Josh Brolin has revealed he came close to walking off the set of Ridley Scott’s new film early in production, and it was only a timely word from the director himself that convinced him to stay.
The actor, 58, told Empire magazine that he “got really scared” shortly after filming began on The Dog Stars, Scott’s post-apocalyptic drama due in cinemas on 28 August.
The source of his anxiety was Scott’s famously instinctive, low-rehearsal approach on set.
“Ridley was talking a lot of stories and not really rehearsing,” Brolin recalled, “and it bugged me out, and I got really scared. I went back, called my agent and said, ‘I want out. Something’s really wrong, and I’ve got to get the f— out of here.'”
His agent, a close friend, suggested he take a day to rest and reconsider. Brolin saw through the tactic immediately.
“I was like, ‘No, man, I know what the f— you’re doing.'”
What actually turned things around was Scott himself.
The 88-year-old director invited Brolin into his trailer and played back a scene they had just filmed together with co-star Jacob Elordi.
The footage did the talking.
“[Ridley] goes, ‘Come here,’ and he brought me into his trailer, and played the scene we had just finished. It was a really good, very dynamic scene between me and Jacob, and he goes, ‘Okay?’ I go, ‘Okay,’ and then I started to feed off that.”
Brolin had worked with Scott before, on 2007’s American Gangster, but the director’s brisk multi-camera style still caught him off guard.
It took a day or two to adjust, he said, before something clicked.
“I got super into it because it was stratospherically creative and stratospherically dangerous.”
He had been actively seeking out exactly that kind of challenge, he noted, and then promptly resisted it when it arrived.
In the end, he said, it “became one of the more creative, satisfying projects that I’ve ever been involved with.”
In The Dog Stars, adapted by Mark L. Smith from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, Brolin plays ex-Marine Bangley alongside Elordi, who stars as a civilian pilot navigating a brutal post-apocalyptic world until a mysterious radio transmission sends him in search of something to believe in.
The cast also includes Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong and Allison Janney.
