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.
