Josh Brolin

Josh Brolin is the son of actor James Brolin, and he got famous at seventeen as Brand in The Goonies (1985), the exasperated older brother whose job is to be outrun by children. That should have been a launchpad. Instead the next twenty years were journeyman work: Mimic, Nightwatch, Hollow Man, Into the Blue, credits that pay a mortgage without building a career.

The turn came in 2007 with No Country for Old Men, where Llewelyn Moss is a man defined almost entirely by competence under pressure and given very little to say about it. Brolin plays him as a welder solving a problem, and the calm is what makes him frightening. The year after, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Dan White in Milk. What he turned out to be good at is a flat, unbothered menace: Matt Graver runs an illegal war in Sicario wearing flip-flops, Bigfoot Bjornsen eats a frozen banana while dismantling a man's life in Inherent Vice, Eddie Mannix fixes a studio's sins on a schedule in Hail, Caesar!. He specialises in men who decided something a while ago and see no reason to explain it to you.

The franchise decade turned that stillness into scale. Thanos is built almost entirely out of vocal weight, Cable is the joke's straight man in Deadpool 2, and Gurney Halleck in the Dune films is loyalty with a scar. He has kept a foot in oddity throughout, from Oldboy to Outer Range to the 2025 run of Weapons, The Running Man and Wake Up Dead Man.