The rocky relationship between Josh Brolin’s Mitt Gardiner and Austin Abrams’ Jay Gardiner is at the heart of Brian Duffield’s Whalefall, but Brolin is also quite literally the heartbeat of the emotional survival tale.
Rather than die in a hospital from mesothelioma, Mitt, the seafaring jack-of-all-trades, chose to take his own life by weighing himself down and jumping off his boat near Monastery Beach, Calif.. He did so while estranged from his college-aged son (Abrams’ Jay).
Throughout Jay’s childhood, Mitt raised him in a fashion that’s a few rungs below R. Lee Ermey’s abusive drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket. He wanted Jay to be better prepared for life’s unpredictability than he was, and while he passed on plenty of valuable know-how, particularly when it came to scuba diving, he imposed his will to such a degree that Jay defiantly chose to attend college in the landlocked cornfields of Iowa.
Brolin had read Daniel Kraus’ Whalefall before agreeing to play Mitt in Kraus and Duffield’s adaptation. When he finished, he embraced the book and wailed, both as a father and as a son.
“You have to allow [your children] to make their own decisions and fall and skin their emotional and psychic knees. So I think [my emotional reaction] was the buildup of that inside me,” Brolin tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Whalefall’s Oct. 16 theatrical release. “It makes me look at the impacts [Brolin’s father, actor James Brolin] wanted to have. When you’re an adolescent and you see that something means so much to a parent, it’s just an opportunity to rebel. Then you get older and you’re like, Oh man, he really tried hard.”
A year after Mitt’s death, Jay returns home to comfort his mother (Elisabeth Shue’s Zara) and two older sisters (Jane Levy’s Eva and Emily Rudd’s Nan). But he refuses to visit his father’s grave with his mom, in part because Mitt isn’t 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 at the bottom of the ocean, hoping to reconcile their profound differences in the process. But his lofty plan quickly goes awry when he gets caught up in a sperm whale’s pursuit of a squid and wakes up in the multichambered stomach of the 80-foot-long, 60-ton leviathan. With just one hour of oxygen left, Jay must figure out a way to escape his impossible predicament, forcing him to draw on the lessons and wisdom he passively absorbed from his father.
The whale ultimately serves as a stand-in for Mitt and the all-consuming weight of his legacy and expectations on Jay. To underscore the metaphor, Duffield recorded Brolin’s heartbeat before filming began and played it throughout Abrams’ two months inside the claustrophobic, practical whale-stomach sets. The track was later enhanced in postproduction to function as the whale’s heartbeat in the film.
As Whalefall hits theater, Brolin is prepping for the long-awaited return of his CIA character, Matt Graver, in Sicario 3, opposite Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro Gillick and Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer. The threequel had already gone through numerous iterations by the time Brolin first updated THR on its status in May 2022. In November 2025, Brolin then told me that it seemed to be “right around the corner.” Fortunately, the good news finally arrived in early October, as Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight delivered a game-winning script for Padraic “Pat” McKinley to direct. (If you haven’t seen McKinley and Ethan Hawke’s The Weight, treat yourself when it arrives on digital Oct. 20.)
It’s fitting that Knight ended up being the one to crack the code, given that he’s simultaneously penning a James Bond movie for the auteur filmmaker who launched the Sicario franchise, Denis Villeneuve.
“We were always looking at scripts. We always wanted to do it. We didn’t intend to wait this long, but you have Benny [del Toro], Emily [Blunt] and me looking at things and reacting to filmmakers or scripts differently,” Brolin shares. “But then Steven Knight wrote a script that was incredible, and it was kind of undeniable. All of us reacted similarly. So we’re very excited about doing it. We’ll do it next year. We have a great filmmaker, Padraic McKinley, who we think is going to make a very good movie, and we’re excited.”
One of the franchise’s best scenes unfolds at the end of Stefano Sollima’s second installment, Day of the Soldado. Brolin’s Graver comes face to face with Isabela Merced’s shell-shocked Isabel after he and del Toro’s Alejandro used her as a pawn in their attempt to take down her cartel kingpin father. The supremely overconfident Graver finally shows some remorse for the damage their dirty work has inflicted on innocent lives. And on the day of filming, Brolin broke down in tears after witnessing Merced’s portrayal of the shattered teenager.
Needless to say, Brolin is eager to build on that in the third chapter. “You’re going to be able to see a different side of Matt Graver that you haven’t seen in the past,” Brolin adds.
The first time I spoke to Brolin was for Outer Range season one in May 2022. Sicario writer Taylor Sheridan had found pandemic-era success with his Yellowstone series, 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. It had to be for Brolin to return to TV as a series lead for the first time in two decades.
