Josh Brolin began keeping journals when he was seven or eight. By the time he came to write his 2024 memoir, From Under the Truck, he had about 90 of them. The notebooks gave him a place to be completely honest.
His friends knew the tougher version of him, and Brolin thought they would mock what he wrote. “Then there was this softer, more imaginative person that didn’t feel like he had the space to live that outwardly,” he said in 2024.
As he got older, two sides of Brolin met in his acting. From Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men to Gurney Halleck in Dune, he has specialised in men with deep emotions who say little and carry themselves as though they can handle almost anything.
It is the kind of man Tony Soprano has in mind when he asks in The Sopranos: “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper – the strong, silent type?” Brolin is probably the closest Hollywood has now. His roles work because silence never means an absence of feeling.
In Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, Brolin plays Bangley, a military survivalist who shares an abandoned airfield with Hig, played by Jacob Elordi, after a pandemic has destroyed much of civilisation. Bangley treats every day as though the war never ended. He rarely tells Hig what he means to him, although almost everything he does is aimed at keeping him alive.
Bangley begins as an old-fashioned masculine figure and slowly changes. “I like the idea of a positive masculine framing,” Brolin tells The National. “Because what is that right now? In this era?”
Brolin describes Bangley as “covered with this super masculinity”, using his military training and capacity for violence to take care of the more sensitive Hig. He points to a small moment when Bangley can no longer hide how much that bond matters.
“When Hig takes off, you see him start to break down,” Brolin says. “He’s not used to it. Little moments, like even putting his hand on the window of the aeroplane, speak volumes.”
Over the course of the film, survival starts to mean more to Bangley than keeping enemies outside the perimeter. He begins to accept other people and the possibility of a life without another fight always coming.
In From Under the Truck, Brolin writes about being pushed to become tough from childhood. He told GQ in 2024 that the book was partly about how hard parents expect children to become. His own children, he said, should not have to endure what he did.
Brolin is father to three daughters and a son. “I think I’m surrounded by women. I wrote a book a year and a half ago that’s very mother-saturated,” he says. “I had a very strong mother, and I have a lot of women who have masculine energy.”
His family has also joined him on location. Brolin describes a six-week stay together in the Abu Dhabi desert while working on the Dune films as “one of the most glorious” periods of his life.
Brolin may still appear to be the strong, silent type, but now it's something he's conscious of – and something he uses to deliberately undermine. “I like the idea, as somebody as primitive as I look, of allowing emotions to show through,” he says.
He has little patience for old rules about how men are supposed to behave. “I hate this idea of masculinity – women talk and men don’t, and we like our man caves, and we like things a certain way.”
“I read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,” he says. “Apparently, I’m from Venus. And that’s OK with me. Especially at 58, you’re like, ‘I have nothing to prove any more.’ I’m a little more comfortable just being the way I am.”
The Dog Stars releases in UAE cinemas on August 27
