In 1999, Tim Blake Nelson had been working as “a complete unknown pipsqueak of a character actor” when Joel Coen asked him to read the script to his next movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Nelson knew Coen and his wife, Frances McDormand, through the New York theater scene, and he assumed Coen was just looking for feedback on his and Ethan’s take on Homer’s Odyssey, since Nelson was a classics major at Brown. He was wrong. “I had no business being the lead in a Coen brothers movie alongside [John] Turturro and George Clooney,” he says, but that is exactly what Coen offered. Nelson was in almost every scene of the movie along with its two more well-known stars, whether it was getting baptized, seduced by sirens, or lip-syncing and dancing to “Man of Constant Sorrow.”
With O Brother, Where Art Thou? celebrating its 25th anniversary, Nelson joined us for an episode of our series Role Call to look back on playing Delmar, the dimmest of the film’s three dimwitted escape convicts. According to Nelson, Clooney joked at the time that all of their SAG cards should’ve been revoked “because there was so much overacting from the three of us,” but it was Turturro’s advice when shooting began to always give the Coens more than they asked for. Ultimately, to Nelson, the broadness of their performances juxtaposes with “passages of real sadness and poignancy” to deepen the comedy.
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Nelson calls O Brother, Where Art Thou? “the movie that changed my life,” because he’s been working consistently ever since. This fall, he co-stars with Ethan Hawke in Sterlin Harjo’s new FX series The Low Down (premiering September 23), leads the independent film Bang Bang (out September 12), and wrote both the Off Broadway play And Then We Were No More (running September 19 through November 2) and his second novel, Superhero (out December 2). “I got to have a career as a character actor solely because of Joel and Ethan,” says Nelson. “Now, I had to deliver, but it’s pretty easy to deliver with that kind of writing and that kind of direction.”
