Published: November 25, 2024
How This Actor’s 99-Year-Old Grandma Inspired Him to Get Sober
By Movieguide® Contributor
MCU actor Josh Brolin recalled how an encounter with his 99-year-old grandmother caused him to realize there was more to life than drinking.
Brolin suffered from alcoholism for 30 years.
“I was born to drink. I was birthed to drink. My mother drank exactly like I did, and I was raised to be a man and drink like the male equivalent of my mother,” he wrote in an excerpt of his new memoir “From Under the Truck.”
By age 15, he had already hit rock bottom in his addiction to drinking, and he didn’t give up the vice until he was 45.
“There was a hit and run at Del Taco, [and I] woke up on the sidewalk.” Brolin told Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast, per PEOPLE. “I didn’t know where my car was, and it wasn’t that rare. That was just, you know, the 400th time that it happened.”
Though this was a common occurrence, this time was different because that night Brolin was supposed to pick up his brother and head to the hospital to see their grandmother, who was on her deathbed.
“Anyway, I woke up on the sidewalk, went inside. My brother called me. ‘Where are you?’ Picked him up, walked into that hospital eventually,” Brolin said. “Everybody knew when I walked into the room, [my grandma] picked her head up and looked at me and smiled and that was it. I was done. I said, ‘If this woman could get through 99 years on life’s terms, how dare me?’”
READ MORE: AVENGERS ACTOR JOSH BROLIN CELEBRATES 8 YEARS SOBER: ‘SOBRIETY IS KNOWING THAT GOD IS IN EVERYTHING’
“I’d gotten away with [so much], I was 45 years old and I’d gotten away with a lot, been in jail nine times, done a little bit of whatever,” he continued. “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.”
The actor has taken his sobriety seriously ever since and has come to love the new life he lives.
“I love being sober. I have more fun,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing that I go through that I am absolutely certain wouldn’t be worse if I was drinking.”
“I feel like something’s been cultivated in me that I helped cultivate that, that my life now is better than my greatest romance of any drink I could have,” Brolin said. “I actually like my life. Not that I didn’t before, because I loved it before, except when I would write indecipherable texts. That—I didn’t like that.”
Brolin isn’t the only MCU actor to get sober.
READ MORE: TOM HOLLAND COMMITTED TO SOBRIETY AFTER STRUGGLE WITH ALCOHOL ‘SCARED’ HIM