Cosmopolitan - August 1996 - Pg. 100
By Nancy Mills
redhotrightnow
Josh Brolin
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This gorgeous former Young Rider, sensationally seductive in the hit
Flirting With Disaster, is ready to ride his own shooting star in
Nightwatch!
"Look at me," Josh Brolin says, inviting inspection of his handsome
features, wavy brown hair, and muscular physique. "People think, Dumb
jock." He admits the handle is at least partly accurate, since he once was
a surfer dude and martial-arts expert. But this former Young Rider is also
a devoted father of two, rancher, and hot Hollywood actor.
How hot? Right after this interview he plans to shave off his goatee and
audition for a major role in the upcoming New Line Cinema film, Legalese.
Since playing a bisexual Federal agent to great comic effect in last
spring's popular Flirting With Disaster, Brolin seems able to do no wrong.
In September, he'll appear as a white-supremacist cop opposite Mario Van
Peebles in Showtime's controversial Gang in Blue, then in this fall's
psycological thriller Nightwatch, opposite Nick Nolte.
The twenty-seven-year-old actor is the son of James Brolin, who played the
righteous but bland leading men of Marcus Welby, M.D. and Hotel. Brolin
fils is eager not to imitate his father's long television career. "How
boring was that?" he asks, stabbing his smoked-salmon quesadilla at the
Revival Café in West Hollywood. "If I can't be respected as a good actor, I
want to do something else. I don't want just the jock roles."
Brolin knows because he's already tried them: five months on Private Eye
(1987), three years on The Young Riders (1989-92), and one month on
Winnetka Road (1994). "You get pigeonholed on TV," he gripes. "I couldn't
stay in this business for twenty years and do episodic television. Luckily,
once in a while a good director comes along and fights for me."
Flirting With Disaster's David O. Russell cast Brolin as part of a gay
couple who want a baby. Initially, the actor worried. "How am I going to
play this? Swishy? No. The lisp is not in gay men's genes. So I read a lot
of books, hung out at gay bars, and got over any macho ego I still had
left. It was a great opportunity for me to show what I'd been doing onstage
for six years [much of it at GeVa Theater in Rochester, New York]. People
realized, ‘Oh, he's kind of funny.'"
With the notable exception of Danish director Ole Bornedal, that is, who
cast Brolin as "an evil SOB, a very unhappy person" in Nightwatch, which
entangles a police inspector (Nolte), morgue attendant (Ewan McGregor), his
best friend (Brolin), and a serial killer. "My character creates as much
havoc as possible to see if he's as bad as he thinks he is," Brolin says.
"This guy is simply not nice."
Brolin has created some havoc of his own -- "Very rageful kinds of things,"
he say obliquely about the trouble he got into after his parents split up
in the early eighties. His behavior was troubling enough to land him in
jail, he admits, although he refuses to elaborate further, explaining, "I
don't want kinds reading about it. Now the only trouble I have with the
police involves speeding tickets. I have my wife call me on the car phone
and remind me to slow down."
There's another mystery: Brolin's "wife." He met former actress Deborah
Adair in 1987 on the set of Private Eye when he was nineteen. They married,
had two children (Trevor, seven, and Eden, three), divorced, and now live
happily unmarried together on a ninety-seven-acre ranch in Paso Robles,
about three hours north of Los Angeles.
"We have a couple of horses, some cows and sheep, a pond and a river we
swim in," Brolin says. "This is where I grew up, and after my mom passed
away last year, we moved back from New York. Along with inheriting the
ranch, I inheritted a pretty hefty mortgage, so any money I make goes into
it."
Brolin knows from financial insecurity. "I hated living in a big house one
year and a crummy house the next," he says, recalling the ups and downs of
his father's career. "Had my parents managed their money better, we'd have
had an easier time. But they lived it up."
After taking acting classes in high school, Brolin debuted in Goonies.
Following graduation, he headed to New York to study, he says, "because I
realized I wasn't much of an actor. I like being scared, and the thing that
scared me most was being onstage."
What he fears today is success. "I'm grateful for doing well in this
business, but I don't know how to deal with it," he says. "I'm happiest
when I'm with my children. After this audition, I'll go right up to the
ranch and stay there until I have to go to work." The way his career is
going, that probably won't be too long.
All text copyright Cosmopolitan, 1996
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