When Josh Brolin was cast in Woody Allen’s 2010 drama You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he wrote the director an email. Three pages long. The character needed a Serbian accent, he explained. A wheelchair, too. He laid out his reasoning assiduously. Allen’s reply was just one word: “No.”
Brolin had always been drawn to the bells and whistles – prosthetics, limps, “extreme versions of character”. But over time, he learnt that less can be more – not just from that exchange with Allen, but also from an earlier role, his laconic Vietnam vet in the Coen brothers’ 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men. “When you’re a lead in a film and have almost no dialogue, there has to be major inner dialogue going on,” the 57-year-old explains in his distinctive California rasp. “If you have something going on that’s dynamic inside, you don’t need a lot.” It allows people to lean forward, he suggests. “I always felt like I had to inundate, whereas now, I don’t generally feel I need to do that.”
