By Variety | Created at 2024-11-19 17:52:02 | Updated at 2024-11-26 02:04:55
6 days ago
Josh Brolin’s new memoir, “From Under the Truck,” isn’t a typical celebrity autobiography.
For one thing, it’s told in non-linear fashion, skittering between reflections in recent years to his childhood to various points in his long and eventful career, from his breakthrough in “The Goonies” to adult milestones like “No Country for Old Men” and “Milk.” What’s more, the book is strikingly candid about Brolin’s missteps and his high points, including discussion of what has been a decades-long struggle with substance abuse and charmingly rendered gossip about his fellow celebrities. Brolin also returns, frequently, to the subject of his challenging upbringing. Here are four takeaways from Brolin’s “From Under the Truck.”
Turbulent years: “I was born to drink,” Brolin writes early in the book. “I was birthed to drink.” His mother, Jane Agee Cameron, he writes, was a heavy drinker who helped set his understanding of what adult life would be like. “My mother drank exactly like I did, and I was raised to be a man and drink like the male equivalent of my mother,” he goes on. Later in the book, he describes life on the set of “No Country for Old Men,” where he’s a regular at the bars in town to the extent that a crew member distributes T-shirts with the slogan “I BLAME JOSH BROLIN” and “a photo of my drunk face someone had taken during one of those weekends of debauchery — wearing a cowboy hat and a big, dumbass smile.” On set, he describes his reflection on his mother, and the chaos she left in her wake, after waking up just before noon: “I think of my mother and how she held that .22 rifle on her boyfriend because she didn’t want him to leave.”
Perhaps the book’s most moving passage, though, is a scene at the New York Film Critics Circle, where Brolin won the 2008 award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in “Milk.” (He would be nominated for the Oscar that year, which he lost to the late Heath Ledger for “The Dark Knight.”) Brolin describes sitting in a hotel lounge before accepting his award, getting drunk on wine to try to push through a hangover. “The wine intensified my exhaustion, and yet the alcohol always won and brought back that warrior gasoline. Be a fucking warrior, the wine whispered to me.”
Brolin inadvertently insults Robert de Niro before heading to the awards ceremony, perhaps the biggest moment of his career. “The dude from ‘The Goonies’ had made good,” Brolin realizes, but he sabotages himself by delivering a profane and rude speech excoriating his perceived haters. “Words like motherfucker and piece of shit rolled off my tongue and onto a growing din of shock and disgust,” Brolin recalls. After returning to his seat, Brolin meets his castmate Sean Penn’s eyes: “Sean smiled a friendly smile, as your brother would while you’re being wheeled back into a traumatic surgery.”
Shooting “The Goonies” and “No Country”: The two films Brolin spends the most time recalling are his first film and the one that revived his adult career. “The Goonies” gives rise to sweet and somewhat melancholy reflections on staying in an Oregon motor inn with the rest of the young cast and getting encouragement from producer Steven Spielberg (“He smiled a little bit once. He told me to keep loose. I’ll remember that.”) The “No Country” shoot is a more raucous affair, marked both by physical setbacks — among them a broken collarbone suffered in a Los Angeles car crash. (Brolin is allowing the injury to “heal naturally” without setting it, and is relieved that the fact that his “No Country” character suffers a shoulder injury makes him, still, an apt fit for the part.)
While shooting the Coens’ film, Brolin becomes fast friends with Joel Coen, with whom he gossips about their careers and “about how Fran [Coen’s wife Frances McDormand] won’t do press”; his relationship with costar Tommy Lee Jones is more arm’s length, although Brolin regards him with admiration. “He’s a cowboy the best he can be,” Brolin writes, “the most cowboy I’ve ever seen on film.”
Sustaining friendships: Brolin writes sometimes allusively about the many, many A-listers he’s met over his career, including Joaquin Phoenix, with whom he gets beers after wrapping “Inherent Vice” (about Phoenix winning an Oscar for “Joker,” he writes, “wow, how ironic: being a famous actor playing someone who is unseen and almost invisible and getting more famous for it), and an unnamed actor-director, whom Brolin insults while blackout drunk at the Chateau Marmont before attempting, unsuccessfully, to make amends through the director’s agent.
Other relationships, though, are more durable. Oliver Stone, who directed Brolin as George W. Bush in “W.,” looms large enough to get a special section recapping what may be a heightened version of a strange meeting about the role. (Says Stone: “You’ve been through a lot. I can tell. (pause) I meditate.” And Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the novel on which “No Country for Old Men” is based, is a close friend until his 2023 death; after that, Brolin visits his home looking at his belongings. He regrets having asked McCarthy, whom he revered, to sign his typewriter: “It was an ask that trivialized that friendship. Let collectors pay top dollar for some dirty underwear that might hold the atoms of genius in it.”
Health and family setbacks and triumphs: Brolin is unsparing in describing the challenges he and his family have faced; in one harrowing chapter, he’s stabbed by a stranger in Costa Rica in 2013; he believes the fact that the knife hit his navel stopped it from hitting any vital organs. And in 2006, he writes, he briefly believed his son Trevor might have died after he went missing; it turns out he had just been briefly hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.
But Brolin is every bit as frank about his love for his family; in his stepmother Barbra Streisand, for instance, he sees a toughness and directness, including a rare willingness to call him on his substance use. “I’ve always liked tough women,” he writes. “It’s an Oedipal thing.” And he writes with gratitude both about his challenging mother, whose portrait he keeps on his desk, and his children: “I’m grateful,” he says, “that everyone seems to be exactly where they’re supposed to be, even my mother on the desk here at the house.”
“From Under the Truck” is on sale now.
