorpions\u2014and said, \"We gonna get married or what\" Maybe it was twelve days in\u2014Brolin isn't positive. Jane would wake James up at 2 a.m., Brolin says, and say, \"C'mon\u2014we're leaving.\"\n\n\"He'd be so pissed off,\" Brolin says. \"But he would end up having the most incredible adventure ever. She was the kind of person who'd be driving and say, 'I wonder what's down that dirt road' I love that.\"\n\nJane worked with Fish &amp;amp; Game. She turned the family's ranch in Paso Robles into a halfway house for animals that had been illegally removed from the wild. She brought home coyotes, chimps, mountain lions, the occasional tiger, and one bear. Brolin and his younger brother (who needed sixty stitches in his leg after being attacked by a wolf at age 6) spent a lot of time in close proximity to dangerous animals. \"I had to clean the cages, which was absolutely irresponsible of my mom,\" Brolin says. \"You just had to deal, man.\"\n\nBrolin didn't grow up around show business. \"You're closer to Hollywood in San Francisco,\" he says, \"than you are in Paso Robles.\" When Brolin was 7, maybe 8, \"I got on the school bus, and somebody was giving me shit. And I said, 'Do you know who my dad is' And they kicked the living shit out of me. And that was a good thing. Because whatever hint of that had started to blossom was snuffed out real quick. That's embarrassing, but it's the truth.\"\n\nYou were only 7, I say.\n\n\"Regardless,\" Brolin says. \"Thank God I wasn't 27.\" Then, in a snotnosedkid voice: \"Do you know who my dad is James Brolin, from Marcus Welby!\"\n\n\"Obviously, I thought there was some kind of power behind it,\" Brolin says. \"But it was also very elusive to me. I just knew my dad did this thing that everybody thought was, Wow. And when they kicked the shit out of me for [mentioning] it, that just confused me. And I ended up despising it.\"\n\n He wanted to be a lawyer. Got good grades. He was also a punk. Sported a Mohawk. Opened for legendary SoCal acts like T.S.O.L. and Black Flag as the drummer in a band that became the semilegendary Santa Barbara hardcore outfit Rich Kids on LSD.\n\n\"The thought of being an actor was ridiculous. I didn't understand that there was a craft, that it involved behavior, psychology\u2014all that stuff that I'm into now. I like it for those reasons alone. The act of acting is a pain. It's humiliating. You put yourself in a position that's very strange and awkward. Y'know, you're doing Flirting with Disaster\"\u2014in which Brolin plays a bisexual ATF agent\u2014\"and you're walking around with tattoos and nipple rings, licking somebody's armpit, and thinking, This is what I do for a living.\"\n\nBut in high school, he took an improvtheater class, and that led to more plays, which led to a string of unsuccessful auditions. By the time he got the idolmaking part in Goonies, Brolin says, \"I'd been turned down a lot and been told a lot of negative things.\" But on the strength of Goonies, he starred in 1986's Thrashin', a '50sstyle juveniledelinquent flick on skateboards, promoted with the movieposter tagline: HOT. RECKLESS. TOTALLY INSANE. Brolin doesn't want to trash the movie\u2014he still runs into people who tell him it inspired them to start skateboarding\u2014but when he saw it, he didn't feel hot or reckless or insane. He felt mortified.\n\n\"I cried when I saw it\" he says. \"That performance. I thought, Get out now, or go figure out how to do this, because that's unacceptable.\"\n\nHe didn't appear in another film until 1994. He acted in a couple of shortlived TV series\u2014The Young Riders, about the scruffily handsome heyday of the Pony Express, is the best remembered\u2014and did theater on the East Coast. You get the sense that if the movies that rejuvenated his film career hadn't come along, he'd have been content becoming a sort of Sam Shepardian pickuptruck bard. He cofounded an L.A. theater troupe; this summer he cowrote and codirected Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, a play about the life and death of AC/DC singer Bon Scott. And his first short film as a director\u2014X, about a prison escapee and his daughter, with Brolin's own daughter playing the female lead\u2014just got accepted to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Brolin says that news is the thing he's most excited about these days.\n\nReally\n\n\"I swear,\" Brolin says, taking a taste from a cup of cocktail sauce with his little finger.