Super Bad

If there’s a superhero on your screen this summer, Josh Brolin’s punching them in the face. Total Film goes head-to-head with the guy playing the iconic Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and Cable in Deadpool 2. Be afraid, be very afraid…

- Jamie Graham

Josh Brolin has a face chiselled out of rock, a bulging, unyielding torso and a grip that’s like slamming your hand in a car door, but he sure knows how to sweet talk. “Man, you have a voice like Jason Statham’s,” he tells Total Film in his rumbling drawl on a bright LA morning in March. Total Film, strangely delighted to be compared to the granite Cockney geezer, thanks him for the compliment. “You take that and run with it,” says Brolin, his growl reverberating into a deep-chested laugh that concludes, abruptly, with a stentorian sniff you might expect to explode from an eight-foot-tall, purple autocrat with a hard bald head to put Statham’s to shame. Or perhaps such a thunderous sniff would issue from a pumped-up supersoldier with a glowing eye and a cybernetic arm.

We’re talking, of course, about Thanos and Cable, the two bad guys (or, as Brolin prefers it, antiheroes) who are set to own the summer by unceremoniously handing a shedload of superheroes their asses. First up, in Avengers: Infinity War, Brolin plays lavender alien Thanos – the big bad who’s been lurking in the shadows of the MCU since Avengers Assemble and who we briefly glimpsed in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Expect him to get his shovel-like hands on the Infinity Stones to bend time and space, meaning the Avengers, Guardians, Doctor Strange et al are royally screwed. Not that Brolin felt especially badass on his first day of motion-capture…