Source: Entertainment Weekly

Josh Brolin is reflecting on his relationship with Donald Trump before the business mogul moved to the White House.

The No Country for Old Men star befriended the U.S. president around the time they filmed Oliver Stone’s 2010 Wall Street sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, from which Trump was ultimately cut.

“I’m not scared of Trump, because even though he says he’s staying forever, it’s just not going to happen,” Brolin said of the president alluding to a third term in his new interview with The Independent. “And if it does, then I’ll deal with that moment. But having been a friend of Trump before he was president, I know a different guy.”

The Hail, Caesar star added that he was fascinated by Trump’s development of a luxury hotel “in the middle of a cesspool city” in the late ’70s.

“That’s interesting to me,” he said. “Now it’s power unmitigated — it’s unregulated.”

Brolin also thinks he understands why the former Apprentice star has appealed to voters across the country. “There is no greater genius than him in marketing,” he said. “He takes the weakness of the general population and fills it.”

He continued, “That’s why I think a lot of people feel that they have a mascot in him. I think it’s much less about Trump than it is about the general population and their need for validation.”

Representatives for the White House did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly’s request for comment.

Though he once considered Trump a pal, Brolin rejected his 2020 presidential bid in October 2020 in an impassioned Instagram post.

“I refuse to believe that Donald Trump is our core version of American masculinity,” the Dune star wrote at the time. “The America that was great was never based on creating hate and conspiracy in order to win. There have been a few, but none has lasted. Donald Trump has lied over 50,000 documented times, but we still are willing to let it go because he speaks to an American demographic that no longer felt masculine.”

Last year, Brolin shared a bizarre memory of an interaction he had with the future president at his New York apartment. “I said, ‘What’s upstairs?’ He said, ‘Our bedroom,'” he remembered on In Depth With Graham Bensinger. “And I said, ‘Can I see upstairs?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ And then nobody moved. And I said, ‘Cool. So should we go up?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And then he still didn’t move. And I’m thinking, ‘What the f— is happening?'”

Brolin is in the midst of a particularly busy chapter of his career. He can be seen in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, both of which are playing now in theaters. He also appeared in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which is streaming on HBO Max, this year, and lent his voice to Ken Burns’ The American Revolution docuseries on PBS.

Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.