Josh Brolin recalls the time dad James Brolin made the family eat his pet pig when he was a child

The "No Country for Old Men" actor compared his famous father to a stoplight that "never changes - it just stays perpetually red."

Josh Brolin clearly inherited a good deal of his father James Brolin's award-winning acting chops. But his sense of humor? Not so much.

When the younger Brolin, 56, learned that James, 84, told Graham Bensinger a humorous version of a dark story from his childhood, Josh decided to tell it his own way. "Did he tell you the pig story? What a f---ing dick," he began on Bensinger's In Depth podcast. "God, man."

"So this story of me raising pigs, this is a horrible story," Brolin warned. "Oink and Snort, those were their names. I helped raise these pigs, and then we're eating dinner one night — it's amazing to me that he would tell you that story. It makes him look so bad."

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The No Country for Old Men actor described his dad saying "'Guess what you're eating.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'Either Oink or Snort.' I said, 'What?" He went, 'Yeah, that's what we're eating. That's who we slaughtered.' I was like, 'Why would you tell a kid that?' It makes no sense. Why would you tell your kid that, with any semblance of, like, celebration? Or was he just looking to have an impact?"

Brolin surmised his father "was looking to have an impact." When Bensinger questioned what kind of impact James could possibly have wanted to make, Josh replied, "Psychologically? On camera? In front of you? I mean, I could get into it."

"When you feel like you don't have an impact, that's when you start to look for any impact, whether it's a negative impact or not," he continued. "I think I can break it down to it being that, because I can't imagine saying that to my kid. It's nowhere in my universe to say that to a kid. Why would you?"

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Josh grew up between Malibu and Santa Barbara, the son of Jane Cameron Agee, a casting director, and James, who in 2016, Josh called "a moderately successful celebrity on TV" during the time he was growing up, with lead roles on shows like Marcus Welby, M.D. and Hotel.

"He would work and then not work for a long time. We would have things and then we wouldn’t have things. I just didn’t understand that level of financial insecurity when I was a kid," he said of his upbringing. While the trail James blazed was confined largely to the small screen, Josh's first acting gig, in Richard Donner's 1985 classic The Goonies, proved a harbinger of things to come. The younger Brolin developed into a full-blown movie star, and he's still getting roles in the industry's biggest films four decades into his career.

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Reflecting on his father today, Brolin says, "My dad's an interesting guy in that he's super friendly, but there's a stop sign. It's like, before you get on the freeway, there's red light. You're ready to go. You're ready to get on the freeway and go 65, 75 miles an hour, and the light never turns. So you're sitting there like this and you're like, It's presented to me that I'm gonna go. And then the stoplight never changes — it just stays perpetually red."

The elder Brolin, who has been married to Barbra Streisand ​since 1998 and appeared in The Amityville Horror, Traffic, and Catch Me If You Can, has re-evaluated on his own domestic performance and reached about the same conclusion. In 2009 he told The Guardian that "As a father, I was fair to everyone, but when you're away a lot, it's hard to regard yourself as a great father. My son... is the best father I've ever known — I've learned lessons from him, but it's too late for me."

Watch Brolin tell "the pig story" on In Depth With Graham Bensinger above.