No kind of about it, Josh Brolin is a big deal. He was Thanos in the MCU, and has starred in some of the best Westerns in modern Hollywood. He’s so good, in fact, that Marvel extended the role of the Mad Titan on the back of his audition.
During a round of Variety’s Actors on Actors, where Brolin interviewed himself because, really, who else could, and he spoke about getting Thanos. “What a lot of people don’t know is that when they came to me, it was for a cameo,” he explains. “It was just a little thing in Infinity War, and what ended up happening is I blew everybody away so much that they ended up making two movies out of it.”
He goes on to accurately point out that one, Infinity War, is the fifth biggest film of all time, while the other, Endgame, is the first (or was before Avatar was re-released to take back the top spot). It might be a stretch to claim that’s all down to Brolin’s nuanced depiction of the purple villain, but we’re comfortable with it – Brolin is the beating heart of the MCU movies.
In the interest of clarity, we should point out this is obviously in jest. Brolin wound up without a partner when Jeremy Renner, Marvel’s Hawkeye, couldn’t make the shoot.
Instead of sacking off the afternoon, Brolin just chatted to himself. What a good sport! He goes through the typical conversation, listing major works, while coming back to the current project he’s promoting, an Amazon Prime Video sci-fi series called Outer Range.
In Outer Range, Brolin plays Royal Abbott, a rancher in Wyoming who, amid struggles with land ownership, discovers an ominous void within one of his fields. The ensuing mystery collides with familial drama for a heady piece of genre storytelling.
You can find the entire first season of Outer Range on Amazon Prime Video, while you can check out his work as Thanos in the MCU films via Disney Plus.