\n\nThere's not a tiny bit of bullshit to what you're saying\n\n\"All this stuff\u2014that people like the movies, that financially they're doing well\u2014is amazing, because it creates more choices. But there's something about starting from absolute scratch, creating something, and having people react to it.\"\n\nDoes it bug you, I ask, that the notion that you've been doing nothing for twenty years\u2014the idea that you've gone from zero to sixty\u2014is such a big part of the narrative of your comeback\n\n\"I didn't feel like nothing for twenty years,\" Brolin says. \"I felt pretty good. My son's in his second year of college. I [was able to] pay for that. He's doing well, and so are my daughters, and everybody's good, man, everybody's been happy. So, no. Zero No. Fifty to eighty Sure. Fifty to eighty I can deal with. Zero to one hundred, no.\"\n\nWatching other actors succeed, Brolin says, \"I never got bitter. I didn't feel like, 'Why isn't that me' No. There were\u2026\"\n\nHere there is a long, wordchoosing pause.\n\n\"There were\u2026\"\n\nAnother pause here, an even longer one, a patch of windblown conversational Mojave. Brolin looks off into the middle distance, at a blue clapboard wall. A fly walks on his hair.\n\n\"There were moments when I wanted to be alone,\" he finally says. \"That's for sure. 'Cause I was surrounded by famous people. That was a little unnerving. At moments. But not because of their success. Because of the cosmetics of it. The celebrity of it.\"\n\nDo you mean\u2014\n\n\"I'm not gonna be clear,\" Brolin says. Then he sort of relents, with a sigh. \"I'm going through it right now. Diane\"\u2014who became a boxoffice draw earlier this decade, on the strength of movies like Unfaithful\u2014\"went through it. Suddenly, it becomes bigger than the work. And you're getting eighty phone calls in a day. And you wanna continue to be the person that you are by answering phone calls, like you did when you used to get five a day. It's much easier to call five people back than it is to call eighty people back.\"\n\nIf Brolin's having a hard time getting used to that ringing phone, maybe it's because he's come to enjoy the view from Hollywood's margins. He's had brushes with notoriety\u2014three years ago, Lane called the police during what Brolin says was a nonphysical argument, and he was carted off to jail. She never pressed charges. (\"It was embarrassing as hell,\" Brolin says. \"The reality of the situation was that we yelled too loud\u2014I yelled too loud\u2014and she said, 'Fuck you. You wanna scream at me Guess what I can do.' Which I respect about Diane, fully. Fully. She's a tough girl. And I'm organically and lovingly frightened of my wife.\") But mostly, he's operated in a vacuum, out of the papers, seldom airkissing other actors (\"See you at Koi,\" he smirks. \"See you at Nobu\"), and it has shaped his sense of self.\n\nEven the stories he does tell about hanging out with famous people tend to emphasize his outsider status. A few years ago, Brolin had dinner at Marlon Brando's house. He sat quiet most of the night, he says, watching other actors ask genuflecting questions about the craft of acting, watching Brando hold hands with a woman he'd met on the Internet and fumble through war stories. (\" 'I was working with, um, what's her name, um\u2014ahh, shit, what's her name' We're all sitting there, on the edge of our seats. 'Y'know, she's got the hair, and\u2014shit, what's her name She was in the car\u2014uh, when\u2014Kazan,' and we go, Streetcar 'Oh\u2014Vivien Leigh! Vivien Leigh.' \")\n\nThere had been a mud slide on the PCH that day. Brando had gotten out of his car to help somebody. \"And as they were backing their car out of the mud, it hit him. Cut him a little bit, around his hip. There was a certain Scientologist at the house,\" Brolin says, \"who had just reached another level of the Scientology grid. And I watched him use those newfound powers, um, on Brando's leg. It was pretty amazing to me, man. However wary or cynical I may be.\"\n\n He laughs.\n\n\"There was one part of me that was like, 'Oh, come on.' But there was another, more real part of me that was like, 'I cannot deny that something good is happening here.' \"\n\n\"GOD IT'D BE NICE to have a motorcycle right now, man,\" Brolin says.\n\nWe're back in the truck now, heading out toward the county line, where the terrain across the highway from the water turns Planet of the Apes\u2013ish. It's never discussed, but from here we'll go no farther. We'll head back to the city\u2014our getaway is an illusion, and Brolin's got a thing to do in Palm Springs later. He's still not totally comfortable in Los Angeles. He wants to buy another ranch. \"I have to have the escape. It's not like, 'Oh, it gets me back to who I really am'\u2014that has nothing to do with it. I just like the country.