Hey, it's Thursday, which means we're coming at you with a short
feel good story from a past guest.
Hope you enjoyed the clip this week, Josh Brolin.
Your dad said he recalls like I think he was a junior in high
school, He was taking a deciding what elective to take and 1 was
like woodworking. Another was something with.
Copper. And then there was the acting
one. Yeah, there was like underwater
basket weaving or acting. And I took the acting one.
We were in a theater in the theater in Santa Barbara High
School. And there were maybe 15 people
in the class, 20 people in the class.
And she said we're going to do something called improvise.
No idea, never heard of it. And she said Josh, and it was
the first one. I had no idea.
And I was like, I don't know what to do.
It's terrified of getting up on stage.
It's it's a terror. That's carried itself into now,
you know, still a massive, massive fear that revolves
around presenting myself really massive, like debilitating for
many, many, many, many years. Not now.
I figured out ways to deal with it, but.
And can I ask what are the ways you figured out how to deal with
that now? Well, I don't drink anymore.
So that let it come out in ways that were that were psychotic,
but relaxing, embracing prep, visualizing right sizing, right
sizing people. Oh, they're going to judge me
because they know and I don't know.
On that front, by the way, you said going back to your early
acting days, I was paralyzed with what I thought other people
saw in me. A nothing, an invisible,
worthless of a word. Wow.
Describe that insecurity. I mean, I remember doing an
episode of Hwy. the Highway to Heaven with Michael Landon,
right? I read for that and it was after
I did the Goonies. It was after I did thrash and I
went into a room. I read it was before I went to
Europe. I took off to Europe by myself
and and that gave me the money to do it and I went in and I
read for him and Paul Walker ended up playing.
It was a two-part episode. He ended up playing my younger
brother and, and I remember doing scenes during that and my
legs were shaking so bad that all the focus was not on what
was happening in the scene. All the focus was how to get my
legs to stop shaking. If I can, just if I can make
them so tight that they'll stop shaking.
You know what I mean? So there's been some through
line to that where I've gotten up and gotten nervous.
My trachea closes up and suddenly there's a different
voice coming out, and now everybody knows.
And then if I'm conscious that everybody knows, then it only
compounds, right? You know how it is.
So I want to take you to a moment after Europe.
You're in Rochester, NY with your long time best friend
Anthony. It's opening night of your first
play Forgiving Typhoid Mary. Take me to the moment you forgot
everything and take it from there.
Every actor has a nightmare. They have several nightmares.
It's the worst things that can happen to you.
All of them have happened to me. They don't happen to actors.
They're nightmares for a reason. They're a projection of like, Oh
my God, if that were to happen, and then you do everything to
assure that that won't happen. All those have happened.
And those are those are what? Those are, you know, I'm going
to go up on stage, everybody's going to know I'm a fraud,
whatever it is, you know? So first professional play, I'm
playing this Irish priest. I had this, these big fat
monologues that set up the whole play.
It's opening night and here comes Josh speaking in the
worst, I'm sure Irish accent, you know, Mary fitted Lee from
Priority Team. We go and I'm doing this thing
and I look down, I take off my glasses, I do some cliche thing
where I take my cassock and I clean my glasses and I look up
and it's gone. I mean, it's gone.
And now I'd be able to improvise through it.
I'd be like, it doesn't have the meaning and the weight to me
that it that it did then because it's my first professional play.
I'm young. Anthony is the one who said
don't try to go do a movie between the series that we're
doing together. Come and, you know, develop
yourself as an actor, be a character actor.
Don't be one of those people. Anthony did say you were trying
to improvise through it. He just said you were saying.
I was trying. I was.
Man, I was saying whatever I was saying, and I just saw the arrow
continuing to go away from me, get smaller and smaller and
smaller with all the dialogue that I needed.
And I said something. And I know Anthony, he says this
today. He reached over to his partner,
his assistant at the time, and said we have a playwright on our
hands, you know, because I don't know what I was saying.
It's probably. But then I, I left, I didn't
know what else to say. It never came.
I just walked off stage and they had gone totally manual.
And I walked off stage and the light stayed on.
And then finally the light disappeared and I went backstage
and both stagehands had their their head and their hands.
That's not what you want to see when you walk off stage.
And I said, I'm out of here. Like I was ready to walk out the
exit door. I remember seeing the exit right
there. I can see it right now and
Anthony luckily got out of his seat and came back around and
said nobody knows. And I said that's bull.
Everybody knows. I saw their heads cock I.
Saw it. He got you to go.
He did. He got me to go out and then the
and then I did another monologue, which went fine.
And then I did some scenes and then I did a third monologue
where I went out on the other side of the stage and I came out
and I said the last line first. So it happened again, but I was
able to edit in my head what and explain what I had just said,
which was, you know, anyway, man, I don't know if I do that
to myself or if I did that to myself then or if that was just
an inability or I don't, I don't know.
I don't know. It's just the way it went.
Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week and
every week sharing long form interviews on Mondays and
shorter uplifting stories on Thursdays and then trending
clips on Fridays. We'd love to hear from you with
ratings and reviews. Do you prefer the longer
podcast? Episodes.
Or are shorter ones? I'm excited to get your take.
Thanks again.