How ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ ‘My Left Foot’ & ‘Saturday Night Fever’ Fueled ‘Outer Range’s Josh Brolin: The Film That Lit My Fuse

The son of a famous actor dad who swore he didn’t want to go into acting, Josh Brolin found his anti-thesp resolve get chipped away for the best possible reasons: film performances by the likes of Steve McQueen, John Travolta, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Daniel Day-Lewis. Cut to now. As he debuts the second season of the sci-fi Western hybrid series Outer Range, Brolin has been so good so long that you barely remember he’s the son of actor James Brolin, or even for his early role in The Goonies. Instead, Josh Brolin has become a compelling leading man in just about any genre. His recent Saturday Night Live hosting stint and films like Flirting with Disaster showed his comic chops; he’s played the hero in films from No Country For Old Men, the Dune trilogy, True Grit, Deadpool 2; and he’s gone the villain route as Thanos in The Avengers films, and the crooked cop in American Gangster. And he’s straddled the terrain somewhere in between in the Sicario films.

In a particularly engaging Fuse installment, Brolin explains how great acting wore down his resolve to do anything else, after watching how the ebbs and flows impacted his father. That all starts with a viewing of Steve McQueen in The Blob at age four, after which he resolved to never sit on a toilet again.