Josh Brolin told GQ magazine in a new interview that “I won’t ever stop shitting on ‘Jonah Hex‘ because it was a shitty fucking movie!” The 2010 comic book film, starring Brolin as the eponymous bounty hunter, is one of the genre’s most infamous flops, earning universal pans from critics and only grossing $11 million at the worldwide box office.
According to GQ, Brolin and his “Jonah Hex” director Jimmy Hayward “recently reconnected” and the filmmaker even “apologized for his part in the mess.” Brolin told Variety last year that part of the failure of “Jonah Hex” is that he rushed to hire a director and Hayward was just too inexperienced to execute Brolin’s vision for the comic book movie. Not that Brolin is interested anymore in taking out the film’s failure on Hayward, who revealed to Brolin that he has bone cancer and has been having several surgeries.
“It reminded me [that] you can’t just keep shitting on somebody,” Brolin told GQ. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on in his life. I mean, total facial reconstruction, the whole thing.”
In last year’s interview with Variety, Brolin remembered Warner Bros. telling him he only had two weeks to pick a director for “Jonah Hex.”
“Then you meet somebody who has a lot of knowledge, Jimmy Hayward, and I remember it didn’t feel right,” Brolin said at the time. “I loved that he was excited, but he just didn’t have the experience and he didn’t treat it like I would imagine somebody would want to treat it — to run back to their house at the end of their every day and watch tonal inspirations and Scorsese movies or this or that. He would be out partying instead.”
Brolin later added, “I just think we made a big mistake with the director — not to blame it all at him, because that was my choice, that was my bad choice. And then the studio took it over and every time that’s happened, in my experience, it has only gotten worse…That’s what happens when you start cutting to this idea of pandering for an audience, and how testing can bite you in the ass. You don’t know what the audience is going to want. ‘Jonah Hex’ was them taking the movie back and saying, how can we make this the most accessible movie? And they ended up making the least accessible movie.”
The actor has been making the press rounds in support of his role in “Dune: Part Two,” which has proven to be a far better franchise experience for Brolin.
“Well, obviously, it’s a great director, but there are no egos,” the actor said. “When you work with great people, there’s very little ego.”
“Dune: Part Two” opens in theaters March 1 from Warner Bros. Head over to GQ’s website to read Brolin’s latest profile in its entirety.