Josh Brolin recalls waking up next to 'last night's urine' in post marking 5 years of sobriety
Sounds like Josh Brolin‘s decision to get sober was a necessary one.
The Avengers: Infinity War actor, 50, marked his fifth sober anniversary by detailing what led him to make the change in his life. Spoiler: He didn’t sugarcoat it.
Along with a photo of himself looking glassy-eyed and drunk mugging for the camera while making a hand-horn gesture, Brolin wrote, “Drunk: when you think you’re having a rip roaring time and the next morning you wake up and your brain has broken into a frenzied beehive and your body is shattered shards of sharp glass desperately searching for what fits where and your spirit is being eaten by worms with great white bloodied teeth and your heart has shriveled into a black prune churning your intestines to the point where dysentery feels attractive and you can’t remember anything you did so you roll out of bed over last night’s urine and you dial your best friend’s phone number because you recall him lifting you over his head, your whole self, before you hit and broke through the drywall and, you think, a large aquarium and the phone on the other end rings and he picks it up, that clambering for a phone, the clumsiness of a hardline, and you say: ‘What did I do last night?!’ and he answers, after a great pause: ‘…Dude…’.” He ended with the hashtag “5years.”
A post shared by Josh Brolin (@joshbrolin) on Jan 8, 2019 at 7:08am PST
Brolin’s candidness drew comments of support from Kate Hudson (“Way to go!!!”), Armie Hammer (“Congrats dude”) and Sophia Bush (“Congrats on 5 years!”), among others.
Over the summer, Brolin opened up to the New York Times about his decision to get sober — the year his marriage to second wife Diane Lane ended. He said he woke up on the sidewalk in front of his house one morning around Halloween. He was called to see his grandmother, who was on her deathbed, and recalled standing over the 99-year-old woman reeking of booze. His grandma looked up at him and just smiled, he recalled, and he knew then he had to change course.
After a wild childhood — heroin use, time in a juvenile facility and emancipation from his parents (dad is James Brolin) at 16 — Brolin explained that he found a way to manage his excessive drinking, saying he did it mostly when he was away from home, often in hotel room suites, so his children wouldn’t see. (He has two children from his first marriage.) But he talked openly about his chemistry with alcohol, saying, “There’s something that happens to me when I drink that all moral code disappears. So it’s like if I were to take that drink,” pointing to a minibar, “after about halfway through, I would start thinking about jumping out that window,” gesturing to a window in the room, “not to kill myself, but just because there must be somebody down there to catch me, and I wonder if I can pull it off or if I could land on that van. It just seemed like fun.”
Brolin’s drunken antics made headlines for years. There was a bar fight arrest with cast members from the film W in Louisiana in 2008. He was arrested for public intoxication on New Year’s Day 2013. That same year, footage of him getting into a fight at a bar and then hugging the bartender was obtained by TMZ. He was also arrested for a domestic dispute with Lane, but charges were dropped. (He was cagier about that in his NYT profile.)
Over the past five years of living clean, Brolin’s life has changed significantly. Not only did he find love again — with his assistant and now wife, Kathryn Boyd — but the couple welcomed their first child together, Westlyn, in November. In addition to appearing in big-budget projects like Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2, Brolin sold a show to Hulu called The Untitled Josh Brolin Project, in which he’ll play a fictionalized version of himself.
