The actor who auditioned for the Coen brothers and immediately threatened them: “I’ll shoot your dog”
If you’re an actor in Hollywood and you’d love to work with a certain director, or make sure you’re considered for a part, then you’ve got a few options, the most obvious of which is to get your agent to plead your case. But if you’re a bit more insistent than that, you could always suggest you’re ready to use a firearm on their pet, like William H Macy did to the Coen brothers once.
Admittedly, that is an extreme example and not a path that any aspiring actor should follow, but it seems in the case of Macy wanting, or indeed needing to get the part in their classic 1996 black comedy Fargo, it did actually do the trick. The movie is one of the Coen brothers’ very best, which is saying something given their back catalogue, and Macy is fantastic in it as Jerry Lundegaard, the downtrodden car salesman who hires goons to kidnap his own wife in hopes of extorting a ransom from her rich dad.
His performance was enough to earn him a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination at the following year’s Oscars, alongside wins for the Coens and fellow lead Frances McDormand, but the role of Lundegaard wasn’t actually the part that Macy initially read for. He told the BFI: “I read for the sheriff. Joel and Ethan (Coen) said: ‘That’s real good. You want to go out and read Jerry?’ They gave me about 20 minutes.”
Continuing, “I came in and read. They said, ‘That’s real good. You want to go home and work on it and come in tomorrow?’ So I went home… I went in and read it again. And they said: ‘That’s real good. We’ll let you know.’”
Now, most folk would have probably left things there and hoped for a phone call in a few days, maybe put it out of their mind for a while, perhaps do a bit of shopping, head off for a nice weekend somewhere, but not Macy. No, he was far more determined than that, determined enough in fact to tread the line between ‘hopeful actor’ and ‘absolute psycho’.
He explained, ”I found out they were going to New York and holding a casting session there. So I got my Lutheran ass on an aeroplane and crashed the audition. I said: ‘I want to audition again.’ Then I made the joke to Ethan, which was: ‘I’ll shoot your dog if you don’t give me this role.'”
Wow. As ‘jokes’ go, that’s pretty out there, but then who knows, perhaps they had that kind of relationship, or maybe Ethan Coen didn’t like his own dog very much. Either way, possibly unsurprisingly, Macy did indeed get the part in the movie he so threateningly desired, and very well it worked out for him too. Hopefully, it was the last time he had to wish a violent death on a furry family member in order to land a role.
He’s had three decades of success in Hollywood, so you’d imagine it was, and he showed last year in the magnificent Train Dreams that he’s lost none of his ability to be one of the best supporting character actors in the business with his performance as the ageing, ill-fated lumberjack Arn Peebles, for which he really should have been recognised with more award nominations.
Maybe the committees were animal lovers, who knows.
