Josh Brolin Jokes He’s “Super Angry” About ‘Dune 3’: “I Believed I Was the Lead”

• Collider's Steve Weintraub talks with Josh Brolin and author Daniel Kraus for Whalefall.
• Brolin and Kraus discuss the movie's version of the character Mitt Gardiner
• They also discuss Whalefall inspiring Brolin to develop a new movie, Dune: Part 3, and Kraus's next movie adaptation, Angel Down.

When the first claustrophobic footage of Whalefall was released at CinemaCon earlier this year, Brian Duffield’s adaptation shot high up on our must-watch list for 2026. The movie stars Austin Abrams, of recent Resident Evil fame, and Josh Brolin in a harrowing survival thriller based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel.

While the movie centers around Jay Gardiner (Abrams), a young scuba diver who’s swallowed alive by a sperm whale, during a recent conversation with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Brolin and Kraus discuss the complex relationship between father and son at the heart of the film. (Quite literally, Brolin’s heart is a central element of the movie.)

While chatting with us about Whalefall, Brolin and Kraus talk about how Jay’s POV informs Brolin’s performance of Mitt Gardiner, and the contrast from the beginning of the movie to Jay’s memories, as well as how Kraus’s novel influenced Brolin’s approach to the character. Kraus explains how the movie has inspired his writing, and shares details on the upcoming adaptation of his World War I novel, Angel Down. Brolin also reveals how Whalefall inspired him to develop a new movie with Miramax, The Fisherman, and why what he’s heard about Dune: Part 3 makes him “super angry.”

Josh Brolin Breaks Down the Softer Side of His 'Whalefall' Character

Brolin and writer Daniel Kraus also choose their fate — the belly of a whale or Arrakis?

© 2026 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

COLLIDER: If you had to choose between being stranded for an hour inside a sperm whale or 24 hours on Arrakis from Dune, which would you choose?

DANIEL KRAUS: I'm going with Dune. I mean, there's people to talk to. Then if you're going to die, at least you can talk to the people. You can look out at the giant worms. It's like you could have an okay last 24 hours.

JOSH BROLIN: It's definitely more seemingly romantic. It's more… Well, it’s not more cinematic.

KRAUS: I don't see how you could say whale.

BROLIN: I’ll say whale.

KRAUS: That's crazy.

BROLIN: I'll say whale just because he said that. No, I think the whale because you're so challenged with your own capacities and capabilities that I want to see if I'm… Because that's why I do Everest; that's why I do Into the Blue. That's why I choose movies with massive challenges. So, I'll take the whale.

Josh, I'm very curious about this. How much of your performance was shaped by the fact that we're experiencing it through Jay's memories? Are you playing the man that he really was, or are you playing the version that his son remembers?

BROLIN: Or the version that his son prefers? Do you know what I mean? I think when you hear the voice, it's a softened voice. There's a scene in the movie in the bedroom when he's talking to his kid where you get a softer version of Mitt than what you get used to in the beginning, which is much harder, and the agenda is pushed a lot more, I don't know, steely, for lack of a better word. I think you get a hint of a softer Mitt, and I think that's the Mitt that you get in the whale.

© 2026 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

What did Josh bring to Mitt that you never imagined when you were writing the character, and Josh, did Daniel reveal anything about Mitt that completely changed how you approached him?

KRAUS: Mitt, again, is such an omnipresent figure in the book. When I write books, I don't ever picture anyone. It's like they're more like feelings, and for Mitt, it was like this kind of looming feeling. And so it almost was cathartic for me, I think, to see it performed in a specific, definite way.

When Mitt becomes an actual human being played by an actor, I can almost get my arms around that and say, “Okay, this is not this unwieldy, ungraspable force. This is a human being who's got clear faults and is not the size of the whale. He's the size of a man.” So I think it was actually kind of healthy for me to see that.

The first time we met in person, we were right outside of the makeup trailer, and I said, “I like your tattoos,” and we went in, and I got the same tattoos.

BROLIN: Oh, you did. That’s right. “Hold fast” on his knuckles.

KRAUS: Yeah, we both had “hold fast” on our knuckles. Even that, in a strange way, it's like here I am communing with Mitt and it's going okay.

