Tim Blake Nelson swaggered through the Old West as the titular character in the Coen brothers’ anthology film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Three years later, he is playing another eponymous cowboy in Old Henry.
They are like mirror images: Scruggs was a showboating gunslinger who craved our attention; Henry is similarly adept with a gun, but is a reclusive farmer and father who has hidden his past.
When Nelson, 57, appears on Zoom to discuss the new movie, he is sitting in a simple room at his family home in New York, holding a mug with a face on it. “Who’s that on your mug?” I blurt out, surprising myself, as he’s putting it down.
“Oh, it’s Marc Maron,” he says, referring to the Jewish stand-up comedian, podcaster and Glow star. “He gives these out when you do his show, and it’s my favourite mug.”
The mug is more than just a mug: it is a symbol of something deeper, and takes us somewhere unexpected. “I have very tender feelings toward Marc,” reveals Nelson warmly, “because my eldest son [one of three with his wife, the actress Lisa Benavides] had a rough time in high school and Marc’s podcast really got him through. He would sit up at night and listen to Marc interview people and it made him feel like there was a place out there for him in the world.”
This reminds me of Nelson telling me that he’d had a difficult period at school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when we’d talked about his role in the dark comedy The Good Girl.
“I had more of a tough time in middle school,” he says. “But I can certainly relate to his travails.” He does not consider his own experience unusual. “I think we all figure out in middle school, but some of us a little later, strategies for navigating the challenges of fitting in socially …And the way we end up navigating those years and finding our voice socially ends up defining who and what we are, and that was certainly true for me.”
Nelson “intuited” that if he was going to be successful, “it wasn’t going to be through the mainstream. I wasn’t going to get there on my looks. I wasn’t going to get there because I was wildly popular.” He pauses. “How do I put this without sounding like a jackass?” More silence. “I was going to get there by entertaining people,” he says eventually. “And the more I tried to do that, the more I realised that to do that well, one had to have a broad foundation.”
He knuckled down, filling himself up with books, music, films, and “essentially educating myself”.
“By the time I was in 10th grade, education meant everything to me. And I understood that mine would be a lifetime of research and study, even while a lot of what I would end up presenting would do everything it could to conceal that.
“Now when I play roles, I take preparation and research very seriously. It’s the ground on which I stand. Take it away and I plummet down the sinkhole.”
Twenty-nine years after his feature film debut in Nora Ephron’s This is My Life, and 21 since his breakthrough as a dimwitted escapee in the Coens’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, Nelson doesn’t like taking roles without at least two months to prepare. When he read Old Henry, he knew he would need six. Due to Covid, he had a year.
The challenge was working out how to play a real-life character (revealing who would spoil the plot) wrapped inside a fictional one.
“When you’re doing a genre piece, you’re stylising and amplifying certain aspects of the character you play. And that’s something very different than historical accuracy. But you also need the historical accuracy if the character is based on someone real. So there’s this triangulation between the mythological, the historical and you that has to occur, and that’s a delicate process.”
Additionally, he needed to “tune-up” his riding skills, skin a hog, dig an irrigation ditch and learn how to make using three guns look second nature. “And that’s not just shooting,” he says, “but it’s the reloading and the drawing and something as simple as how you hold the gun when you’re relaxed.”
I was struck by the realism of the gunplay in Old Henry even before the tragic shooting dead of a cinematographer on the set of the low-budget Western Rust by its star, Alec Baldwin, after he fired a gun which, unknown to him, contained a live round.
Since then, actors have opened up on Twitter about their own experiences. One recalled the stress of using a shotgun even though it was just loaded with dummies, while another said he had tinnitus caused by “close range work”. Has Nelson ever felt uncomfortable around prop guns?
“Luckily, I’ve never been on a set with a sub-par armourer,” he says. “I’ve always, whether I was an actor or a director, experienced top-rate safety protocols. So I have not ever felt unsafe around guns on a set. And I’m not impugning anyone. There’s no ulterior motive behind that statement. It’s just a fact.”
A major appeal of Old Henry for Nelson was the relationship at its heart. Henry has tried to shield his son from the world, and Nelson has said that he recognised in this his own struggle of wanting to protect his boys while also preparing them for life. Henry worries about violence. What troubles Nelson?
“I worry more about social pressures and cultural pressures than I do about physical harm,” he says. “It has more to do with my boys either being cancelled or being a part of cancelling others; what might be said off the cuff, perhaps as a joke, that suddenly could ramify in ways that they never expected. So I feel that, at least as they have experienced it, much of the violence is now social more than physical.”
Consequently, he has “erred toward exposing them, as much as possible, to what’s out there”. The dinner table is a place where “conversations are charged with the issues of the day. And we don’t shy from free expression. You can say anything,” says Nelson. “Because I want our boys to go out into the world with less fear than what the world seems to induce in some people right now. Everyone’s so afraid. I want to raise kids who are unafraid to say what they think and feel. Because if they happen to step on a landmine, they’ll be able then to articulate a point of view that explains why they said what they said.”
Nelson grew up in a small Jewish community in Tulsa, where incidents of antisemitism were almost unknown. His grandfather was a refugee from Germany who had been disbarred from practising as a lawyer under the Nuremberg Laws. When Nelson was a teenager, he told him “I shouldn’t even exist,” but for the “luck and privilege” that enabled him, his wife and Nelson’s mother to flee Germany in 1938.
He didn’t experience Jew-hate until he went to college on the East Coast. Now, he says, “because my name is Nelson, and because I play so many American rubes, most assume I’m a gentile, and therefore, over the years, I’ve heard antisemitic remarks from at least one person on almost every set I’ve been on.” These have ranged from “Of course he didn’t want to pay the overtime, he’s a Jew,” to calling Hollywood “the synagogue of the performing arts”, which amused him, and someone claiming that Israel was behind the coronavirus.
“It hasn’t bothered me in the past because I think that we are generally tribal,” he says. “And it’s so ingrained in us that we say stuff against others often simply out of boredom and laziness. So, as the son of a Holocaust refugee, it’s always been hard for me to get too exercised over antisemitic remarks that come more from lassitude than conviction. That said, I think there’s more antisemitism out there right now than I’ve ever seen. And mostly it’s in the form of antizionism.”
While he doesn’t think Zionism and Judaism are the same thing, he thinks there’s “a lot of overlap”.
“So, when you say that there’s intersectionality between colonialism and racism, and therefore that Israel is a colonial vestige in the Middle East, so therefore the Jews are racist, and Israel is inherently racist, you’re up to a rewriting of history that is antisemitic. Because while there’s an argument for the Palestinians having predated the Jews in Israel pre 1948, or 1917, there’s also an argument for the Jews having predated everyone before the other Abrahamic religions even existed.”
Before we finish, I ask Nelson about working on three projects with Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning director of The Shape of Water. Effusive in his praise, Nelson promises that the filmmaker’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel, Nightmare Alley, in which he plays a carnival boss, will deliver “a screed against the evils of capitalism through the metaphor of the circus that people aren’t going to forget.” Personally, I can’t wait.
Old Henry will be out in 2022
