Josh Brolin Once Felt Acting Could Sometimes Be ‘Humiliating’
Actor Josh Brolin is a bit of a veteran in the film industry. But despite all of the years he’s been in Hollywood, Brolin confided that acting could still occasionally turn out embarrassing.
Josh Brolin can sometimes be an ‘insecure guy’ when it comes to his acting
Brolin has been a familiar name in Hollywood for a long time. His father, James Brolin, was already an actor. And when his son was a youth he already had a starring role in Richard Donner’s 1985 classic The Goonies. After a couple of movie roles, however, Brolin had fallen into a bit of a rut in his career.
In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Brolin opened up about how his career stalled for a moment in time. The actor was only being offered a particular type of role and wasn’t feeling all that fulfilled as an actor. This would eventually lead to him quitting the business altogether in his 20s before bouncing back. But even years after proving to many that he’s a capable of actor, Brolin still has his moments of self-doubt.
“I’m an insecure guy,” he said. “Skittish and scared. There’s this woman, Meryl Poster, who worked at Miramax. She told me later: ‘You and Benicio Del Toro were the worst auditioners we ever experienced. In all the thousands we saw. By far.'”
But Brolin was always willing to put in the necessary effort to improve his acting.
“Any actor I became was completely and totally learned from doing a lot of really, really bad acting. Which still happens, incidentally. Every time I shoot a film I have to feel my way into the part. I have to learn to do less. The more affectations I have, the more I can hide. The more free I feel because it’s not coming from me,” he said.
Josh Brolin once shared why acting can sometimes be ‘humiliating’
Brolin has no shortage of acclaimed movies in his filmography. Aside from The Goonies, No Country for Old Men and Sicario are just a few of the respected movies Brolin has starred in. But for as much as Brolin enjoys acting, he admitted that the art can sometimes be a bit humiliating. Often times, acting required a performer to be vulnerable, which wasn’t always easy.
“You’re revealing things, and you don’t know, given a scene, if you’re going to be able to do it,” Brolin once said according to NPR. “That’s always the question as an actor: Can I live up to what this person has written? There’s always a fear around that. I would love to feel an arrogance in saying, ‘I hope that the writing is as good as I’m going to be right now,’ but I’ve never felt that, I don’t think I’ll ever feel it.”
A part of Brolin’s feelings towards the matter came from occasionally being uncertain of his own acting abilities.
“There’s a nervousness and an embarrassment. It’s not an embarrassment like, ‘I’m going to look bad.’ It’s just an embarrassment of, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough to live up to this,'” he added.
Why Josh Brolin broke his vow to take a break from acting
Brolin recently made a promise to himself that he was going to take a bit of a hiatus from acting. But this changed when filmmaker Denis Villeneuve contacted him to do a movie. Brolin worked with Villeneuve once before on Sicario. Brolin was asked why he’d chosen to return for the Villeneuve film Dune during his visit on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
“Because it’s Denis Villeneuve,” Brolin answered simply.
And that was all the reason Brolin needed to return to films.