Unfortunately, when Outer Range returned for its second season in May 2024, it didn’t receive the same promotional push as the first, despite earning even better reviews. The writing was already on the wall, and sure enough, the series was canceled a couple of months later.
Fast-forward to August 2026, I was knee-deep in Lanterns coverage 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 had scared Brolin away from another major TV commitment, as it had for nearly two decades. But he’s not entirely sure that’s the case.
“Outer Range was heartbreaking. But Lanterns, I don’t know, maybe it was too close [to Outer Range],” Brolin says.
What he is sure of is that Amazon Prime Video made a mistake. Tom Pelphrey’s recent Emmy win for Task only reinforces that view, as do the flourishing careers of Lewis Pullman and Imogen Poots.
“I really loved Outer Range, and seeing what those actors — Tom Pelphrey, Lewis Pullman, Imogen Poots — have done since then makes me very happy,” Brolin shares. “To me, it’s a great middle finger to those people who canceled that show. It’s like, You had gold.”
Below, during a conversation with THR, Brolin also discusses an unconscious choice he made in Mitt and Jay’s most confrontational flashback.
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I’ve been hearing a lot about your houseguests lately, one being Glen Powell and another being the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Whalefall, Daniel Kraus. Do the Brolins run a bed and breakfast for creative folks between movies?
(Laughs.) I’d be very happy to leave that legacy. Now that we’ve moved, we’ve got more and more people stopping by. Glen rented my house in Atlanta, a house that we no longer have, probably because Glen stayed there. (Laughs.) Daniel, who was finishing a novel, stayed with us for two weeks, which was so pleasant. He was the best house guest imaginable. You never really knew he was there. You didn’t feel like you had to host him at all. Then he left, and four days later [in May 2026], he won the Pulitzer for Angel Down, the book he wrote after Whalefall. That made me feel like I had won the Pulitzer for Angel Down.
Your house must have good vibes.
It actually does! It’s a cool place. We got lucky.
Late last year, you told me about finishing Whalefall during the filming of Dog Stars and sobbing once you were finished. Have you figured out why it opened the floodgates?
As a parent, to be serious for a second, you’re struggling, you’re improvising, you’re hoping, you’re projecting — and then you have to deal with real human beings. So it’s not just what you’re intending of them, and you realize how ridiculous that statement is. You can’t help but impart things that you think are important, and yet kids grow up and live their own lives. You have to allow them to make their own decisions and fall and skin their emotional and psychic knees.
So I think it was the buildup of that inside me. I’ve only been a parent, man. I graduated high school, and I think I had a year to myself that didn’t prove to be great. Then I had kids, and I’ve been a parent ever since. My older kids, I see what they’ve done with their lives, and I’m so proud of them. I now have a 38-year-old, a 33-year-old, a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. So I’ll be doing this from the beginning to the end of my maturity.
Did it hit you as a son as well?
Totally. My dad [James Brolin] hasn’t seen the movie yet, and I really look forward to him seeing it. It makes me look at the impacts he wanted to have. When you’re an adolescent and you see that something means so much to a parent, it’s just an opportunity to rebel. And for what? It’s for no other reason than you’re just being an adolescent. Then you get older and you’re like, Oh man, he really tried hard. So I softened up to all that, and I’m done with that now.
Mitt reminds me of these famous sports dads — Earl Woods, Richard Williams, Marv Marinovich — who put a golf club or tennis racket or football in their kids’ cribs.
Totally.
Is the fundamental issue here that Mitt couldn’t mold Jay exactly in his image?
I think it comes more out of a paranoia that Jay is going to have to go through the hardships that Mitt went through when he was young. The intention is, I don’t want you to go through what I had to go through. I’m going to design your hardships in the way that I think is better and more productive so you’re able to be self-sufficient later on. And the truth of the matter is that it ostracized his kid from him. But ultimately, be it legacy or whatever you want to call it, Jay utilizes all the things that he was taught in order to survive as long as he’s able to survive. It’s a symbol because it’s a parable of the whale.
The Steinbeck quote that’s tattooed on his back — “Our Father who art in nature” — is essentially his religion. He has this belief system involving whales and the natural world. So did the cancer and the alcohol take what was already an unusual creed and cause him to lose his mind within it?
I think the alcohol has a lot more to do with that than the desperation of knowing you have cancer and limited time. He knows his son is leaving [for Iowa]. He knows their last boat ride is probably going to be the last time he spends with his kid. So he’s trying 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 the drinking makes it ten times worse. We can all identify with this on some level — whether it’s as a parent or a child, but the more you try, the less effective it is.
So it was a really uncomfortable scene. All the scenes were uncomfortable to do, but that was an extremely uncomfortable scene that felt very real. There was something that wasn’t necessarily intended, but when I watched the movie, I saw how much Mitt touches Jay. He’s trying to make it tactile. It’s almost like he’s trying to mold the wet clay, which looks so desperate and so sad to me. But I didn’t even notice it until I saw the movie and went, Oh, that’s a cool extra act of desperation.
