Josh Brolin

After The Goonies at 16, his second film embarrassed him badly enough that he quit movies and spent years doing stage work in Rochester, New York. He's said his own performance in Thrashin' was "horrendous." The Coen Brothers found him anyway. No Country for Old Men (2007) landed him an Oscar nomination for Milk the following year. Back-to-back films that rebuilt a career most people had forgotten about.

In 2018, he played Thanos for Marvel and Cable for Fox in the same calendar year, two franchise villains from rival studios simultaneously. The Dune franchise followed, as did the antagonist role in Edgar Wright's The Running Man and Rian Johnson's next Knives Out film. In 2004, police arrested him on a domestic battery call from Diane Lane's house. She didn't press charges. He's talked about that period as chaotic, has been sober since 2013, and the openness seems to have cost him nothing with casting directors.

His father is James Brolin, making Barbra Streisand his stepmother. He grew up on a ranch in Paso Robles where his mother kept wolves and cougars on the property. He filled over 90 journals across his adult life, and his 2024 memoir From Under the Truck is assembled from that material. The subtitle calls it "A Decidedly Un-Celebrity Memoir," which is either honesty or good branding, but the wolves were real.