IN HIS EARLY 20s, long before he became a leading man, Josh Brolin took a writing class taught by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. One of the assignments was to create an evocative phrase by combining two words. A fellow student came up with “Tylenol Christ”; Brolin, an enthusiastic storyteller, had trouble being that succinct. The experience has been on the actor’s mind recently as he finishes his forthcoming memoir, a mix of stories, anecdotes and poems scheduled to come out this fall. In a recently completed essay, he describes chasing a flock of sheep with two of his children when they were young on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. (His son, Trevor, and eldest daughter, Eden, both from his first marriage to the actress Alice Adair, are now 36 and 31.) To their horror, one of the fleeing animals broke its back. “It’s about what had to transpire for the next hour,” says Brolin, 56, from his writing hut in Malibu, Calif., a gift from his wife of nearly eight years, the photographer Kathryn Boyd Brolin, 37, who modeled it after ones used by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. “It’s the clearest, most emotional thing I’ve written.”
transcript
House Tour | Josh Brolin
The actor gives a tour of his guesthouse and Airstream trailer in Malibu, Calif.
Hey, this is Josh Brolin. Welcome to my home in Malibu. It’s a beautiful day today. Come on in, let me show you around. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is the big room. I like the big room. It holds most of the art that I have. I grew up on a ranch in Paso Robles, California. I’ve always liked the ranch feel, so I think there’s a lot of California influences. I love playing pool. I remember playing in Barney’s Beanery once, and Sean Penn was behind me, and “The Color of Money” had just come out, and I had a big pompadour at the time, and Sean Penn says, “Look, another Tom Cruise wannabe.” [BILLIARD BALL SMACKS] [LAUGHS] To be in a kitchen like this, the only downfall is that I don’t want to cook in it because it’s so nice, but we do. [MUSIC PLAYING] We’re in one of two offices. There’s a lot of books. I’ll do a lot of reading in here. This is Cormac McCarthy’s book, “No Country for Old Men,” which is a film that I did with the Coens. And when Cormac came to the set, he used my fake blood. That’s his fingerprints and his signature. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is my most prized wall of art, for sure. [FOOTSTEPS CRUSHING GRAVEL] Here’s the writer’s room. It’s inspired by Dylan Thomas’s shed. The most important aspect to me is this. [CLICK] It’s the single light. [CLICK] I missed that when I was a kid. The story of this — it was the trailer of one of the characters of a movie I did called “Hail, Caesar!” [MUSIC PLAYING] When people come over, this is where we meet, this is where we talk about business. Ahh, yeah, we could take this on the road if we wanted to. [MUSIC PLAYING]
The actor gives a tour of his guesthouse and Airstream trailer in Malibu, Calif.CreditCredit…Megan Lovallo
Brolin looks and presents like a modern-day cowboy. He was raised 200 miles up the Pacific Coast on a horse ranch in Paso Robles and inherited that property (which he sold in 2004 and bought back in 2010) from his mother, the wildlife conservationist Jane Cameron Agee, who died in a car accident the day after his 27th birthday. Although his father, the actor James Brolin, relocated to Malibu, where he now lives with his wife, Barbra Streisand, Brolin had always rejected the seaside community as a place for, as he puts it, celebrities “trying not to be seen as they’re trying to be seen.” He prefers the lawless energy of nearby Venice, in Los Angeles, where he’s been renting a beachfront apartment for almost 15 years. But in 2011, Brolin, who frequently looks at online real estate listings in bed, came across a 2,400-square-foot bungalow on one and a half acres in a part of Malibu once known as Poor Point. With money he made from “Men in Black 3” (2012), he bought the charmingly rundown four-bedroom house, which spoke, he says, to his “misfit, outcast mentality,” from the musician Jakob Dylan. Brolin, who also has a home in Atlanta, rented it out for years.
In 2018, he and Kathryn, who once worked as his assistant, decided to fix up the place and live there themselves. When the minimalist style of the first designer they hired didn’t align with Brolin’s vision — “Neutral makes no sense to me at all,” he says — Kathryn suggested they reach out to Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward, known professionally as Pierce & Ward. (Coincidentally, it was Ward’s partner, the actor Giovanni Ribisi, who had nearly outbid Brolin to buy the house.) The duo understood Brolin’s taste for what he calls “nutty kaleidoscope” and “Old World European busyness”: The walls of the residence are painted or papered in powdery colors, floral motifs and stripes; a playroom for the couple’s two daughters — Westlyn, 5, and Chapel, 3 — has been made to resemble the berth of a ship; the living and dining rooms are decorated with worn leather armchairs, creaky wooden tables and sun-faded kilim rugs. Except for the fake Academy Award in a closet that they use as a wet bar — and Brolin’s casual mentions of “Clooney’s place in the South of France” and “Momoa’s hundred motorcycles” — there’s barely any suggestion of Hollywood. “I was so in their face in the beginning [of the renovation],” he says about Pierce and Ward. “I’d send them hundreds of photographs. And then I thought, ‘The more I try to affect this whole thing, the worse it’s going to get.’ So I backed off.”
