Josh Brolin shares how his dying grandmother inspired him to stop drinking after 9 stints in jail

"I said, 'If this woman could get through 99 years on life's terms, how dare me?'"

It took a single smile from his ailing grandmother for Josh Brolin to turn his life around.

On the latest episode of Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson's Cheers rewatch podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Brolin, 56, opened up about the night he took his last drink — and how his 99-year-old grandma helped him choose sobriety.

"I woke up on the sidewalk," Brolin began. "I didn't know where my car was, and it wasn't that that was rare. That was just, you know, the 400th time that it happened. It was so normal when I woke up."

While that disorientation was par for the course, the Dune: Part Two actor explained that what made the night notable was his grandmother's declining health. "My grandmother was on her deathbed," he said. "I was supposed to have picked up my brother and taken them, because I was the one in the family that put everything together and structured everything and controlled everything."

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After getting a call from his brother asking where he was, Brolin picked him up and they eventually arrived at the hospital to pay their respects. And one quiet interaction changed everything.

"My grandmother, who was 99 at the time, picked her head up and looked at me and smiled, and that was it," Brolin recalled. "I was done. I said, "If this woman could get through 99 years on life's terms, how dare me?'"

Danson interjected, "That's a great phrase. 'On life's terms.'"

Brolin agreed: "How dare me. And I'd gotten away with… I was 45 years old and I had gotten away with a lot. Been in jail nine times, you know? Done a little bit of whatever. So I thought, 'I wonder if I could do that half of life like that and then do this half of life like this.' Then I get to live two lives and not just one."

When Harrelson asked if Brolin ever finds himself "dying to have a drink," he immediately replied, "No."

"I feel like something's been cultivated in me," Brolin clarified. "That my life now is better than my greatest romance of any drink I could have."

A representative for Brolin didn't respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for further comment.

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Brolin, who entered rehab in 2013, has long been open about his struggles with substance abuse. Just last year, the actor posted a photo on Instagram of his Alcoholics Anonymous chip marking 10 years of sobriety.

"Today isn't to be celebrated any more than any other day," he wrote. "With the exception that it represents to others who are thinking about a way out of their tornado of shame that there exists a life where that over-pressurized piece of coal that is you will eventually transform into the diamond of liberty that you always deserved to be. Amen."

Watch Brolin discuss his sobriety journey in the podcast clip above.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.