Josh Brolin rides horses, works with cattle and loves driving his Dodge Ram pickup round Hollywood with Johnny Cash blasting out Ring of Fire. But suggest that he’s anything like George W Bush, the Texan oil man turned president, and Brolin’s eyes narrow as if he’s about to reach into his holster.

Brolin plays Bush in W, Oliver Stone’s film about the US president, which is released in the UK on Friday. Last week his performance secured him the award for actor of the year at the Hollywood film festival. Yet he almost didn’t take the role.

“I didn’t understand why he [Stone] wanted me,” he says. “I was offended. I said: ‘You are f****** kidding me.’ I stayed away from it. Then I saw the script and understood. [But] even when I started filming, I broke out in spots.”

Brolin’s family weren’t happy either. His father is James Brolin, a television star, and his stepmother is Barbra Streisand, the singer and actress, who is a Democrat and antiIraq war campaigner. “She [Streisand] said: ‘How much are you getting paid?’ ” says Brolin. “I told her it was a very low fee. She said, ‘Then why are you doing it?’ She was furious and would not talk to me. I kind of liked that one. I think, in the end, she was pleased that I was doing something of this weight.”

For all his protests, though, Brolin’s life has had more than a few similarities to Bush’s. As with the president, his father was a big star who eclipsed his early career. He, too, lived wild for a time, and just as Bush Jr had no initial interest in politics, Brolin did not much care for his father’s profession. “I wanted to be a writer, and my father wanted me to be a lawyer,” he recalls. “But maybe it was in the genes or perhaps it was an easy way out, because I thought I could use nepotism and nab an acting job to get me started.”

Brolin moved to Los Angeles from Texas, where he’d been living with his mother since his parents’ divorce, but his progress wasn’t as easy as he’d imagined. In fact, things went from bad to worse. “I had a row with my mother about it, because my parents had just got divorced and there were a lot of bad responses all around me,” says Brolin. “I stayed on my dad’s couch, then in the garage.”

At 17 he moved in with a girlfriend, got a few acting jobs, made his big screen debut in The Goonies in 1985, then became disillusioned. “I took off to Europe and just worked at various jobs, living from hand to mouth. I got mugged on a train in Italy, sleeping next to the toilet. I woke up to find a hand in my pocket, trying to get money. I tried to fight, but there was more than one of them and they broke a bottle and glassed me. I was finally taken to hospital by an Italian gypsy.”

He returned to LA and attempted to make his living as an actor once again. He got a job in one episode of 21 Jump Street, and then landed a long-running role in Private Eye, another television series. His name then remained just below the radar for two decades, before he hit the big time last year, a few months shy of his 40th birthday. In 12 months, Brolin appeared in not one, but four big releases: American Gangster, In the Valley of Elah, Grindhouse and No Country for Old Men, last year’s Oscar-winning film.

His only regret is that his mother is not around to see his success: she died in 1995 in a car crash. “She was great - a really strong Texan woman,” he says. “She was small, loud, angry, funny and drop-dead gorgeous. When she spoke, everyone listened. Then, one day, her car hit a tree. On that morning, she was there. On the next, she wasn’t. It taught me the fragility of life.”

His father married Streisand in 1998. Brolin says he and Streisand get on well. “She is extremely nice, likes gatherings and is sweet to my kids - her step-grandkids.” Brolin lives with the actress Diane Lane, who became his second wife in 2004. He has two children, his daughter Eden and his son Trevor, with Alice Adair, whom he divorced in 1992. Lane has a daughter, Eleanor, aged 15, from her first marriage to Christopher Lambert, the French actor, which ended in 1994.

“Our household is strange,” says Brolin. “I pretend to run the show and my wife allows me to think that I run everything. But she’s really in charge. We all get along with each other - all the kids and our exes. It is a modern marriage.”

Parked on the driveway next to his SUV is his wife’s petrol-electric Toyota Prius. “Our cars are total opposites,” he admits. “I love the Dodge Ram but don’t have much time for the Prius. I have always had an eye for an old Chevvy or Cadillac, too.”

He wishes the driveway still led to the Californian cattle ranch he was forced to sell a few years ago. “I should have done more movies to keep that ranch,” he says. “I was too precious about the work . . . [Since] I sold the ranch I’ve been in work. And not only are good films coming up, but they are mostly paying decent money, too. That’s life.”

And can he see George W Bush watching his latest blockbuster? “Maybe,” he says. “Eventually. But I don’t expect a call of congratulations any time soon.”

MY STUFF...

JOSH BROLIN: MY LIFE IN CARS

Honda Civic This understated runabout was Brolin’s first car Dodge Ram Brolin prefers his pickup truck to his wife’s petrol-electric Toyota Prius

1950s Cadillac One of these would remind him of when the US ‘made great cars’

ON MY iPOD Music by Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. I’m a country and western fan and don’t mind who knows it

ON MY DVD PLAYER

I have films that are more about the director than the story. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, Robert Rodriguez and Ridley Scott

I’D NEVER THROW AWAY

All my clothes from running my ranch, which I was forced to sell. I will buy another ranch one day