By Charles Webb

Love - or at least a deadly woman will mess you up. That's what Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin) learns in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For." And Brolin has a lot of sympathy for the character, who's drawn back into the world of his one-time flame Eva Lord (Eva Green), only to end up battered, beaten, shot at, and out for revenge in the Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller film.

"He thinks that chemically, he's in the right place to be able to deal with her when she calls on him," Brolin told MTV News during a recent junket in L.A. "When she does, he has no control whatsoever. I always find that interesting - people who think they're in one state and really they're in another."

For Brolin, there was something attractive about playing such a conflicted character: punching Sin City's seemingly endless waves of goons one moment, and at the mercy of Eva the next.

"He's a tortured character and I like tortured characters where you're not really sure how they're going to react to something," Brolin said.

But it wasn't easy jumping into the role - for Brolin, learning how to act against a green screen was a new and unexpected challenge (something he may encounter again in his role as Thanos in the Marvel movies).

"When you're in a green screen, you don't really know what's happening," Brolin said. "You don't have a big picture to lean on except for what's coming out of Frank and Robert on set, telling you what it's going to be like."

Did he feel like his performance ultimately worked? "What I saw onscreen was better than what I thought I did," Brolin noted.

"Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" will be in theaters on August 22.