You got a tattoo after Whalefall. Did you base it on one of the designs used in the movie? Or is it something else?
It’s nautical. It was not just inspired by the film, but also by growing up near the sea. Every line that it has means something, whether it’s the birds that represent the five members of my family, or the lighthouse, and what that is. I got tattoos very early on, and I didn’t like what they did. They were just intimidating. So I got rid of them when I was 30.
But this one really 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 supposed to speak at his retirement. I had gotten to know him. We got along very, very well. Then Anders ended up rolling his car the day after Christmas [in 2024] and died. He had named his daughter Arete, and it’s a Greek word that has no English equivalent. It’s about doing the best you can do in any situation and being the best of you in that moment. So I have Arete written on the top of my back.
(Spoiler Warning.) The movie doesn’t reveal it, but Kraus and Brian Duffield know what Mitt’s letter to Jay said. Does any part of you wish you could’ve written it?
To be able to talk about it during interviews and say, “I’m a complete actor,” that selfish, egotistical part of me sure does. But ultimately, I never read what they wrote, and I never wanted to read it. That was the next best thing to me. I created what Mitt wrote in my head, and I never wrote it down. I also know that Daniel didn’t write that letter in the book. So he and Brian have their version together, and I have my version, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is whatever version Austin read that day and how he, as Jay, took it. [Writer’s Note: Duffield told Abrams what he and Kraus thought it said, and he instantly knew how to play the moment.]
Good news is extremely hard to come by nowadays, but after years of begging and pleading to see you chew gum and wear flip flops on the big screen again, it’s happening at long last. How did Sicario 3 finally get over the hump?
We were always looking at scripts. We always wanted to do it. We didn’t intend to wait this long, but you have Benny [del Toro], Emily [Blunt] and me looking at things and reacting to filmmakers or scripts differently. But then Steven Knight wrote a script that was incredible, and it was kind of undeniable. All of us reacted similarly. So we’re very excited about doing it. We’ll do it next year. We have a great filmmaker, Padraic McKinley, who we think is going to make a very good movie, and we’re excited.
You and Benicio are great writers in your own rights, and you’ve both contributed more to the Sicario movies than people realize. Have you been feeding Steve plenty of notes?
I had my notes. But even though Benny and I are focusing more on pre-production than we have in the past, it becomes instinctual once we get [to set]. We both experiment a lot.
I’ve told this story a million times, but I remember when Meryl Poster, who was third in charge at Miramax back in the day, said, “The worst auditioners that Miramax had ever experienced were Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin.” It was insulting then, but it makes sense to me now just because we experiment.
So you don’t know [how much you’re going to add or reapproach] until you’re actually doing it on the day and even then you’re experimenting. But having done Sicario and Sicario 2 together, if something wasn’t working, we weren’t shy about saying it.
It’s going to be interesting to see how you play Matt Graver after Sicario: Day of the Soldado. When we last saw him on that helicopter, his shell of arrogance had cracked as he was forced to reckon with his role in traumatizing this teenage girl (Isabela Merced’s Isabel) in front of him.
Yeah, I’m really, really looking forward to it. You’re going to be able to see a different side of Matt Graver that you haven’t seen in the past.
I haven’t had a chance to commiserate with you about the cancellation of Outer Range. I was very disappointed by that, especially since I knew that you were very hesitant to lead a TV show again unless it was under the right circumstances.
I didn’t have a horrible experience [as a series lead two decades prior to Outer Range]. It was just too fast. There wasn’t enough care put into it. It was just like, Let’s get it out there. Overall, I was involved with some pretty good shows, at least shows that I liked. But Outer Range was heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking.
Did that heartbreak ultimately lead you to say no to Lanterns? Did one lead to the other?
No, it was just one of those things. Lanterns, I love those actors, and I’ve seen it. I hope that it’s killing it. If I decide not to do something, I never really think, Oh, had I done it, it could have been better. Birdman was that way when I saw what Edward Norton did with it. I was like, That’s excellent. It’s not necessarily what would’ve transpired had I done it, but there’s no comparison. Matt Damon was supposed to do Milk before me, and because it pushed, he had to go do something else that he was required to do. So I went in there and did my version of that.
But Lanterns, I don’t know, maybe it was too close [to Outer Range]. I really loved Outer Range, and seeing what those actors — Tom Pelphrey, Lewis Pullman, Imogen Poots — have done since then makes me very happy. To me, it’s a great middle finger to those people who canceled that show. It’s like, You had gold. So that’s how I perceive it.
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Whalefall is now playing in movie theaters nationwide.