Brolin said he was intimidated by the “Gladiator” filmmaker’s directorial style: “I went back, called my agent and said, ‘I want out. Something’s really wrong.’”

Josh Brolin almost quit Ridley Scott’s new movie after he ‘got really scared’: ‘I’ve got to get the f--- out of here’

Brolin said he was intimidated by the “Gladiator” filmmaker’s directorial style: “I went back, called my agent and said, ‘I want out. Something’s really wrong.’”

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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June 30, 2026 5:22 p.m. ET

Josh Brolin in ‘The Dog Stars’. Credit:

20th Century Studios

Josh Brolin said that he tried to quit Ridley Scott’s new movie *The Dog Stars* after one day of shooting: “I want out.”

The *Weapons* actor said that his agent convinced him to stay despite thinking, “I’ve got to get the f--- out of here.”

Brolin quickly warmed up to Scott’s style after being intimidated by it, saying he “got super into it.”

Josh Brolin didn’t totally click with Ridley Scott‘s workflow at first.

The *Weapons* actor told *Empire* that he became extremely anxious on the first day of production of the post-apocalyptic film *The Dog Stars*, which features Brolin as an ex-Marine neighbor of Jacob Elordi’s protagonist in a world devastated by a flu pandemic.

“Ridley was talking a lot of stories and not really rehearsing,” Brolin said of the *Gladiator *director, “And it bugged me out, and I got really scared.”

Josh Brolin in Doraville, Ga., on May 1; Ridley Scott in Los Angeles in 2024.

Brolin, who previously collaborated with Scott on 2007’s *American Gangster*, said that he was so put off by the first day of shooting that he attempted to back out of the film.

“I went back, called my agent and said, ‘I want out. Something’s really wrong, and I’ve got to get the f--- out of here,’” he recalled. “Luckily, my agent is a close friend, and he said, ‘Rest for a day.’”

Despite his agent’s reassurance, Brolin said that he was still alarmed after that first day.

“I was like, ‘No, man, I know what the f--- you’re doing. It’s not one of those day-things,’” he said. “And I was right.”

Brolin said that he only acclimated to Scott’s directorial style on the film — which typically involves shooting a scene with multiple cameras from multiple angles simultaneously — after reviewing footage of his performance.

“[Ridley] goes, ‘Come here,’ and he brought me into his trailer and played the scene we had just finished,” the *No Country for Old Men* star explained. “It was a really good, very dynamic scene between me and Jacob, and he goes, ‘Okay?’ I go, ‘Okay,’ and then I started to feed off that.”

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Brolin quickly warmed up to Scott’s filmmaking methods.

“It took about a day or two for me to really embrace that, and then I got super into it, because it was stratospherically creative and stratospherically dangerous,” he said. “It was like, ‘This is what I’ve been asking for, but now I’m getting it, I’m fighting it, because there’s zero comfort in it.’”

Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin in ‘The Dog Stars’.

20th Century Studios

He added, “It became one of the more creative, satisfying projects that I’ve ever been involved with.”

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Based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name, *The Dog Stars* also features Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Guy Pearce, and Benedict Wong among its cast. The film is set to hit theaters on Aug. 28.

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