You could easily mistake Josh Brolin for a guy who’s more likely to speak with fists than feelings. He has played men who stare into the dusty horizon and contemplate violence. Even when he played Marvel’s Thanos, under layers of purple CG, Hollywood was taking advantage of his burly persona.
But Brolin, 57, is out to spring a trap on anyone who thinks they know who he is, or what being a man is all about. This, he tells Polygon, is why he had to make Weapons.
The new horror epic from writer-director Zach Cregger (Barbarian) spirals around the mysterious disappearances of 17 children in a small town, including the son of Brolin’s character, Archer Graff. When we meet Archer, a hard-as-nails, emotionally repressed father, he’s screaming at a school meeting, demanding the principal do something about the number-one suspect in the disappearances: his son’s teacher, Justine (Julia Garner). Cue a downward spiral of paranoia, grief, and self-destruction, but with something richer than you’d see in either a paperback mystery or so-called “elevated horror.” Archer doesn’t just hunt for his child; he slowly unravels, forced to confront his own failures, his inability to express love, and the myth of the all-powerful male protector.
“I love confronting masculinity,” Brolin tells Polygon. “This idea of how you’re supposed to act in that box that’s been created — confronting it constantly.”
His eyes light up as he talks about how the role scared him: a man “repressed and hard-hitting with his kid,” who can only access his emotions after that child is gone. “He starts out all balled-up and super-masculine,” Brolin says, “and then he realizes by the end, ‘Oh, this is the diamond in my life. The only way that I can truly experience it and have a full life is to open up to this kid.’”
This kind of introspective bloodletting has been key to Brolin’s resurrection as a big-screen presence, beginning with Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 thriller No Country for Old Men. While Brolin swung toward pure toxicity in films like Sicario, stranger projects like the sci-fi neo-Western Outer Range saw him stumbling down a grief-stricken path (or rather, falling down a literal hole to another dimension in his backyard). These days, he knows how to weaponize emotional repression.
Weapons is a blunt puncturing of the masculine persona, but Cregger’s genre-bending — veering from horror to thriller to black comedy — keeps it from being a “message movie.”
“It’s not just a heavy-handed arrow of a genre,” Brolin says. “There’s absurdity in it. There’s humor in it. It’s constantly challenging masculinity and challenging the genre.”
The genre shake-up invites scrutiny. All I wanted to do after Weapons was pick apart what was really going on, in a Twin Peaks-y way. So I put it to Brolin: In a surreal dream sequence partway through the film, Archer glimpses an assault rifle floating in the sky. Is the title literal? Is this a movie about gun culture?
“I don’t know, man,” he admits. “Maybe we’re the sheep, part of the flock. We’re just doing whatever is told of us. We tend to see things in black and white and good and evil.”
Weapons is about vengeance and loss and suspicion and despair. It’s also about a man learning — maybe agonizingly late — that strength can mean admitting you’re scared. Brolin may relate, but on this press tour, he’s far from shaking in his boots. While he may be in an endless pursuit to unravel the American masculinity complex, he’s also on a hunt for great talent to work with, and it keeps him going and going. He signed on to Weapons because he believes Cregger might be that kind of visionary, someone willing to “go against the studio and create something wonderful and unique.”
“I want to work with great filmmakers,” he says. “Not just to be in something cool, but to be in something that’s a milestone. We look back at movies like Taxi Driver, and I want an audience to have that moment now.”
Weapons is in theaters now.