BROLIN: We bonded quickly. I was blown away by the book. I thought the book was all I would need, but luckily, and it just kind of happened that we became very close very quickly, and I called him and I said, “Can you just tell me anything?” And he told me everything. So, what he told me about his own relationship with his dad, all that stuff, what he told me was incredibly informative in how I played the role.

'Whalefall' Inspired Josh Brolin's Next Movie

"We're going to do it in January."

Image via Sara De Boer/startraksphoto.com

You have a love of diving in the ocean, and I'm just curious, how did your personal relationship with the ocean inform Mitt and how you played him? There's a really powerful speech on the boat.

BROLIN: Selfishly, in a big way, it allowed me to kind of live a life, at least for a few months, that I would have lived had I not become an actor. Do you know what I mean? It was like I got to live. It wasn't just another character, even though I think it was very important to me because of the parent-child relationship, all that stuff, my relationship with my son, my relationship with my father.

But selfishly, to act as if I was a fisherman, a seafaring guy that had lived that life his whole life, I was not only totally in, but we're going to do a movie in January that was inspired by me doing this.

Wait, what?

BROLIN: Yeah. The Fisherman. We thought of a story and sold it to Miramax, and then we're going to do it in January, which is purely based on being inspired by this experience.

Do you have a director?

BROLIN: Not yet.

Oh, so this is going, but you're putting it all together literally right now?

BROLIN: Right now.

That's crazy.

BROLIN: Yeah, it is crazy. And that's never happened to me in 42 years of doing this. I've never been so inspired that I didn't want it to end, so much so that I made it continue. Different character.

It's just it's so amazing because when you're in that unique position that you can will this into existence, this is not the norm.

BROLIN: This is not the norm.

As an individual for you, you were obviously on set; was this your first time really watching a movie up close, being made?

KRAUS: To this degree, definitely.

As a writer, what did you take away from this experience for what you want to write in the future, or did it inspire you, knowing now how the sausage is made, to write a movie script? How did it inspire you?

KRAUS: If it inspired anything, it's reiterating to not write — books, anyway — ever thinking about the movie. I never have, and now I would do so even less, if that's possible. Because I never would have ever thought that Whalefall would be adapted. It seemed unadaptable in my head, and yet here we are.

So, I'm just going to double down on that, really. I'm going to continue to write things that are books first, and in my mind exist only as books, and I think whatever uniqueness or individuality I can bring to those books, sometimes, I think, can shine through, and someone would say, “This might be an unlikely story to adapt to the screen, but that's why we're going to do it, because it's so unlikely and so unusual.”

Mitt is a complicated figure. When you're playing someone who has caused his son pain but also genuinely loves him, how do you avoid making him either the villain or the misunderstood hero?

BROLIN: You're the first person that has said that that we haven't pushed that on. But it's obvious that he loves him. He loves his son, and it's obvious that his son loves him. It's the intention behind it, I think. It's the intention. He gets desperate that he wants to impart something that he thinks is going to save his son's life or be self-sustaining in some way, and that's what we all want to do as parents. I just think that he gets in his own way.

He has his own past. He doesn't want his son to go through the pains that he went through, which, strangely enough, creates more pain. Every mistake that every parent makes at some point in their parenting trajectory, this is just an extreme version of it. And yet it's those things that you don't think get inside Jay are the things that enable him to survive for as long as he does.

Josh Brolin Is "Super Angry" After Seeing a Cut of 'Dune 3'

Kraus also discusses his next novel adaptation for Angel Down.

Individual for both of you: You are working on Angel Down as an adaptation. Can you tell people the status of that, and for people that haven't read the book, what it's about? And Josh, I spoke to someone who may or may not have seen a cut of Dune 3, and, pardon my language, fucking loved it. I’m just curious if you've seen it and want to share anything.

KRAUS: Angel Down is a World War I story about an angel that is shot down over a battlefield, and then the soldiers have to sort of decide what to do with it. And, yeah, I've written the script. We just hired a director; it's not public yet. So, we are all systems go. Looking at casting next. It's as weird a movie as it is a book.

BROLIN: And by the way, he won the Pulitzer for it.

You know what you're doing as a writer. I'll throw that out there.

KRAUS: Thank you.

BROLIN: And Dune 3, I believed I was the lead, and then I heard — I haven't seen it yet, but I heard now that I'm not, and I'm pissed. I'm super angry about it. But I hope people enjoy it. Sort of.

Whalefall opens in theaters on October 16.