Special Features
Josh Brolin: A Brilliant Talent Has Erupted
Greg Kaczynski |
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 Josh Brolin is in quite the enviable position amongst Hollywood actors these days. He’s one of those rare breeds of Hollywood actors, the kind that, after years of skimming under the radar, finds himself in a massive resurgence of popularity. After his film debut in the venerable The Goonies in 1985, Brolin was treading water in forgettable roles in forgettable films and television shows for nearly two decades. This all changed last year when Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino asked Brolin to portray Dr. Block in their horror double feature Grindhouse. After that, the Coen brothers asked him to star as Llewelyn Moss in the Academy Award-winning No Country for Old Men, and it was this role that threw Brolin back onto the scene. Suddenly he had street cred again and directors wanted to work with him. Since No Country Brolin’s worked with Ridley Scott (American Gangster), Paul Haggis (In the Valley of Elah), Oliver Stone (W.) and now Gus Van Sant in Milk, the story of the rise and murder of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay public official voted into office.
In Milk, Brolin plays Dan White, a fellow member of the San Francisco board of supervisors who, in a moment of frustration at the seeming failure of his own life, murders Harvey Milk (Sean Penn). In writing, White sounds like a fairly straightforward bad guy; he’s the guy who steals Milk’s thunder, the guy who goes against the grain and breaks everyone’s heart. But against all expectations, Brolin’s performance, along with Van Sant’s directing, makes the audience feel for Dan White. At the end of the film, it’s almost disappointing to not have an unquenchable rage at what White has done, but Brolin brings such sensitivity and dimension to his performance that he completely steals Penn’s thunder.
Brolin saunters into a conference room at the Regent Beverly Wilshire to speak with reporters, wearing a loose-fitting black shirt with the top button undone. He’s charming and polite, soft-spoken but assured, a gentleman, and he first tackles the question of how such a nice guy can play publicly disliked characters like White and George W. Bush with fairness.
 “I don’t hate them,” he explains. “I find them both sad and a little pathetic…I think I understand them.”
He says that the baggage that came with each of those characters was the reason he chose to play them. White was a no-brainer from the moment Brolin read the script, but playing Bush required some cajoling.
About W. he says, “I read the script and I felt that this was a very interesting challenge for an actor, and it’s not just about him in the last seven years, which I have very strong [views] about, politically.”
He went on to explain how the script humanized Bush, and how Milk did the same for Dan White.
“Are they totally to blame?” he asks.
Specifically about White he says, “You start to understand [the murder] was his only way to garner back any real power.”
 When asked if it’s possible he may have played Bush or White as “too human,” Brolin responds, “I think it’s a possibility. I also think it’s a possibility that Obama gets elected and people are frothing at the mouth with hatred. I don’t get it. I don’t agree with it. I played a child molester when I was in theater, where they wanted me to play it like Nicholson or something, and I just said I think it’s more interesting if I can get five mothers to want to fix me.”
That statement alone displays such fine thinking and technique that a good deal of modern actors ignore, and it’s this ability and wisdom that makes Brolin stand out from his peers: the ability to humanize and make such stark characters multifaceted and even empathetic. It’s a talent that he’s remarkably humble about: his manner says he’s just doing his job the best way he knows how, and for that, he’s all the more endearing.
He further details his method, describing a scene where Dan White confronts Milk (Sean Penn) at his birthday party. White is drunk and, as Brolin explains, this is the only time it ever crossed his mind that White may have been a latent homosexual, but, as he says, “Who cares?” He explains that he and Penn were ad-libbing through the scene. White was supposed to give Milk some booze for his birthday, but Brolin decided that was boring and switched up the scene so that he had been drinking the booze. Then, “Whatever resentment is brewing in there, and whatever comes out of that, comes out of that…and then there’s looks that I gave Sean that I’ll never forget that Sean was like, it was no longer acting. He was looking at me like, what’s happening? I stared at him for a long time and I don’t know if that came from the need to connect, whether that has a latency to it, or the resentment of wanting to be liked and knowing that he’s afraid of me, and there’s a complexity that comes out of that.”
 With this explanation, it occurs to me how amazing it is that Brolin worked in the industry for more than two decades and got so few substantial roles. The techniques he describes, bringing this tangible reality to his characters, is the kind of masterful strokes we know such actors as Penn for having and dealing in. So it is fitting that as Brolin rises above the lighter stuff he’s played in the past that he gets to take on one of his meatier roles with Penn. They’ve apparently known each other for years, since they were kids, and he describes Penn as the most gracious and giving actor around.
“That dude gets a bad rap,” he says.
Of course, Milk is not only a good film filled with amazing actors like Brolin, it’s also incredibly timely. With the recent passing of Proposition 8, the film echoes a time when a more discriminatory proposition was on the table: Proposition 6, one that would make it okay for outwardly gay educators to be let go from their jobs. In reference to 8, Brolin says that he was surprised it passed.
“It’s very interesting to me, and I don’t quite understand it,” he says. “I started looking into it…and then you start to find out that 70% of [minorities] voted yes on 8, and you realize the religious connection and the God-fearing thing.”
 He goes on to state how happy he is that people are out on the streets protesting.
“Like Howard’s End says, ‘Democracy comes from the bottom, not from the top,’ and I love that people are out there voicing their opinions.”
As to how he feels about the resurgence of his career, Brolin says he’s not too surprised, but admits to being “pleased, humbled, grateful…very grateful. I love working with the people I’ve been working with. It’s easier to work with these types. They love filmmaking, and it’s not about the ego or the status or the power struggles.”
He finishes off by adding that he has no idea what he’s going to do next. If the past year is any indication, though, I think we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of Brolin in the near future, and our entertainment will be all the better for it.
Milk is now playing in select theaters.
For more information, visit filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/milk.
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