These are photos from Josh Brolin’s appearance on the October issue of VMAN Magazine – we got these last week, and I was just itching for an excuse to use them. Because although I think Josh is probably a douche in real life, I find him incredibly sexy. Like, Hot Guy Friday sexy. I like that he looks like a man, you know? It’s the Jon Hamm thing – Brolin isn’t necessarily aging the best way, but I like that he looks his age, and he wears his experiences well.

Anyway, Brolin is also the October Playboy Interview. Since Playboy usually doesn’t put their interviews online, we have to make do with Us Weekly’s excerpts. You know why I appreciate Playboy? They do one of the most comprehensive interviews in celebrity culture, and their interviewers aren’t afraid to ask the bitchy questions. So whoever was doing Brolin’s interview asked him about all of the cheating rumors – like the one about Josh and his costar and friend Marley Shelton, and the time in 2007 when he was busted getting his groove on with some NOLA random. Anyway, in the Playboy interview, Josh denies that sh-t:

Diane Lane’s husband has never been unfaithful.

“I don’t f*** around on my wife,” Josh Brolin tells Playboy in its October issue. “I mean, check her out, man. My relationship with my wife is fantastic.”

Married to actress Lane since 2004, Brolin, 42, was the target of cheating rumors when he was photographed kissing actress Marley Shelton, his costar in the flick Grindhouse.

“Marley is my wife’s and my great friend,” the actor explains of the pic. “I’m an extremely affectionate guy…Marley and I were out together, turned around and saw there were cameras. That’s it.”

Jokes Brolin: “Next time I see that camera guy, I’m going to give some guy a good smack on the lips and then hopefully it will be ‘Josh Brolin is gay’ instead of that I’m f***ing around on my wife.”

Brolin and Lane, 45, also hit headlines back in December 2004 when he was arrested for spousal battery just four months after their wedding; Lane eventually called the incident a “misunderstanding.”

“I feel rage about that,” Brolin admits of the surprising arrest. “I feel I’ve gotten to a point where I can’t explain it, defend it or compensate for it. I can’t say, ‘No, I’m actually a really good guy and that didn’t happen.’ Everybody knows what happened because it’s all out there.”

He continues about the fight: “I talked big, she said ‘F*** you’ and called the cops, and somebody had to go to jail. This will be there for the rest of my life. That f***ing sucks. It’s been so disruptive to our lives. It’s also post-O.J., and that horrifies us both. It kills me, man. It kills me.”

In his Playboy interview, the star also offers his thoughts on another Hollywood couple: his dad James Brolin and wife Barbra Streisand. “The fact that he got together with her and found this solace is such a coup and so wonderful,” he gushes of the pair, who wed in 1998. “The guy was so frigging unhappy and lonely. She’s always like, ‘Come over. We’ll have cake or cocktails or soup or ice cream.’ I love her and I love what they’ve created together. I say thank God for her.”

Brolin also defends the acting prowess of Megan Fox, his costar in Jonah Hex. “What Megan has done is confuse everybody thoroughly,” he says of Fox, 24. “To me, she’s doing something more interesting than what a lot of other young people in movies are doing.”

He even compares Fox to a classic movie actress. “Katharine Hepburn, one of the most appreciated actresses today, was hated back in her heyday. She was box office poison…They didn’t understand her. Yet now we all look back and go, ‘Okay, she was incredible,'” he says.

Brolin hopes to help Fox find work with his own film production company. “I would love to be the person who puts Megan in a film in which she can actually do something interesting.”

[From Us Weekly]

Okay, I kind of love the way he explains the domestic battery arrest. That must have been a hell of a fight – and I would love to think of Diane Lane that way. The kind of woman who would call the cops on her husband in the middle of drunken pissing match, because you know that’s exactly what it was. They were probably both sh-tfaced and they started fighting, and Josh was all “go f-ck yourself” and Diane was all “You piece of sh-t, Imma gonna call the cops and you can spend the night in jail thinking about what you just f-cking said to me.”

VMAN Magazine photos by photographer Hedi Slimane, courtesy of VMAN.