I am not a younger brother but I bet being one is weird, you have this guy who has the same DNA as you but is way ahead of you (even if he’s only two years older than you he still feels waaay ahead of you), and you’re compared to him loads by your family but because he’s way ahead of you definitely can never catch him up because you can’t catch up time, because time isn’t really flexible. Here are my favourite Hollywood younger brothers.
WORDS: ROBERT FOSTER
Stephen Baldwin
There are four Baldwin Brothers and they are all actors. Billy is the hottest Baldwin, he was a male model and starred in one of the best movies ever, Flatliners, Daniel is the ugliest Baldwin and was in Celebrity Rehab with Dr Drew a few years ago, Alec is actually the best Baldwin in terms of ability and actual success and is the funniest thing in 30 Rock, which leaves… the youngest and weirdest Baldwin, Stephen. Stephen Baldwin was in the best movie of the nineties (am I joking? I’m not sure), Biodome, where he played Doyle, who was who I wanted to look like/be until I was about 17.
Stephen was a total joker for a while, but I guess his older brothers made him eat lentils as a youth or noogied him until he said he liked the idea of gays marrying, and so he just rebelled against them. Because, when September 11th happened, like a lot of Americans, Stephen totally lost his shit. The whole ‘being attacked on home soil’ thing or whatever freaked him out enough for him to find God and now he’s a total maniac and probs a massive embarrassment for his older, liberal bros. He’s not just started going to church a bit though, he’s so into it he runs his own ministry that plays on his vague association with ‘extreme sports‘ and gets Christian skateboarders to do laps around him while he preaches in board shorts like Fred Durst crossed with Billy Graham or something.
Chris Penn
Chris Penn had a LOT to live up to, his older brother is a massive badass called Sean who beat the shit out of photographers back in 1986 when he was married to Madonna. Sean Penn looked insanely cool back then, despite being married to a lady who would become the biggest douchebag in the history of mankind less than twenty years later, and in fact also beat the shit out of her in a true ‘actually, chill out, that’s a pretty appalling act of violence’-type moment that all great badasses must at one point endure.
Sean cleaned up his act and got into campaigning for stuff, mainly stuff about GW Bush and war, and forgot about repeatedly smashing flash bulbs into people’s heads or having heroin for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then won a bunch of Oscars and assorted awards for being great etc.
But Chris must have seen that movie he was actually in, Rumble Fish, one too many times, and just totally missed the point of it. The plot of that movie is basically an older brother (Motorcycle Boy) comes home to a younger brother (Rusty James) and tries to get him to stop emulating him, but the younger brother doesn’t listen and it all fucks up.
Chris Penn managed to be amazing in Reservoir Dogs and play an unpleasant schmuck a few times, but he loved to party and be a badass like his big bro so much it eventually killed him, he died of ‘an unspecified heart problem’ (famous dead people’s agents’-speak for ‘DOING A SHITLOAD OF COKE IN ONE SITTING) in 2006.
Jim Belushi
You remember that kid at school that got by on the reputation of his older brother? Well, would you like to see that same kid in the context of Hollywood stardom and bad syndicated sitcoms? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Jim Belushi, or, as some smart cookie once called him: The Funniest Living Belushi.
John Belushi was the coolest guy ever, he had two finest hours, Animal House and Blues Brothers, plus a bunch of solid gold Saturday Night Live moments that are always getting taken down from Youtube. He was totally original, anarchic and untameable, so much so that he obviously died having a race to see who could do a metre of cocaine first, him or Chevy Chase (no one says that in official stuff but this is what I heard). It was very sad and Dan Ackroyd wore a leather jacket to his funeral and stuff but then I guess there was a gap in the market for a Chicago-raised Albanian with expressive eyebrows and a moderate weight problem, and so John’s younger brother Jim just filled it wholesale.
He was on Saturday Night Live for 2 years after Jon’s death, he was in films pretty much playing his brother, and he’s generally pissed all over his brother’s spotless legacy as a genius to this day, to the point he has one of those weeeeak family sitcoms where he plays a character with the same first name as himself (why are Americans so into doing that?). He’s always making a fool of himself and videos of him being a douche always end up on Youtube, he sold some elderly man a broken car, the worst thing he’s ever done, however, is go on tour with Dan Ackroyd and flat out just pretend to be his brother, which is just admitting that he owes everything to his brother being better than him but dying. How did this putz come from the same pair of nuts as the man who gave us this?
