I’m barely in my seat before Josh Brolin is reeling off the reasons why he almost said no to playing US President George W. Bush. First off, he is no fan of the sitting president. Second, he was wary of working with director Oliver Stone, who has a reputation as a loose cannon, “a leftist hammer.” And if that weren’t enough, he had to listen to Stone’s constant, clamoring insistence that Brolin actually had more in common with Bush than he cared to admit. “Oliver kept talking about the similarities between Bush and I, which really pissed me off. I don’t see them,” says Brolin. “I don’t understand it.”
But let’s look at the evidence. W tells the tale of a reckless, feckless playboy who follows his father into the family business, makes an ass of himself for a decade or two and then abruptly turns his life around on his 40th birthday. He is played by the eldest son of Hollywood mainstay James Brolin. Junior spent 20 years spinning his wheels in largely unremarkable movies before ascending to the A-list. By a happy chance, Josh Brolin turned 40 just weeks after signing on the dotted line.
There’s no denying he’s earned his spurs. In person, Brolin looks every inch the movie star; a toned, rangy alpha male who parries questions with an easy drawl that is one part good ole boy, one part stoner. And yet on screen there can be something low-key — even anonymous — about him. You might have caught him in his film debut as a teenage jock in The Goonies, or as the gay cop who licks Patricia Arquette’s armpit in Flirting With Disaster. More likely you first clocked him in No Country for Old Men, although even here his character was so deeply embedded in the warp and woof of the film that it was easy to overlook in favor of Javier Bardem or Tommy Lee Jones. “Yeah,” he says when I mention this. “But that’s a compliment in a roundabout way.”
W is different. Brolin’s performance is a showstopper, a firework display. It catches Bush’s hesitant vocal rhythms and fidgety physical tics with an accuracy that is rather eerie. Judged as a film, Stone’s movie is a bit of a Horlicks. Viewed as an acting masterclass, it’s endlessly entertaining. Brolin’s co-stars include Richard Dreyfuss as an implacable Dick Cheney, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld and Thandie Newton as the Uriah Heep-ish Condoleezza Rice. At one stage our merry band get hopelessly lost on the dirt tracks of Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, while plotting the war on Iraq.
I suggest that Bush is something of a construct himself — an East Coast aristocrat playing the part of the Texas cowboy. But Brolin is having none of it. “No,” he says. “He really is that guy. He didn’t grow up in the east, he grew up in Texas. That’s where his roots are, and I do think his intentions are pure. I think he’s surrounded by, you know, very, very ... I don’t want to say evil.”
Oh go on — say evil.
“I don’t want to say evil, even though I just said it. Let’s just say that they are people with massive agendas. But I don’t think this was the impact that he initially wanted to have on the world. I think he wanted to have a positive effect.”
Against the odds, he found himself admiring certain aspects of Bush’s personality: the way he battled his demons, the way he treats his family. Maybe that’s a hazard of the job. Maybe the longer you spend in someone’s skin, the more you come to identify with him. Or perhaps Stone is right when he says that there has always been a bit of Bush in Brolin and that the actor “no doubt shared many of the crises George Bush found himself up against.”
Brolin pulls a face. “Well, it sounds good, doesn’t it? I don’t know, maybe I’m completely denying it. Maybe Oliver knows me better than I know myself. My dad is an actor and I’m an actor. So yes, I guess there’s a cosmetic parallel. My dad’s more placid than I am — there’s another. My mother’s very strong, or was very strong [she died in 1995] — another similarity. What else? I grew up on a ranch, he grew up in Midland, Texas. He grew up around oil; I didn’t.” He throws up his hands. “I don’t know man, I’m running dry here.”
W filmed for two months in Shreveport, Louisiana, a conservative bulwark that did not take kindly to an influx of wealthy, liberal movie stars. On the last day of filming, Brolin and fellow actor Jeffrey Wright (aka Colin Powell) were arrested following an altercation at the local Stray Cat Bar. Wright was reportedly Tasered in the street, while Brolin found himself doused with pepper spray.
The actor explains that all this was the result of a verbal altercation, not a physical one. “But when you’re in a place like that, it’s about them wanting to teach a lesson to the Hollywood ‘poof squad,’ and it snowballed like nothing I’ve ever seen. There was incredible violence in reaction to zero violence. When I was in jail I could only think about what the average person has to go through — the person who has no power to go to the press or no money to hire a lawyer.”
Was he scared? “Well, it’s a scary prospect. When it started escalating I thought, ‘Is this the night when I get Tasered and have a heart attack?’ But I was more confused than scared. Confused and befuddled. I was looking around in total shock. Or I was trying to — I had Mace in my eyes at the time.”
When the story was reported, it initially seemed to support the perception of Brolin as a hell-raising Hollywood brat. And while I have no idea whether this impression has ever had any basis, it’s hard not to return to those fictional parallels. Stone’s film implies that Bush squandered his youth on wild living and then fell ass-backwards into politics because it provided the easiest option. Did Brolin — the son of the man who starred in Westworld and The Amityville Horror — do the same thing with acting?
He shoots me a withering look. “How to you fall into acting? It doesn’t happen. I was pursuing it in a major way.” He shrugs. “People assume it’s some nepotistic thing. If my father owned a studio then maybe he could get me work. But my father’s just like me, looking for the next job. The difference is that he got it right off the bat.
“He got very famous, very young, but I was knocking around for 25 years before anyone gave two shits about me.”
So what changed? Brolin freely admits he has made some bad movies in his time. But he was happy to wait. He rustled up rewarding roles in theater and eased his incipient financial pressures by trading on the stock market. These days he even runs a Web site called marketprobability.com that offers five to 10-day “stock baskets” based on historical trends and the current state of the market.
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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