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Personal Life:

Josh Brolin was born February 12, 1968

His first role was in the 1985 film The Goonies.

Brolin was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of Jane Cameron (Agee), a wildlife activist who was a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, and actor James Brolin.

Brolin was raised on a ranch in Templeton, California with little interest in his father’s acting career. His parents divorced when he was 16 years old.

In 1998 his father married his third wife, singer/actress Barbra Streisand.

Brolin became interested in acting after taking an Improv acting class in high school.


Career with the Coens’ :

Brolin has also worked with an array of great directors including Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, David O Russell, Paul Verhoeven, Gus Van Sant and Spike Lee, and with the Coen brothers several times.

The three films Josh Brolin has worked with the Coen Brothers has been, No Country for Old Men (2007) as Llewelyn Moss, True Grit (2010) as Tom Chaney, and Hail, Caesar! (2016) as Eddie Mannix.

Garret Dillahunt had auditioned five times for the part of Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men. Ethan Coen said: "With Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem having been cast, the third person had to be able to hold his weight with those two actors. That’s setting the bar pretty high. We saw everybody and we hadn’t met anybody we liked and whom we felt wouldn’t be something of a letdown coming from Tommy to Javier to person X.”

The Coens had initially declined to give Josh Brolin an audition so Josh Brolin asked director Robert Rodriguez to help him shoot an audition tape while Brolin was filming Planet Terror. With Quentin Tarantino directing, Rodriguez shot the tape with a $950,000 digital camera.

Brolin sent it to the Coens. Brolin said that at his audition their only remark about the video submission was: "Who did the lighting?"

He then did an audition and said "then they just hired me and said, ‘We really get a sense from you that you’re right for this part. So come up with something interesting.’”

Josh Brolin and the Coen Brothers relationship then grew and they discovered they all had the same type of humor. In an interview for the release of No Country for Old Men, he discussed the Coens’ directing style saying that the brothers “only really say what needs to be said. They don’t sit there as directors and manipulate you and go into page after page to try to get you to a certain place. They may come in and say one word or two words, so that was nice to be around in order to feed the other thing. ‘What should I do right now? I’ll just go watch Ethan go humming to himself and pacing. Maybe that’s what I should do, too.”

In another interview with Logan Hill of New York magazine, Brolin said, "We had a load of fun making it. Maybe it was because we both [Brolin and Javier Bardem] thought we'd be fired. With the Coens, there's zero compliments, really zero anything. No 'nice work.' Nothing. And then—I'm doing this scene with Woody Harrelson. Woody can't remember his lines, he stumbles his way through it, and then both Coens are like, 'Oh my God! Fantastic!'"

While doing press for Hail Caesar! The interviewer asked Josh Brolin what makes you clicked with the Coen brothers? He said, “Maybe the absurdity factor. I just really enjoy their sensibility, I get it. I don’t know why. You wouldn’t think, because we come from extremely different backgrounds, and charismatically we come from very different backgrounds. But I think, I just get it. What they chuckle at makes me chuckle.”

In that same interview he was asked:

When other actors have described working with them, they’ve said they’re like one mind in two bodies. Is that the feeling you have working with them?

“Yeah, but you have to understand I’ve done years of publicity on them. We all play up this thing - George does and I do - we all play up this thing about how weird and f*cking strange they are, and quiet, and all this stuff. But it’s really not. Like, Ethan said ‘I saw you on a talk show the other day when we were coming out with Hail, Caesar! and I felt so bad for you.’ Because there was a moment where I didn’t believe my own bullsh*t anymore. You tell the press things like ‘they’re really weird and they’re like one mind in two heads’ and [the press] are like, ‘one mind in two heads, that’s a good soundbite’, or whatever it is. You just lend yourself to it and you know you’re doing it. I just caught myself, in an interview in front of millions of people and I died in my own bullsh*t for a couple of seconds.

The truth of the matter is, they’re the most pleasant, collaborative, incredibly creative guys I’ve ever worked with. There’s nothing I would say no to. It could be horrendous and I’d still say yes. They could say ‘we’re going to do a Walt Disney story about pornography’, and I’d be like ‘great, let’s do it’. I don’t care. I just get it, it’s fun being with them. And it’s not necessarily fun, I’m not on the set laughing the whole time, but I very much appreciate their level of discomfort and what I think makes them great writers. That’s all they have you know. “

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