Josh Brolin became a full-time stock trader for nearly five years after Hollywood stopped calling, and says those trades paid better than two decades of acting work.
The 58-year-old actor told podcast host Theo Von he spent almost five years trading stocks full-time from home once the industry lost interest in him. He ran three screens with four tabs on each, swinging trades and day trading while his film career stalled.
Fox News Digital reported Brolin’s account from the “This Past Weekend” interview, including his blunt math on what the markets paid versus the movies.
“I made more money in those four years, really... than I had made in 20 years acting. But I didn’t really make hardly anything acting,” Brolin said.
"I was really good at it,"
he told Von. He also said, “Day trading I loved, man.” The stretch began around age 30, after a year of landscaping work and long before the role that finally changed his standing in Hollywood.
Brolin did not coast into stardom. Before landing Brand in “The Goonies,” he went on about 350 auditions. People told him the business was not for him.
Even the early win came with a rough start. On the first day of shooting, he could not stop laughing and said he ruined the day. Steven Spielberg told him to take a breath and that they needed to get through it. Soon after the film, Brolin headed to New York to study acting and work in theater. He said he took the craft seriously for 22 years while almost no one else did.
"I had 22 years of taking it seriously because nobody was interested until really I did ‘No Country,’ and then ‘No Country’ kind of changed s***."
The Coen brothers’ 2007 crime thriller finally broke the drought. The pay still was not glamorous. Brolin said he was paid $100,000 for “No Country for Old Men” and cleared about $30,000 after costs, “not considered a great year,” in his words.
While filming that movie, he sent one more tape. His 16-year-old son read Denzel Washington’s part opposite him for “American Gangster.” Brolin said that was the last audition he ever did. The work that followed put him back in front of cameras for good, including a 2010 appearance with the cast of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” ringing the opening bell at the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York. He is now starring in the thriller “Whalefall” as the main character’s estranged father.
His father, actor James Brolin, has said he tried to be present for his own kids as much as an acting career allowed, a reminder that the business pulls hard on family time even when the phone finally rings again.
Brolin’s detour is a plain lesson in self-reliance: when one industry freezes you out, skill, grit, and a working market can still pay the bills.