\"\n\nI ask him how he got through the lean years\u2014whether it was a blow to his ego that his leadingman career didn't shape up the way he might have expected it to.\n\n\"I just knew that things were going to be okay,\" he says. \"I knew that I always had a choice. I'm not interested in just lying down and being happy forever. It's the fluctuation that's fun, man. That's what's fun about the stock market.\"\n\nWe should probably talk about the stock market.\n\nA couple of years ago, Brolin got heavy into daytrading. He'd always been good with numbers. He met a guy, a businessman, Brett Markinson. A friend of Skeet Ulrich's. Markinson taught him how to pick stocks using applied mathematics. Or at least I think that's what happened\u2014Brolin explained all this to me twice and lost me at Skeet Ulrich. What's important is that he and Markinson started a company together called MarketProbability.com, and that when Brolin talks about all this stuff\u2014quantum mathematics, indicators, \"playing the edge\"\u2014he sounds as excited as he does when he talks about acting. Really, he says, the skill sets involved aren't that different\u2014you're thinking about psychology, motivations, behavior.\n\n\"If you look at a graph,\" he says, \"it's just fear and greed. Don't watch the numbers. Watch the people.\"\n\nWe're poking along in hellish afternoon traffic now. \"It was a business thing,\" Brolin says of his adventures in the market. \"I felt like I was way behind, y'know But I love the creativity of it.\"\n\nTrading stocks also gave Brolin a livelihood apart from the movies. It's still the way he makes his money\u2014he didn't get paid that much for any of the movies he's in right now, he says\u2014and before things heated up for\u00A0 him, having another income allowed him to pick and choose acting gigs more carefully.\n\n\"That was always my motive,\" he says.\n\nHe stops. Two very young blond girls in a black Escalade one lane over are bopping frenetically and unselfconsciously to some music we can't hear.\n\n\"God, those girls are pretty,\" Brolin says. \"I mean, sort of. Look at that. They're just rockin' out. I love it. Just keep goin', man.\"\n\nWhen they see Brolin, they stop rocking and start giggling\u2014maybe they recognize him, maybe they're just embarrassed. Then the traffic jerks forward and they're gone.\n\n\"I see them back there, just going off,\" Brolin says. \"That's hilarious. So\u2014anyway. Ugh. I'm tired of talking about myself. You start to get a buzz in your head. That's when I know.\"\n\nBACK IN THE CITY NOW, and Brolin's pointing out an apartment where his dad used to live, years ago, in a decrepit saltbox of a building called the Pacific Fontainebleau. \"Things weren't going so well,\" he says. \"Fluctuation. That's why\u2014this moment's nice and all that, but you never know. My dad was living there. Happily.\"\n\nWe talk for a minute about the possibility of a Goonies sequel. He's heard Sean Astin's been telling people the movie's a go. Brolin only wants to do it if he can take it really dark\u2014play Brand Walsh again as a homeless alcoholic or a paralyzed braininjury victim. He can joke about that movie now, because things have fluctuated. This feels good. Scorsese's calling. Brolin's in another place.\n\n\"It's like the dog, man,\" Brolin says. \"The dog was really cute when we first got him. He was fluffy and pretty. And soft. And then he got older, and the hair got all coarse, and the lower jaw started to stick out. His teeth started to go in every direction.\"\n\nAll day, we've been talking about accepting what comes. How Brolin's found something, by relaxing into character roles, that had always eluded him on the leadingman track. I'm thinking about this as Milo climbs up between the front seats. Brolin grips Milo's muzzle, makes who'sagoodboy\n\n faces at him.\n\nHe's cooler now, I say.\n\n\"It's not that he's cooler now,\" Brolin says. \"What would be sad is if he changed, and I went, 'That's not what I bargained for. I wanted the goodlooking dog that was soft, that cuddled with me, and now he's not that, and I don't want him anymore.' He's changed, and that's cool. Look at 'im, man. He's so smart. He just makes me smile, every time.\"\n\nALEX PAPPADEMAS is a GQ staff writer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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