DC Comics is finally exploring their library of lesser known but equally cool comic book character. Before there’s another Batman or Superman, Jonah Hex will hit screens in summer of 2010. Josh Brolin and company brought the film to San Diego Comic Con a year early to give fans a taste of some footage and a chance to meet Jonah himself, as played by Brolin.
Crave Online: How would you describe Jonah Hex?
Josh Brolin: I don't know how to describe my character, I really don't because in the comic book he's this alcoholic curmudgeony kind of guy. You know, he's a bounty hunter, kind of goes from place to place just trying to get through the day. Not in the comic book, but from my perspective he's loosely based on this guy Col. Seaver, who existed back in Civil War times who is stabbed and shot forty-some odd times and grew to a nice ripe age before he died, but it's a hybrid of a lot of different people. This is one of those movies that before the day we shot I didn't really know what I was going to do, you know the voice and the this, and how do we go about this, what's going to work? So it sort of developed as we were shooting and everything seemed to do that, the whole story and script, were rewriting while we were doing it. It was a very tough shoot. Luckily I didn’t have a ton of dialogue so it was okay. It was challenging as a movie, as an actor, figuring out what it is as you’re doing it but I like how it turned out. I think we got very, very lucky in what we've come up with and seeing what we have now, I think we were extremely fortunate given what we had to work with.
Crave Online: What’s the romantic side with Megan Fox’s character?
Josh Brolin: There’s love in the air, but a weird love. A prostitute type.
Crave Online: What was your entry point to the character?
Josh Brolin: I didn’t read a lot of comic books as a kid. I read a lot of Ray Bradbury that was my thing, so there's a similarity there and I appreciated it very much When I got into it. I loved the fact that he was an antihero. I loved that it wasn’t an extremely successful comic book. There were three different manifestations of the comic book, but I loved the fact, like the character himself, it refuses to go away. There's a great survivalist element to this guy, and the comic book itself so I like the fact that he's an antihero, I like the fact that there's not another comic book character like him and that like I said in the panel, there's no model to base a film on him on, so we were really starting from scratch and got to create what we wanted to create with the blessing of those guys. Then when I met Jimmy [Hayward], Jimmy had a 1st edition of Jonah Hex that he brought, which I thought was really kind of funny and loved me in Thrashin’, a skateboard movie that nobody saw. So it fit within the bizarre nature of this film. It was a perfect match.
Crave Online: Do you have any horror stories from the makeup?
Josh Brolin: It was a horror story in itself. 3 hours of makeup per day. We figured out the end, with 46 shooting days, that I spent 5 ½ full days in the makeup chair, 24 hours a day. It’s great for the first five days. Then after that it starts to gets a little old. But, we were very lucky because I did a couple prosthetics in
Crave Online: How gratifying is it to see fans in the Comic-Con community so excited for Jonah Hex?
Josh Brolin: Honestly, no bullsh*t, it’s amazing. To have 6800 people react to that teaser, I reacted. I saw it on my computer at home with a friend of mine, next to me, who had been on the set, and he said, "That’s movie magic." He had been on the set, he saw what we went through, the realities of dealing like this with a camera her and all of the decisions that have to be made and then he saw that manifested in a couple of minutes, it was a six minute teaser, and he said, "That's amazing, that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen." It was nice to feel the buzz in the audience and that's what matters. This came out of nothing, this was a blank piece of paper at one point. It's very nice to get the reaction that we got. It’s like, "Ladies and gentleman, please come for a signing with Megan Fox and Josh Brolin, [whispers] Michael Fassbender," Nobody knows Michael yet, it's hilarious because we know and we know what you don't know yet, and I don't know if anybody saw Hunger, it’s this very little film that not a lot of people saw, he's in Inglorious Basterds and it's not about the f*cking resume per se, but it's about what he did with the role. The role was not flushed out in the writing and what he brought to the role, this idea that he talks about of A Clockwork Orange, you see it in the teaser and to me it's the greatest moment of the teaser. This is more obvious. You see the head come up and me and Jonah and the Megan, everybody goes wow. Then you have the silence in the middle of the teaser with Michael's character spinning his hat and total silence and him just whistling and pointing that thing. Everybody reacted to that great character moment; I think it will be a resounding character for everyone for sure.
