Josh Brolin Says Denis Villeneuve Should Win Oscar for ‘Dune 2’

There’s a moment in Josh Brolin’s raw, often self-effacing memoir “From Under the Truck” when the actor, shirtless, shoeless and wandering Manhattan’s Upper West Side with a crippling hangover, runs into Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s 1992, and Hoffman is freshly sober and embarking on a brilliant career on screen and stage, while Brolin is at one of his periodic lows, strung out from too much booze and too many drugs. The two men know each other vaguely — Brolin met Hoffman’s mother while she was doing plays upstate, and she connected them — but their lives are on different trajectories. The meeting is deeply unpleasant, all the more so because each man has taken the full measure of the other.

“There’s sweat all over my bare chest,” Brolin writes evocatively. “I look back at the subway stairwell, but he’s already gone. I know he’s sober. I am no longer. He knows that too. I could tell by the way he looked at me that I just didn’t get it.”

Thinking back on that exchange decades later fills Brolin with sadness. Hoffman died of a drug overdose in 2014, about a year after Brolin kicked his addiction. The two men had kept in touch, and Hoffman had talked Brolin into directing him in a stage version of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling.” Brolin knew Hoffman was using again.

“I said, ‘If you ever want to talk about any of this shit, let me know’. And he was dead a month and a half or two months later. It was terrible. This was a guy who became all our favorite actors. He was at the helm, man, he was the. He was the most talented of us all and lived his sobriety as a badge of honor. It meant a lot to him.”

Hoffman’s death is just one of many painful reminders in Brolin’s book about the dangers of living hard and fast. Brolin, who writes that he was “born to drink,” grew up the son of an alcoholic mother, Jane Cameron Agee, who took him bar-hopping when he was still a child. The book’s title refers to a drinking contest between his mother and her boyfriend that Brolin witnessed as a teenager. It ended after 15 rounds; the boyfriend was later discovered collapsed under a truck, his legs sticking out from under the vehicle.

And Brolin was his mother’s son in other ways. He didn’t just start drinking at a dangerously young age. He started smoking pot when he was 9 and tried LSD at 13. Later there would be nine stints in prison, countless bar fights and a stabbing in Costa Rica. Brolin admits he’s lucky to be alive.

“I feel so lucky because I had so many friends who died,” he says. “I don’t have survivor’s guilt, but I do feel a sense of responsibility to live my life to the fullest. I wasn’t one of those people where I didn’t know what was happening when I drank. I didn’t black out. I chose to drink, and I did some horrible things after making that choice. I was willing to endure those horrible things to have an identity. Because without alcohol, I didn’t feel like I was a full person.”

But things have changed. Brolin hasn’t had a drink in 11 years, and finally decided to quit after he showed up smelling of booze to his grandmother’s deathbed.

“I had a moment where she was smiling at me and I was like, ‘How dare I?'” says Brolin. “It made me realize that I had everything on my watch and yet I screw it up. And that was it. I like the clarity that comes with sobriety. Maybe it’s an influence, but I like the rebellion of saying, ‘OK, I lived 45 years of that life. Now I have to live another 45 years without drinking.”

Even when drinking too much, Brolin gave one compelling performance after another. He broke into the mainstream with his turn as a soft-spoken cowboy in “No Country for Old Men,” then followed up playing heavy, manly men and the 43rd president in the likes of “True Grit,” “Milk” and “W.” But now that he’s sober, Brolin thinks he’s become a better actor. More present, more disciplined, more willing to take risks.

“It’s not because I didn’t do a good job,” he says. “I was very professional when I was acting. I didn’t show up very drunk at work. I did once in a while. But now that I’m sober, I’ve discovered different levels of the things I do.”

He is also more confident. He recently took a job on Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” a “Knives Out” sequel that boasts crackling dialogue.

“I read it and I thought, ‘This is so lofty,'” he says. “This writing is superb. And I was scared. I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough to do this. I don’t know if I can portray all these subtleties in a way that’s organic and authentic .’ But I prepared a lot and got ready for it. It would have looked very different if I had been drinking. I don’t know if I could have done it.”

“From Under the Truck” is not a conventional celebrity memoir. It’s looser, wilder, more poetic. The book moves back and forth in time, mixing memories of growing up on a ranch in Paso Robles, California, with her wild mother and famous father, “The Amityville Horror” star James Brolin, with scenes from the sets of “The Goonies” and “Inherent Vice.” Instead of airbrushed anecdotes about a life in the limelight, Brolin shares stories of masturbating using hotel pillows or drunkenly insulting Robert De Niro at an awards luncheon.

“The book was a living, breathing thing that I tried not to get in the way of,” says Brolin. “Is it the most accessible? No. But I was very open and held myself to a certain standard that I tried to stay true to.”

When he recorded the Audible version of “From Under the Truck,” Brolin began to panic. Had he gone too far?

“I was halfway through it and I was like, ‘Oh, shit. What did I do?'” he says. “I would burn any evidence that this thing ever existed. And it lasted for about a month. But after I went on this shame spiral, I decided to put all that aside. I realized that this book is 1,000% what it wanted and needed to be.”

Despite the setbacks and hardships he has endured, Brolin has undeniably traveled in some rarefied circles. His stepmother is, after all, Barbra Streisand. It was at one of Streisand’s dinner parties that Brolin observed John Travolta using Scientology techniques to “heal” Marlon Brando’s injured leg.

“It was supposed to be a joke, but it turned out to be this amazing collective experience that I got to witness from a distance,” Brolin says. “At the time I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Now I look back on it and say, ‘That was such a sweet moment.’ Scientology has nothing to do with it. I got to see someone take care of someone else in this thoughtful way. It’s funny how your perspective can change.”

Brolin hasn’t softened his view that the Oscars blew it when they failed to nominate his “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve for the 2021 sci-fi epic. This year, Villeneuve is back in the running to oversee “Dune: Part Two,” the rare sequel that received better reviews than the original. Brolin plays Gurney Halleck, a mentor to Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides.

“If he doesn’t get nominated this year, I’ll stop acting,” Brolin says. “It was a better film than the first. When I saw it, it felt like my brain had been ripped open. It’s masterful, and Denis is one of our master filmmakers. If the Oscars have any meaning, they recognize him.”