He’s not trading at the moment, he says. Times are tough. Even so, he estimates that he still makes more money from stocks than he does from acting.
“I like to do it,” he explains. “It enables me to offset movies that I might otherwise have had to do for the money. Plus it stopped me gambling. I used to go to Vegas and play the horses, and then I realized how ridiculous that was. There is no winning in gambling, but there is on the stock market. Maybe it’s not trillions of dollars. Maybe it’s just five bucks for lunch. Who cares, it’s all good.”
In the wake of the 2000 election fiasco, Bush hurried to claim victory, taking to the stage to boast that they (the great, anonymous They) had always “misunderestimated” him. They might have misunderestimated Josh Brolin, too. Certainly he has always been a better actor than he was given credit for — yet only now is he getting the chance to prove it.
“You know, that’s the funny thing about Josh,” says British actor Toby Jones, who plays Karl Rove in the film. “It was such a difficult and demanding role, playing Bush, and yet I was impressed by how lightly it sat on him. When you get to a certain age you are able to get a sense of perspective on the whole business of making a film. I think this came at the right time for him.”
Brolin would go along with that. If success had struck any earlier, he says, he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Now it’s different. His three kids are almost grown up, and he is happily settled with the actor Diane Lane. He has known triumph and flirted with disaster and he has learned to treat them just the same. “I hope I can respect the moment,” he says. “I’ve been given an amazing opportunity and I could not be more grateful. But I also know that all this will eventually die off. It’s not real. It will go away and then you’ll go away and then, I don’t know, I’ll be left sitting in some English hotel room.”
In the meantime, here we are. “Yeah, I know why you’re here, man,” he says, laughing. “This is a fun story for you guys in the media, because it’s like a discovery. The old man.” He rolls his eyes. “All of a sudden they care about the old man.”
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