Josh Brolin contracted Bell’s Palsy while relocating to Montecito, California.
“I got so stressed out about moving here because it represented something very specific to me that I ended up contracting a mild case of Bell’s Palsy,” Brolin, 56, revealed on the Thursday, January 30, episode of SiriusXM’s “Literally! With Rob Lowe” podcast.
When host Rob Lowe asked if the condition occurred from stress, Brolin replied, “Absolutely a hundred percent. There’s nothing else to blame it on.”
Brolin, who grew up on a ranch in Paso Robles, California, explained that he previously was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy — which is temporary facial muscle weakness or paralysis — under a similar situation.
“The last time I got Bell’s Palsy was 17 years ago when I was thinking about moving back up here,” Brolin shared. “So the two times I’ve gotten Bell’s Palsy are when I was thinking about moving up here. And then I moved up here and I was like, ‘Oh! it’s all good.’”
When asked by Lowe, 60, whether he’s been able to get to “the other side” of it where memories are not the “number one thing” he thinks about, Brolin shared, “Not only that, all these good memories are starting to come up.”
“I’m like, wow, I remember when I was on Biltmore, we’re down in Butterfly. Was it Miramar? All these great things. So all these things are popping out of the ground,” Brolin said. “My childhood wasn’t as severe as I kind of illustrated it to be. Which we do anyway, as writers and storytellers, we make everything more dramatic and more severe. And not that it wasn’t, because I think it was. But, all the other stuff came too, and it’s been really nice.”
Brolin resides in California with his third wife, Kathryn Boyd, with whom he shares daughters Westlyn, 6, and Chapel, 4. (Brolin was previously married to Alice Adair, with whom he shares Trevor, 36, and Eden, 30. He also tied the knot with Diane Lane in 2004, but the marriage came to an end in 2013.)
In a November 2024 interview with The Times, Brolin recalled his wife’s reaction to envisioning their life in the California neighborhood. “My wife was, like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so great,’” he said, while noting that he was imagining his youngest two children in prison. “I was so afraid to move back there. I was freaking out. I contracted a minor case of Bell’s palsy — I had paralysis in my face.”
