The actor the Coen brothers really didn’t want to cast: “There’s no fucking way this is gonna work”
As you’d expect from two filmmakers who seemingly shared a brain and have one of the industry’s most distinctive writing styles, the Coen brothers are very particular when it comes to casting, especially if it’s a role they haven’t written with a specific actor in mind.
Many of the siblings’ most famous creations have been penned with a person already on their mind, but not always. Oscar Isaac emerged victorious at the end of the most arduous casting search of their career when he was hired as the title character in Inside Llewyn Davis, which almost broke them.
John Goodman, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi, and John Turturro don’t need to jump through hoops for Joel and Ethan when they’ve become frequent collaborators, but when they need to find the perfect performer and they don’t have anyone on their wish list, things can get tricky.
Although things turned out perfectly fine in the end, with the film winning four Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, becoming their highest-grossing release ever until they surpassed it with True Grit, and arguably being their finest work, No Country for Old Men‘s ensemble didn’t come together easily.
It’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, but when scheduling conflicts reared their ugly head, he was almost ruled out and replaced by Mark Strong. Heath Ledger was supposed to play Llewelyn Moss, and after he dropped out, Josh Brolin lobbied hard and eventually won the part.
When it came to Carla Jean Moss, the loyal and Texas-born and bred wife of Brolin’s character, the Coens couldn’t fathom the idea of someone from Glasgow. “It took them a while,” Kelly Macdonald confessed to The Skinny. “They searched high and low before they thought, ‘The Scottish girl will have to do.'”
After her audition, she recalled that “they took two months to phone me back,” and their complete reluctance to have a Glaswegian play a Texan was the reason why. “It’s true,” Joel confessed. “We actually resisted meeting Kelly for a while. The casting director said, ‘There’s this really great Scottish actress who wants to come in’, and we went, ‘Scottish?!?'”
“I remember the first time she came in and we started talking, and she had this Glaswegian accent, and we went, ‘There’s no fucking way this is gonna work,'” he continued. Of course, she wasn’t the first actor to put on an accent to try and win a role, and her Texas brogue was so convincing that it changed their minds.
Joel even said “it was shocking when she opened her mouth” and sounded exactly how they’d envisioned Carla Jean, making a mockery of their hesitance. The furthest thing from their minds when gathering together the cast was bringing in somebody who was born over 4,500 miles away from ‘The Lone Star State’, but it was foolish for two such vastly experienced filmmakers to write somebody off simply because they hailed from the other side of the world, and she proved it with her performance.
