Josh Brolin
speaker
488 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Josh Brolin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
who's been really wonderful. And he didn't suggest a lot during the writing. I thought there was going to be this whole, you need to change this and flip this into this. And there wasn't. But one suggestion he did make, because I wrote the story about how I had gotten into a thing with my wife at the time.
And I was going down Columbus Avenue with just pants on, no shoes, no shirt, kind of out of my mind. And I looked over and there was this guy sitting at this cafe and it turned out to be Nick Nolte, who I recognized. He had no reason to recognize me. Like Monica, he hadn't seen Goonies. Yeah, exactly. It was like Nick and Monica.
But I remember a slight smile on his face and it was almost like, get ready, kid. Wow. Like it gets way gnarlier than this.
I saw my future and he saw his past or whatever. Whatever it was. So my editor said, is there a follow-up to that? And I go, there's actually several follow-ups to that. And then I chose the Nightwatch story where I'm cutting off my thumb. Part of the reason that I chose that, it was because this guy,
who hadn't gone anywhere for a long time, had these moments during that 22 years, Nightwatch or Flirting with Disaster, where it could have been a big hit and then it wasn't necessarily. Flirting with Disaster was a really revered and is still a revered movie.
but not a lot of people have seen it. Have you ever seen flirting?
Alan Alda, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Patty Arquette, Patricia Arquette, Ben Stiller, Taya Leone, Richard Jenkins. Richard Jenkins kind of steals it. He's your lover in the movie. He's my lover. He's my lover in the movie. And that was a moment, you know, it was like, I'm fucking acting with Nick Nolte.
And when you're looking in somebody's eyes and you don't see them. And that's whether it be the book, whether it be acting, even though I didn't grow up in Hollywood, my dad was an actor. There was a celebrity thing in it because he went from total unknown to Marcus Welby, MD, which was basically like the friends of its time. So there was all this attention and how he dealt with that attention.
There was a lot of irritability and a lot of confusion. And, you know, you have to go do this and you have to be this and you have to present your wife. It was not great. Didn't come natural to him. So there was nothing about it in that way that was attractive to me.
But behaviorally, and I think if you go back into this book, you go, oh, it was so behaviorally chaotic for me as a kid or my brother as a kid that, of course, I would be obsessed with why people do what they do. And what a great way to explore that in acting. That was the toehold for you. That was it. Yeah, yeah.
That's exactly what it is. It's like, would you become a psychologist just to be around people who are constantly talking about this thing that is endlessly interesting to me or experientially be inside of it? And then you're with Nick Nolte and you're like, this is fucking crazy. Nick ended up saving my life later. There was a whole relationship. You ping ponged, yeah?
Well, he's a ping pongy kind of guy.
Almost impossible to believe stories about him. I mean, literally walk into his house and you go, Nick, are you there? And he'd go. And you go, I guess he's here, you know, and then you go in the back room. Is he like an armchair chemist? He's like growing things. No, that's what I mean.
So you'd go in the back room or whatever past the living room and he'd be sitting there looking into a microscope and studying his blood. He liked six band-aids on his arm. And you go, hey man. And by the way, not on drugs. Not. No. Sober. OK, but he has also partaken in drugs.
scheme is well there was the pyramid scheme of the 70s what was that and it was the beginning it was the first one and what you do is if you have the ability to kind of whether you'd say manipulate but she was so good at cold calling people and saying hey if you give five thousand dollars to this pyramid scheme so if you have eight people on the bottom that works itself to six people four people two people one person and then once you get more people on the bottom you get
whatever money has been accumulated in that pyramid. And then you start a new pyramid. She would have 20 pyramids going at once. She could call 100, 200 people a day and get people involved. So she was getting that money one bag after another. Dumping bags of money on the table. She would come in with literally grocery bags full of money and then she'd dump it. I can see it right now.
It was right on the side of her bed and she'd dump it and she'd say, count. So I counted, I count 50 grand. And then at some point she was put on a hit list. Ultimately, she found out she was the third person on the list. And the first two people had not been killed, but had been severely beaten.
And those are the people who didn't get their money back.
And so I knew it was around there somewhere. And when you're a 13 year old kid, you're not even 13, 12 year old kid who has this penchant for addictions that you don't even know about yet. And then you're taking each piece of furniture saying there's got to be a hollow spot in the floor or whatever. And then finally hearing that chunk or a piece of wood goes and falls out. And you're like, yes.
And I paid her back. After I did Goonies, I gave her a check for six grand and she didn't know what it was for. She didn't know it was gone because she had money coming in and out all the time.
Showing 101–120 of 488 · page 6 of 25
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