Josh Brolin Never Thought He’d End Up in Malibu

In his early 20s, long before he became a leading man, Josh Brolin took a writing class taught by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. One of the assignments was to create an evocative phrase by combining two words. A fellow student came up with “Tylenol Christ”; Brolin, an enthusiastic storyteller, had trouble being that succinct. The experience has been on the actor’s mind recently as he finishes his forthcoming memoir, a mix of stories, anecdotes and poems scheduled to come out this fall. In a recently completed essay, he describes chasing a flock of sheep with two of his children when they were young on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. (His son, Trevor, and eldest daughter, Eden, both from his first marriage to the actress Alice Adair, are now 36 and 31.) To their horror, one of the fleeing animals broke its back. “It’s about what had to transpire for the next hour,” says Brolin, 56, from his writing hut in Malibu, Calif., a gift from his wife of nearly eight years, the photographer Kathryn Boyd Brolin, 37, who modelled it after ones used by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. “It’s the clearest, most emotional thing I’ve written.”

Brolin looks and presents like a modern-day cowboy. He was raised 200 miles up the Pacific Coast on a horse ranch in Paso Robles and inherited that property (which he sold in 2004 and bought back in 2010) from his mother, the wildlife conservationist Jane Cameron Agee, who died in a car accident the day after his 27th birthday. Although his father, the actor James Brolin, relocated to Malibu, where he now lives with his wife, Barbra Streisand, Brolin had always rejected the seaside community as a place for, as he puts it, celebrities “trying not to be seen as they’re trying to be seen.” He prefers the lawless energy of nearby Venice, in Los Angeles, where he’s been renting a beachfront apartment for almost 15 years. But in 2011, Brolin, who frequently looks at online real estate listings in bed, came across a 2,400-square-foot bungalow on one and a half acres in a part of Malibu once known as Poor Point. With money he made from “Men in Black 3” (2012), he bought the charmingly rundown four-bedroom house, which spoke, he says, to his “misfit, outcast mentality,” from the musician Jakob Dylan. Brolin, who also has a home in Atlanta, rented it out for years.

In 2018, he and Kathryn, who once worked as his assistant, decided to fix up the place and live there themselves. When the minimalist style of the first designer they hired didn’t align with Brolin’s vision — “Neutral makes no sense to me at all,” he says — Kathryn suggested they reach out to Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward, known professionally as Pierce & Ward. (Coincidentally, it was Ward’s partner, the actor Giovanni Ribisi, who had nearly outbid Brolin to buy the house.) The duo understood Brolin’s taste for what he calls “nutty kaleidoscope” and “Old World European busyness”: The walls of the residence are painted or papered in powdery colours, floral motifs and stripes; a playroom for the couple’s two daughters — Westlyn, 5, and Chapel, 3 — has been made to resemble the berth of a ship; the living and dining rooms are decorated with worn leather armchairs, creaky wooden tables and sun-faded kilim rugs. Except for the fake Academy Award in a closet that they use as a wet bar — and Brolin’s casual mentions of “Clooney’s place in the South of France” and “Momoa’s hundred motorcycles” — there’s barely any suggestion of Hollywood. “I was so in their face in the beginning [of the renovation],” he says about Pierce and Ward. “I’d send them hundreds of photographs. And then I thought, ‘The more I try to affect this whole thing, the worse it’s going to get.’ So I backed off.”

The main house contains a considerable amount of art — including several of Brolin’s 13 portraits in oil by the contemporary Genoese painter Vera Girivi; another one by the 20th-century American artist Moses Soyer (a gift from Brolin’s stepmother); and a 2009 watercolour of the writer Charles Bukowski, about whom Brolin is developing a script by the American painter and street artist David Choe — but the newly finished one-bedroom guesthouse, which overlooks the pool and took more than six years to complete, was made for displaying it. In addition to wanting a place to entertain friends, the couple needed the extra 2,000 square feet to accommodate their growing collection of works by emerging and established painters such as Jonathan Gardner, Shara Hughes and Danielle Mckinney.

“If you only know me cosmetically, it makes no sense that I’d be a collector of art,” says Brolin, who also has a number of vintage motorcycles. “But what you see is usually not what you get.” Not that he minds; the actor, who is sober, has stopped trying to control how people perceive him. “There’s nothing better than bringing my crew here and having a gnarly-ass ex-Hells Angel going, ‘Well, that’s really interesting,’” he says. As we talk, the afternoon sun is casting shadows across the nearly 17-foot-high mustard walls and a pair of lounge chairs from a 1980s steamboat. In this light, the space feels like a William Eggleston photograph come to life.

Two additional structures complete the fantasy: an Airstream trailer from the set of the Coen brothers’ 2016 movie, “Hail, Caesar!,” where Brolin, who returns to screens this month in “Dune: Part Two,” takes most of his meetings; and a stand-alone office with an antique walnut desk, an Art Deco lamp by the modernist Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray and a typewriter — an Olivetti Lettera 32 — that once belonged to the novelist Cormac McCarthy. After years of false starts and a second career as a stock trader, Brolin finally became a movie star with his role as an unsuspecting hunter in the Coen brothers’ film adaptation of McCarthy’s 2005 novel, “No Country for Old Men”; he was with the author this past June the night before he died.

While discussing his late friend, Brolin pauses to admire a pin board of his most cherished works of art: a glitter-covered shooting star and a paper cutout in the shape of a tiny hand by Chapel and Westlyn. “I can get all weird and emotional thinking about them,” he says. “I went 22 years in a career where I wasn’t valued. I was the guy who was supposed to hit but never did. And then a part came along that was revelatory. The point is that none of this was supposed to happen. And that’s the truest way I can say it.”