Josh Brolin, 42, wears tuxedo, shirt, bow tie, cuff links Tom Ford

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Photography Hedi Slimane
Styling Jay Massacret
Text Joseph Donnelly

Josh Brolin is stoked. And for good reason. He finds himself in the rare company of actors who’ve starred in two major movies opening on the same day.

“It’s a dream come true,” he says, breaking into that wide, little-bit-country, little-bit-rock-and-roll grin of his. “It’s a Daniel Day-Lewis dream come true.”

So rare is this feat that one has to dig for precedence back to the days before Mr. Day-Lewis started over emoting with feet, Mohawks, butcher knives, and bowling balls. All the way to April 11, 1986, in fact, when My Beautiful Laundrette and A Room with a View went theatrical on the same day in the U.S. and England, respectively.

For Brolin, it’ll be Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (My Beautiful Money Laundrette, if you will) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (or, A Room with a View of Freida Pinto). Brolin, though, one-ups Day-Lewis: both his films are slated to open in the same country (this one) and on the same day.

Oliver Stone directs the former and Woody Allen the latter. Based on the directors, you might guess the films bear little resemblance to each other. Stone, a famously swaggering alpha male, likes (liked) to party and make epic films about prison, wars, football, presidents, and Wall Street. Allen, a famously neurotic clarinet player, likes to kvetch and make intimate comedies about the existential angst of chatty New Yorkers and, sometimes, chatty Londoners.

And though they are worlds apart visually and tonally, the films have their similarities. Both deal with the things that cause men to lose their moral bearings, be they money and power or mortality and younger women. In both cases, too, it’s Josh Brolin playing the heavy.

Wall Street’s Bretton James is a hard-charging Wall Street bull shark and Stranger’s Roy is a duplicitous, lit-world weasel. These are fallen men, character studies in various manifestations of want and greed. One may be more polite and one may be richer, but they both lust after the same thing: star status in their distinct cosmologies.

 

TAGS: JOSH BROLIN, vman19