Josh Brolin – Fear is the Mind Killer

How did Josh Brolin build one of Hollywood’s coolest careers? By finding ‘fuck it’ mode.

- By Jesse Will

Josh Brolin holds his laptop askew off the balcony of his room above the plaza near La Fonda, an old adobe-walled hotel in Santa Fe. In the Zoom window on my computer screen, tourists amble around in the late Saturday afternoon light below the Gothic Revival spires of the Loretto Chapel. Brolin, in his scraggy-timbered voice, tells me he’s spent the last hour in one of its pews. He says he’s just been sitting. Not praying. Not meditating. Just sitting.

“I’m not particularly religious,” says Brolin. “I’m just tired. Man, things get weird when you get tired.”

Brolin says he worked all night and is in the last week of a seven-month shoot where he’s playing a Wyoming rancher on Outer Range, a mystery series set to premier next spring on Amazon.

Down at the church, he says he’s gone unnoticed. This is not uncommon. Despite Brolin’s very recognizable look—a topographic map of lines between his temples, a head that he’s described as an “oversized vegetable” and a body detailed in one movie as having “Flintstone proportions”—he somehow manages, most of the time, to evade getting ID’d.

This seems difficult to fathom. In 2018 and 2019, movies Brolin starred in made a combined $5.7 billion worldwide, including Avengers: Endgame, where the actor completed the character arc of Thanos, the would-be destroyer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.