I'm one of the lucky ones

Dune and Avengers star Josh Brolin tells Patrick Smith about his wild years of fighting, drugs and alcohol, his relationship with fame, and appearing in the new Knives Out film

- Patrick Smith

When Josh Brolin was cast in Woody Allen's 2010 drama You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he wrote the director an email. Three pages long. The character needed a Serbian accent, he explained. A wheelchair, too. He laid out his reasoning assiduously. Allen's reply was just one word: “No.”

Brolin had always been drawn to the bells and whistles — prosthetics, limps, “extreme versions of character”. But over time, he learnt that less can be more - not just from that exchange with Allen, but also from an earlier role, his laconic Vietnam vet in the Coen brothers’ 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men. “When you're a lead in a film and have almost no dialogue, there has to be major inner dialogue going on,” the 57-year-old explains in his distinctive California rasp. “If you have something going on that’s dynamic inside, you don’t need a lot.” It allows people to lean forward, he suggests. “I always felt like I had to inundate, whereas now, I don’t generally feel I need to do that.”

In person, though, the square-jawed star of Sicario, Avengers and Dune is pure inundation. Not an ounce of reticence. We meet in Mayfair to chat about his role in the upcoming third instalment of Rian Johnson’s puzzle-box series Knives Out – Wake Up Dead Man. He’s all compact, coiled energy in a navy long-sleeve polo. Midway through our conversation, his costar Glenn Close bursts in, with her dog Pip in tow. Brolin grins and flexes his pecs for her. She feels them. They laugh.

His friend Imogen Poots, with whom he worked on the 2022 Amazon series