Josh Brolin can’t be broken

By Phoebe Eaton

updated 5:03 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2007

There’s a scene — one of several — from “No Country for Old Men,” the new Coen Brothers movie adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, which will be obsessively taken apart and reassembled for years to come. A girl by a pool. Some beers. A proposition. Sure, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is married and, yes, his wife is on her way into town. But maybe he’ll join this girl with her cold beers and big heart — so long as there’s no horsing around. What happens next is intensely important and yet maddeningly vague. And it all happens off-screen.

With “No Country” about to arrive in theaters, Brolin is sitting by the pool at the Chateau Marmont. Soon he’ll be driving out to the airport to pick up his wife, actress Diane Lane, who’s been marooned on location in Toronto and North Carolina these past six months. But that’s a few hours from now. He removes the you-lookin’-at-me? shades and kicks off his black Converse All Stars. “I’m so ecstatic to get to know my wife again,” Brolin begins. “I just want to sit there and look at her.” His big, suntanned hands in the air, he squeezes something soft and curvy from memory.

Neither of us is booked in at the Chateau. Truth is, we have sneaked out here — Brolin has never played it safe, so why start now? He lights up the first in a series of Winstons. “Young Nolte” is how the 39-year-old actor is presently known in Hollywood. Smug, sick, and twisted are becoming an on-screen sideline: A believably bisexual federal agent in David O. Russell’s “Flirting With Disaster.” A self-satisfied dentist in Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda.” A mad doctor in the Robert Rodriguez half of “Grindhouse,” a character who seems like he’s on his 15th coffee and drunk at the same time. Even so, it’s taken awhile to gain momentum with such blue-chip directors, and a year ago Brolin was forced to sell his farm in Northern California and become a serious day trader. “That’s how I earn the majority of my money,” he says, “so I don’t have to do roles I don’t want to.” He doesn’t usually tell people about his convoluted stock-picking system. “It’s all about patterns. If you look at the graph after a while, all you see is fear and greed. All stocks are fear and greed. It’s people.”

But now, with his career overheating, he’s shopping for a replacement farm. Currently, he’s costar as a corrupt cop with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster.” He shows up as a cop again in Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah.” But first comes Llewelyn Moss, tripping over a heap of dead Mexicans and a suitcase padded with hundreds out in the Texas desert after a drug deal gone to hell. Llewelyn, for all his good intentions, finds himself being hunted by a creep named Chigurh — Javier Bardem as a flesh-and-blood Terminator with a ridiculous Monkees mop-top. Llewelyn’s wife (Kelly Macdonald) and the sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) worry after him as the chase jerks its way through sad, shag-carpeted motels.

Video   The actors of ‘No Country for Old Men’ Nov. 9: Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem talk to TODAY’s Natalie Morales about starring in the new thriller directed by the Coen brothers. Today Show Entertainment

Brolin spent most childhood vacations checked into motels — a world away from this patio, where he is now mocking the fries that have become “frites” on the menu before settling on a Sam Adams on draft. Hotel-motel living gets him talking about his mother, Jane, a former casting assistant who dated Clint Eastwood and then married actor James Brolin after an 11-day courtship. Jane was afraid to fly and logged up to 60,000 miles a year behind the wheel, until one terrible night in 1995 when her Chevy Suburban sped into a tree. “She was an amazing character,” says Brolin affectionately. “A big drinker. A riot, about that tall” — his palm hangs heavy in the air at sternum level — “and 90 pounds. She would find the biggest guy in the bar and wear him down and then probably end up sleeping with him.”

Brolin likes women who come with opinions. He has this in common with his father, who divorced Jane in 1987 and has been married to Barbra Streisand for nearly a decade. “Barbra’s no bullshit, and she has probably no filter — which I really appreciate in women,” says Brolin the younger. “My wife is like that, and my mother was like that.”

At 13, Brolin enrolled in psychoanalysis, which didn’t exactly roadblock the mohawk, tattoos, or Dead Kennedys shows in the years that followed. “I had a shrink who tried to turn me in at one point,” he casually remarks. For what? “For whatever,” comes the nonanswer. Brolin eventually bailed when somebody wanted to put him on pills: “The point was supposed to be a never-ending hashing out. That was the point.” Recently he went on “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” his system bushwhacked by Prednisone prescribed for a shoulder injury. “That stuff just drives you insane. It was torture.”

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