Josh Brolin talks about the personal side of 'Whalefall' and the 'undeniable' script for 'Sicario 3'.

The actor also talks about the "Lanterns" transfer (he watched it and loved it) and says "You had gold" about the cancellation of "The Outer Limits."

The strained relationship between Josh Brolin's Mitt Gardiner and Austin Abrams' Jay Gardiner is at the heart of Brian Duffield's Fall of the Whale, but Brolin is also the literal heartbeat of this emotional survival story.

Rather than die in the hospital from mesothelioma, sailor Matt decided to take his own life by jumping off his boat off Monastery Beach, California.

Throughout Jay's childhood, Mitt raised him in a way that's a few steps down from R. Lee Ermey's annoying drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket. He wanted Jay to be better prepared for life's unpredictability than he was, and while he imparted much valuable knowledge, especially about diving, he imposed his will to the point that Jay defiantly chose to study in the landlocked cornfields of Iowa.

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Brolin had read Daniel Krauss before playing Mitt in Krauss and Duffield's adaptation. When he was done, he hugged the book and groaned, both as father and son.

"You have to let [your kids] make their own decisions and fall down and cover their emotional and psychological knees. So I think [my emotional reaction] was to create that thing inside me," Brolin told The Hollywood Reporter in support of Whalefall's Oct. 16 theatrical release. "It makes me look at the effects that [Brolin's father, actor James Brolin] wanted. When you're a teenager and you see that something is so important to parents, it's just an opportunity to rebel. Then you get older and you see, oh man, he really tried hard."

A year after Matt's death, Jay returns home to comfort his mother (Elizabeth Shaw's Zara) and two older sisters (Eva Jane Levy and Nan Emily Rudd). But he refuses to visit his father's grave with his mother, in part because the body is not actually buried there. (Whalefall also marks a Hollow Man reunion for Brolin and Shue.)

Unbeknownst to his family, Jay takes it upon himself to track down Mitt's remains in the depths of the ocean, hoping to reconcile their deep differences in the process. But his grand plan quickly goes awry when he is caught by a sperm whale chasing a squid and wakes up in the multi-cavity stomach of a 60-ton, 80-foot leviathan. With only an hour of oxygen left, Jay must find a way out of his impossible predicament, forcing him to use the lessons and wisdom he passively absorbed from his father.

The whale ultimately serves as a stand-in for Mitt and the all-encompassing weight of his legacy and expectations of Jay. To emphasize this metaphor, Duffield recorded Brolin's heartbeat before filming began and played it during Abrams' two months on the claustrophobic, whale-belly practical sets. The song was later improved in post-production to serve as the whale's heartbeat in the film.

As Whalefall hits theaters, Brolin is gearing up for the return of CIA character Matt Graver in Sicario 3, opposite Benicio del Toro's Alejandro Gillick and Emily Blunt's Kate Messer. By the time Brolin first updated THR in May 2022, the trilogy had gone through several iterations. In November 2025, Brolin told me he seemed to be "around the corner." Fortunately, good news finally arrived in early October, as Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight pitched a script to be directed by Padraic "Pat" McKinley. (If you haven't seen McKinley and Ethan Hawke's The Weight, treat yourself when it's released digitally on October 20.)

Given that he's also writing a James Bond movie for Denis Villeneuve, the auteur filmmaker who launched the Sicario franchise, it's only fitting that Knight finally cracked the code.

Brolin says, "We've always been looking for scripts. We've always wanted to do this. We weren't going to wait this long, but you have Benny [del Toro], Emily [Blunt] and I looking at things and reacting differently to filmmakers or scripts." But then Steven Knight wrote a script that was incredible and somehow undeniable. We all had the same reaction. So we're very excited to do that. We will do this next year. "We have a great filmmaker, Padraic McKinley, who I think is going to be a great movie and we're excited."

One of the best scenes in the franchise comes at the end of Stefano Solima's second installment, Day of the Soldado. Grover Brolin confronts a shocked Isabella Merced, who he and Alejandro del Toro used as a pawn in their attempt to overthrow his cartel kingpin father. A supremely confident Griever finally shows remorse for the damage their dirty work has done to innocent lives. And on the day of filming, Brolin broke down in tears after seeing Mercedes' image of the shattered teenager.

Needless to say, Brolin is eager to work on the third season. "You get to see a different side of Matt Graver that you haven't seen before," Brolin adds.

The first time I spoke with Brolin was for the first season of Outer Range in May 2022. Sicario writer Taylor Sheridan had found success with his Yellowstone series during the pandemic, prompting other networks to try their hand at the neo-western. But Brolin and creator Brian Watkins' take on the subgenre was easily the most interesting and ambitious of the bunch. Brolin had to return to television as an original series for the first time in two decades.

Unfortunately, when Outer Range returned for its second season in May 2024, it did not receive the same hype as the first season, despite garnering better reviews. The writing was already on the wall, and sure enough, the series was canceled a month or two later

By August 2026, I was knee-deep in Lantern covers when I learned that Brolin had turned down the role of Hal Jordan, which later went to Kyle Chandler. At the time, I theorized that the crushing disappointment of Outer Range scared Brolin away from another major television commitment, as he had for nearly two decades. But he's not entirely sure that's the case.

"The Outer Limits was heartbreaking. But the lantern, I don't know, maybe it was too close [to the Outer Limits]," Brolin says.

