Josh Brolin can’t be broken

Once in a while, Brolin and wife Diane leave the kids — his college sophomore son and teenage daughter from his prior marriage to actress Alice Adair, and Lane’s 14-year-old daughter from her prior marriage — and do the full, five-star-spa deal in Mexico. But he has to be honest: “The last really expensive trip we took was so uncomfortable. It’s so lazy. I want somebody to give me a great $30 massage as opposed to a bad $265 massage.” Preferably one administered minus the tinnitus of New Age music. “And don’t talk to me! Don’t talk to me! I don’t want anyone to be spiritual with me. I just want somebody to jump on my (stuff) and make me feel like a noodle.” Suddenly, a piece of Brolin’s front tooth cracks off on a hard piece of bacon. “Man, this (stuff) always happens to me.” As a kid, Brolin was studding a horse on the family ranch in Paso Robles, Calif., when his front teeth got kicked out.

Another mishap almost cost Brolin the Llewelyn gig. Two weeks before rehearsals, he flew over the handlebars of his Ducati motorcycle and snapped his collarbone in half. His lawyer informed him he was obliged to say something. Brolin copped only to a hairline fracture. Luckily, his character gets shot in the right shoulder early on in the film, and is entitled to look like he’s been run over. But there is still that scene where he must swim some rapids with a hungry pit bull in pursuit — a painful action sequence most definitely not CGI’d into the footage. “Long story short, the lying helped,” he rationalizes. “Most people lie most of the time.” Brolin’s no pessimist, just a realist with a Ph.D. in human nature. “It’s probably a bit of a power trip when you befriend somebody enough that they trust you to tell you things,” he says. And he will tell you things. And get you to tell him things. Researching Llewelyn’s Texas accent, he’d randomly call folks in hotels and stores with his tape recorder running. “You’re from the area? What’s fun to do there?” he’d say, pretending to be a tourist.

Off the set, Bardem put away Chigurh’s slaughterhouse stun gun — a murder weapon as memorably freaky as a medieval mace — and bonded with Brolin like a brother as the two actors puzzled together over the Coens’ way of doing business. “For the first two weeks, Javier and I were flipping out,” says Brolin. “There were no compliments. Zero compliments. Like, ‘These guys (friggin') hate us. We’re going to be fired.’?” (Later, “Josh was calling around the set tricking people, doing Javier’s voice,” says Kelly Macdonald.)

“Your feet look sunburned,” says Brolin after a few hours, looking for his sneakers. Ours would not be a never-ending hashing out, much as it’s clear he’s a talker. Long story short: The airport awaits.

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