Josh Brolin’s onscreen persona is that of a consummately grizzled badass, one who maintains an almost permanently furrowed brow and intense physicality, which isn’t too far from his real-life personality. The actor can come across as sardonic to the point of being curmudgeonly in interviews, and he’s never one for mincing his words.
After all, this is the guy who played the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest of big bads for years, and yet blasted his other appearance in the superhero genre that didn’t require him to strap up in a motion leotard as a business transaction. Brolin is at it again, this time revealing to ComicBook what annoyed him during his MCU stint that he didn’t have to deal with on Denis Villenueve’s Dune.
“They give you everything. There was none of that, and by the way, they did with Marvel also, the only thing with Marvel is once in a while, I started to pick up on why do they keep changing it when we get to the set? Because they would release pages to make you think it was one thing, and then you would change it and do it, that was annoying. With Dune, it’s all out there, you have a book, you have source material, it’s kind of tough to hide it, even though it’s a very loyal adaptation, there’s some things that are changed, there’s some things that are ad-lib, there’s some things that are created for.
Because it kind of has its own life, but no. And it’s all practical, we’re on sets that you’re looking at, you’re in the middle of these massive sets, the production design was on a massive scale, whereas Marvel, it’s kind of up to your imagination, both are equally fascinating and deserve a lot of focus, but very different.”
Of course, the clear difference is that the MCU is the world’s biggest franchise and must maintain an air of secrecy at all times to prevent spoilers leaking online, whereas Frank Herbert’s Dune was first published in 1965, so it’s not like Villenueve would be forced to hide large sections of the screenplay from his cast so they didn’t end up being given away ahead of time.
You see the point he’s getting at, though, when it must be irritating for the talent to be given such vague instructions on the day of shooting or be forced to react on the fly to last-minute rewrites, but that’s never been Villenueve’s style.