What he is sure of is that Amazon Prime Video is wrong. Tom Pelfrey's recent Emmy win for Task only reinforces this view, as do the flourishing careers of Lois Pullman and Imogen Potts.

"I really loved The Outer Range, and it makes me so happy to see what those actors — Tom Pelfrey, Lois Pullman, Imogen Potts — have done since then," Brolin says. "To me, that's a great middle finger to those who canceled that program. It's like you had gold."

Below, speaking with THR, Brolin also talks about the subconscious choice he made in Matt and Jay's most confrontational flashback.

I've been hearing a lot about your guest house lately, one being Glenn Powell and the other being Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Whalefall, Daniel Kraus. Do the Brolins host a bed and breakfast for creatives between films?

(Laughs.) I will be very happy to leave this legacy. Now that we've moved, more people are stopping by. Glenn rented me a house in Atlanta, a house we don't have anymore, probably because Glenn stayed there. (Laughs.) Daniel, who was finishing a novel, stayed with us for two weeks, which was very nice. He was the best houseguest imaginable. You never really knew he was there. You didn't feel like you had to host him at all. Then he left her, and four days later [in May 2026] he won the Pulitzer Prize for Angel Down, the book he wrote after the whale fell. It made me feel like I took down the Pulitzer for Angel.

It actually does! It's a cool place, we got lucky

Late last year, you told me that you finished Whalefall while shooting Dog Stars and that you cried when it was done. Do you understand why it opened the floodgates?

As a parent, being serious for a moment, struggling, improvising, hoping, projecting—and then you have to deal with real human beings. So it's not just your aim at them and you realize how ridiculous that statement is. You can't help but pass on the things you think are important, but kids grow up and live their own lives. You have to let them make their own decisions and fall down and skin their emotional and psychological knees.

So I think it was building it in me. I've only been a parent, man. I graduated high school and I think I had a year to myself which wasn't great. Then I had a child and have been a parent ever since. My older children, I see what they have done with their lives, and I am very proud of them. So I will do this from the beginning to the end of my puberty.

My dad [James Brolin] hasn't seen the movie yet, and I'm really looking forward to it. It makes me look at the effects he wanted to have. When you're a teenager and you see that something is very important to your parents, it's just an opportunity to rebel. And for what? For no other reason than you are just a teenager. Then you get older and you see, oh man, he really tried hard. So I softened up to all that and now I'm done with it.

Mitt reminds me of these famous sports dads—Earl Woods, Richard Williams, Merv Marinovich—putting a golf club or tennis racket or soccer ball in their kids' cribs.

Is the underlying issue here that Mitt failed to make Jay exactly in his image?

I think it comes more from a paranoia that Jay has to go through the same hardships that Mitt went through when he was younger. The point is, I don't want you to go through what I had to go through. I design your hardships in a way that I think is better and more productive so that you can become self-sufficient later. And the truth is that he rejected his child from him. But in the end, whether it's legacy or whatever you want to call it, Jay uses everything he's been taught to survive as long as he can. It is a symbol because it is an allegory of that stench

The Steinbeck quote tattooed on his back—"Our Father who art in nature"—is basically his religion. He has this belief system that includes whales and the natural world. So has cancer and alcohol taken what was once an unusual belief and made it lose its mind?

I think the alcohol has a lot more to do with it than the frustration of knowing about cancer and limited time. He knows his son is going [to Iowa]. He knows that their last boat ride will probably be the last time he spends with his child. So he tries to fit it all in, and then, as I've seen people do, he doesn't want to deal with the tension that creates. So he starts drinking to loosen up and drinking makes it ten times worse. We can all relate to this on some level - whether as a parent or a child, but the harder you try, the less impact it has.

So it was a really sad scene. All the scenes were uncomfortable to do, but this was a very uncomfortable scene that was very real. It was something that wasn't necessarily intended, but when I watched the movie, I saw how much Mitt was touching Jay. He tries to touch it. It's almost like he's trying to mold wet clay, which seems very desperate and sad to me. But I didn't even realize it until I saw the movie and I went, oh, that's an incredible act of desperation.

You got a tattoo after the whale fell. Did you base it on one of the designs used in the movie? Or something else?

It's the Sea It's inspired not only by the movie, but also by growing up near the sea. Every line on it means something, whether it's the birds that represent the five members of my family, the lighthouse, or whatever. I started tattooing very early and I didn't like what they were doing. They were just intimidating. So I got rid of them in my 30s.

But this one actually came from a friend of mine named Anders Johansson. He was a Delta Force guy who was retiring at 42 or 43, and I was going to speak at his retirement. I had met him. We were very, very good together, then Andres rolled his car the day after Christmas [in 2024] and died. He named his daughter Arete, a Greek word that has no English equivalent. It means doing the best you can in any situation and being the best you can be at that moment. So I have arte written on my back.

(Spoiler alert.) The movie doesn't reveal it, but Krause and Brian Duffield know what Mitt's letter told Jay. Does a part of you wish you could write it?

To be able to talk about it during an interview and say, "I'm a complete actor," that selfish, egotistical part of me certainly does. But in the end, I never read what they wrote, and I never wanted to. It was the next best thing for me. I created what Mitt wrote in my head and never wrote it down. I also know that Daniel did not write that letter in the book. So he and Brian have their version together, and I have mine, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is what copy Austin read that day and how he as Jay took it. [Author's note: Duffield told Abrams what he and Krauss were thinking, and he immediately knew how to play the moment.]