Josh Brolin reveals that he auditioned for The Goonies six times since the filmmakers didn’t want to give it to him on nepotism

Even as an actor with a bevy of great movie credentials, Josh Brolin is still proud to talk about his early childhood role in The Goonies. The Thanos star is always game to give anecdotes from his time on the Steven Spielberg-produced, Richard Donner-directed film. Brolin recently told a story about how he had been reading Stanislavsky’s method acting techniques and recalled Spielberg re-directing his performance, “And he looked at me, and he goes, ‘Just act.’ And I was like, ‘I know, but–’ And he wasn’t being rude, he was just like, ‘Don’t overcomplicate it. Just get in there, look around, listen to people, and just do your deal.’” 

According to People Magazine, Brolin also recently dropped the nugget that the filmmakers knew he was James Brolin’s son, but wouldn’t give in to casting on nepotism, so they made him audition six times. Brolin told Rob Lowe on his Literally! podcast, “I think Goonies was quite an accident. I went in there, I’ve 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.'”

Brolin talked about meeting with both Donner and Spielberg, “And I just looked right for the part. You look at Sean Astin, you look at the type of movie it is, I looked like a bit of a bad boy, but sort of a jock, and I was in good shape, so they were like, that’s the guy. I went back six times, just so they could make sure, and then I did it.”

At a Goonies panel at NYCC last year, Brolin appeared alongside castmate Ke Huy Quan, where he asked his favorite moment from making the movie. Brolin responded with a story, “They wouldn’t let us see the ship the whole time they were building it. So we finally ended up on the Warner Brothers lot, and we were shooting in different stages, but they wouldn’t let us see the ship…Finally the moment came, I think, four months into filming, four-and-a-half months into filming, and they lined us up, they backed us in, they had us close our eyes. They said, ‘We want you to go underwater.’ They had speakers underwater. They had all the cameras set up. And they said, ‘We want you guys, because we’re coming off the slide, that’s the cut, and we want you to come up from under the water and turn around,’ and they’re going to get the real reaction of, you know, all of our real reaction of the ship.”