Josh Brolin Worked at an Italian Restaurant as a Teenager

Josh Brolin is dishing out details on his first job!

When Brolin, 56, appeared on the May 7 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote his upcoming memoir, From Under the Truck, and the new season of Outer Range, the actor mentioned that before he made his film debut in 1985’s The Goonies, he worked in an Italian restaurant.

“I cooked in an Italian restaurant between 12 years old and 15 years old,” Brolin told host Jimmy Kimmel, who asked whether The Goonies was Brolin’s first-ever job. After Kimmel, 56, joked that working at a restaurant at those ages could be illegal, Brolin said “a friend of a friend who owned the restaurant” first hired him and noted he was sent to the kitchen after an ill-fated stint as a busboy.

“You give the bread or you don’t give the bread in time and they go, ‘Excuse me? Excuse me?’ And then I threw the bread at somebody and then I lost that job. I got fired within three days,” the actor said. “So then they put me in the back in the kitchen, and it was an open kitchen, it was an Italian restaurant, we had an opera singer that would go from table to table. It was a fun restaurant, it was more presentational.”

Despite Brolin’s insistence that he enjoyed the job, he was not complimentary of the restaurant’s food quality. “The food sucked, it was really bad,” he said.

“But I made chicken, I became head pasta cook by the time I was 15,” Brolin added. “I thought that was what I wanted to do.”

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Brolin, the son of actor James Brolin, grew up in central California and eventually moved to Santa Barbara as a teenager; a 2006 interview with CBS News noted that he also worked as a cattle wrangler during his youth.

“He was in the world. But we didn’t go on sets, really,” Brolin said of his childhood years. “We didn’t spend a lot. My mom was very adamant about not growing up around that. We grew up around a lot of country western people. That was a huge thing for me, you know? Much bigger than actors.”

Elsewhere during Brolin’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the actor joked that he works hard to entertain audiences after Kimmel described him as one of his favorite guests. “Because you never know what’s going to happen. I might take off my clothes, I might not,” he said. “You’ll see!”

Brolin most recently appeared in the science fiction blockbuster Dune: Part Two. The second season of his Prime Video series, Outer Range, premieres on May 16.