Actor Josh Brolin wasn’t always flush with Hollywood cash.
Before he became widely recognized for roles in films like “No Country for Old Men,” he was a working actor trying to make ends meet.
And at one point, he says, acting just wasn’t cutting it.
“I had to earn money. I had children going to school, and I just wasn’t making money, man,” Brolin said in an episode of The Great Creators with Guy Raz.
“If you’re lucky enough to make $100,000 a year, which I wasn’t, then you’re clearing $30,000 after taxes and commissions, and if you have a lawyer and you have a manager and an agent and all this stuff that I had back then.”
That financial pressure pushed him into something unexpected: day trading.
A Stranger With a Tip
Brolin says talking to someone on a plane got him interested in trying something new.
“I met a guy, Brett Markinson, on the airplane,” he recalled.
“We really hit it off. We laughed a lot, and he traded, it was part of what he did. He was an entrepreneur, but he traded, and he was very disciplined in it.”
He said Markinson’s willingness to share what he knew matched Brolin’s eagerness to learn.
“He was a guy who loves to talk and loves to teach, and I’m a guy who’s not afraid of asking questions, the same question 50 times until I understand.”
So Brolin got serious. “I went and I got TradeStation and I had my three screens and I had all my graphs and I had four tabs per screen,” he said.
“You look at stochastics and you look at this type of thing and I go, I don’t know what this means. What does that mean? Support and resistance, and I don’t understand.”
It Paid Off
Even if the subject bores most people, Brolin says he dove in.
“All this stuff that’s super boring to talk about because nobody’s interested in it like I am,” he said.
Eventually, his work paid off.
“I made more money than I had ever made acting, for sure. By far,” Brolin said.
“And it wasn’t just ’cause I got lucky with one stock that went through the roof. I was very disciplined in the breaths of upward momentum, you know, fairly solid stocks. So I’d get it when it would go down. I’d sell it when it would go up.”
These days, Brolin no longer day trades.
“I’m a long-term trader now,” he said.
“I don’t pretend to day trade because if you do that you have to be up at 4:30 every morning and you have to know your basket and you have done your due diligence for what you’re trading for that day and the night before.”
Acting Came Back Around
By the time Brolin starred in “No Country for Old Men,” released in 2007, he had come to terms with never becoming a big star.
“I was going to be a working actor, and that was okay with me,” he said.
“I had embraced that…that I would keep doing it as long as it fed me in some way. And I don’t mean financially. I knew that I could figure financials out. I knew that I could support myself not just through acting.”
Despite being offered big paychecks after that breakout film, Brolin said he stuck to projects he believed in.
“We’re offering you a few million dollars to do this thing…you’ve just done ‘No Country.’ Yeah, but I don’t want to do that. Yeah, but you need money, don’t you? Yes, desperately. And it’s just kind of…it’s been okay. It all works out okay.”
He added, “The story is more interesting anyway.”
For Brolin, that mix of financial survival and creative integrity became the real success story.
A random chat on a plane, lots of questions, and a willingness to learn helped him find a way to make money outside of acting, and do it in a way that worked for him.