Josh Brolin has opened up about the daily ritual that has kept him sober for twelve years.
The 58-year-old actor, who recently starred in ‘Whalefall,’ said that he logs into a Zoom meeting every morning at 6 a.m. Without fail. “Twelve years [sober], and I do a meeting every morning at 6am on Zoom,” he shared. Brolin, who first rose to fame in ‘The Goonies,’ traced his decision to quit drinking back to a morning he woke up on the sidewalk outside his house. He described that moment as a fork in the road, asking himself which direction he wanted to take for the rest of his life.
The actor admitted that drinking had simply gotten boring by the end. One of the turning points that pushed him toward treatment came after he was arrested for assaulting six police officers while under the influence. Brolin went to rehab for substance abuse in 2013, a period that followed several public altercations in the months after his split from ex-wife Diane Lane.
His path to sustained sobriety hit complications after he moved to Tucson with his first wife, Alice Addair. Though he called the city a “formational place” in his life, Brolin struggled to maintain his abstinence while living there and eventually began drinking again. He has since come to view alcohol through an entirely different lens. “I love being sober. I’m having way more fun now than I ever did drinking, and I never end up in jail, which is a real bonus,” he explained.
Brolin has been candid about the full scope of his substance use beyond alcohol. He acknowledged that he “got strung out on heroin a few times,” though he insisted he was “never a full-blown junkie.” These experiences and others are documented in his memoir, ‘From Under the Truck,’ where he detailed the day he was supposed to pick up his brother to visit their grandmother, who was said to be on her deathbed.
“I woke up on the sidewalk, went inside. My brother called me. ‘Where are you?’ Picked him up, walked into that hospital eventually,” Brolin wrote in the memoir. He described walking into his grandmother’s hospital room and watching her pick her head up, look at him, smile, and pass away. That interaction became the catalyst for lasting change.
“I was done. I said ‘If this woman could get through 99 years on life’s terms, how dare me?'” Brolin wrote. He noted that he was 45 years old at the time and had “gotten away with a lot, been in jail nine times, done a little bit of whatever.” The actor framed his decision as a kind of rebirth: “So I thought, I wonder if I could do that half of life like that and then do this half of life like this. Then I get to live two lives and not just one.”
Brolin, an Emmy winner, has also supported military veterans and worked to protect America’s rivers throughout his career.
