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There’s a moment in Josh Brolin‘s raw, frequently self-eviscerating memoir “From Under the Truck” where the actor, shirtless, shoeless and wandering around 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 his brilliant career on screen and stage, while Brolin is at one of his periodic low points, strung out from too much booze and too many drugs. The two men know each other vaguely — Brolin met Hoffman’s mother while doing plays upstate, and she connected them — but their lives are on different trajectories. The encounter is deeply uncomfortable, all the more so because each man has taken the full measure of the other.
“There is 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’m not anymore. He knows that too. I could tell by the way he looked at me as someone who just didn’t get it.”
Thinking back on that exchange decades later fills Brolin with sadness. Hoffman died of a drug overdose in 2014, roughly a year after Brolin kicked his addictions. The two men had stayed in touch, and Hoffman had been talking to Brolin about directing him in a stage version of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling.” Brolin knew that Hoffman was using again.
“I said, ‘If you want to talk about any of this shit ever, let me know.’ And he was dead a month and a half or two months later. It was horrible. This was a guy who became all of our favorite actor. He was at the helm, man. He was it. He was the most talented of all of us 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 perils of living hard and fast. Brolin, who writes that he was “birthed to drink,” grew up the son of an alcoholic mother, Jane Cameron Agee, who took him bar-hopping when he was still a kid. The title of the book refers to a drinking contest between his mom and her boyfriend that Brolin witnessed as a teen. It ended after 15 rounds; the boyfriend was later discovered collapsed under a truck, his legs sticking out from beneath 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’d be nine stints in jail, countless bar fights and a stabbing in Costa Rica. Brolin admits he’s lucky to be alive.
“I feel so fortunate, because I had so many friends that died,” he says. “I don’t have survivor 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 happened when I was drinking. 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 in order 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, finally deciding to quit after he showed up reeking of booze to his grandmother’s death bed.
“I had a moment where she smiled at me, and I thought, ‘How dare I?’” Brolin says. “It made me realize that I had everything at my beck and call, and yet I’m destroying it. And that was it. I like the clarity that comes with sobriety. Maybe it’s an affectation, but I like the rebellion of saying, ‘OK, I lived 45 years of that life. Now, I’m going to live another 45 years without drinking.’”
Even when he was drinking too much, Brolin gave one compelling performance after another. He broke into the mainstream with his turn as a taciturn cowboy in “No Country for Old Men,” then followed that up playing heavies, man’s 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 that I wasn’t doing good work,” he says. “I was very professional when I was acting. I didn’t show up to work drunk a lot. I did every once in a while. But now that I’m sober, I’ve discovered different levels to the things I do.”
He’s more confident too. 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 was like, ‘This is so elevated,’” he says. “This writing is supreme. And I got scared. I was like, ‘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 prepped a lot and got ready for it. That would have all looked very different had I been drinking. I don’t know if I could have done it.”
“From Under the Truck” isn’t a conventional celebrity memoir. It’s looser, wilder, more poetic. The book moves backward and forward in time, mixing in memories of growing up on a ranch in Paso Robles, Calif., with his wild-child mom and famous dad, “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 spotlight, Brolin shares stories about masturbating with the help of hotel pillows or drunkenly insulting Robert De Niro at an awards show luncheon.
“The book was a living, breathing thing that I tried to not get in the way of,” Brolin says. “Is it the most accessible thing? No. But I was very open and held myself to a certain standard that I tried to stay true to.”
As he recorded the Audible version of “From Under the Truck,” Brolin started to panic. Had he gone too far?
“I was halfway through it and I went, ‘Oh, fuck. What did I do?’” he says. “I wanted to 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 this book is 1,000% what it wanted and needed to be.”
Brolin, despite the setbacks and hardships he’s endured, has undeniably traveled in some rarefied circles. His stepmother, after all, is 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 should have been a joke, but it turned out to be this amazing collective experience that I got to witness from afar,” Brolin says. “At the time, I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Now I look back on it and go, ‘That was such a sweet moment.’ Scientology has nothing to do with it. I got to see somebody take care of somebody 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 nominated his “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve for the 2021 sci-fi epic. This year, Villeneuve is in the awards race once again for overseeing “Dune: Part Two,” the rare sequel that got 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 quit acting,” Brolin says. “It was a better movie than the first one. When I watched it, it felt like my brain was broken open. It’s masterful, and Denis is one of our master filmmakers. If the Academy Awards have any meaning whatsoever, they’ll recognize him.”