Can you believe it’s been 40 years since The Goonies? The movie was Josh Brolin’s first film, and four decades later he’s an established and sought-after actor with multiple movies on the 2025 schedule. However, when the Oscar nominee reflected on being part of The Goonies cast, he spoke about his nepo baby status and how it worked against him.
In recent years, a ton of actors with famous parents have been commenting on what it’s like to be the child of a big star in the business. (For example, Johnny Depp’s daughter, Lily-Rose Depp has felt like “people have been ready” to see her fail since she was a kid). For Josh Brolin, who is the son of James Brolin, when he was trying to break into the industry, being a nepo baby only meant he needed to prove himself more. As he recalled:
I think Goonies was quite an accident. I went in there, I'd been told, they pulled the Brolin thing, 'Are you [James] Brolin's kid? You want to be an actor, huh?' So instead of that nepotistic thing, they looked at me and were like, 'Oh yeah? So act.' ‘I’m not gonna help you, because I know that you think you’re gonna make it…’ Which is just ridiculous. I studied, and I got Stanislavski books, Grotowski, the Poor Theatre, and Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. I stayed in a bookstore 90% of the time. Just reading, reading, reading.
When Brolin recalled earning his first Hollywood role while on the Literally! With Rob Lowe podcast, he shared that it wasn’t easy for him to get roles because he had a famous father. It sounds like it actually led people to believe he thought he had it easy, and they needed more convincing. As he continued:
And then I met Dick Donner and Steven Spielberg, and I just looked right for the part. You look at Sean Astin, you look at the type of movie it is, I looked like a bit of a bad boy, but sort of a jock, and I was in good shape or whatever. So they were like, that's the guy. I went back six times, just so they could make sure, and then I did it.
Can you imagine your first job being with the likes of Steven Spielberg and Richard Donner? It’s actually so wild. But for those who think Josh Brolin got the part because he was the son of another actor, it sounds like he really had to prove himself, and it was the case of being there at the right place, right time.
Interestingly enough, Brolin isn’t the only nepo baby in The Goonies. Sean Astin is the son of Oscar winner Patty Duke. However, the cast also included first-time actors with blue-collar backgrounds like Corey Feldman, whose mom was a cocktail waitress and Ke Huy Quan, whose family actually fled to America from the Vietnam War and were part of the Refugee Admissions Program in 1979.
Brolin has also previously talked about how he thought he’d rise to fame right after The Goonies, but had professional struggles directly after and fell off. He wouldn’t star in another theatrical movie until 1997’s Mimic, and he didn’t really become a big name until he was cast in the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men. After that became a huge success, critically and commercially, things really took off for him – but it sounds like his career definitely didn’t come easy.
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