Josh Brolin on His Wild Life: Weed at 9, LSD at 13, Jail 9 Times

STARS ALIGN SOBERLY? –

Nov. 16, 2024 – “Find another bar. Blood on the face. Blood in the hair … More alcohol … Another fight. I fall in the Seine. I’m cold. I can’t remember where I live. I have a child.” Brolin was 23 Nov. 16, 2024 – I jump onto a group of people, young men, friendly, preppy boys drinking wine spritzers. They kick me. I swing wildly. “Find another bar. Blood on the face. Blood in the hair … More alcohol … Another fight. I fall in the Seine. I’m cold. I can’t remember where I live. I have a child.” Brolin was 23 at the time, and had spectacularly fallen off the wagon after three years of sobriety. Movie stars are often damaged, but Brolin, now 56, is more damaged than most. His childhood was chaotic, reckless. He was nine when he first tried marijuana and 13 when he first dropped acid. Later he yo-yoed between raging alcoholism and sobriety. He has been in jail nine times.

“I love being sober. I have more fun,” he tells me now when we meet in a warehouse in downtown LA. He has been off the booze for a decade — but those years are never far from his mind. “There’s nothing that I go through that I am absolutely certain wouldn’t be worse if I was drinking.”