The character the Coen brothers admitted they gave the wrong name: “We fucked up”
While casting and performance are the two most important elements in creating a memorable character, it definitely helps if they’ve got a name audiences aren’t likely to forget. Needless to say, the Coen brothers have concocted a few of them across their idiosyncratic four-decade career.
Burn After Reading alone epitomises how the siblings like to give their characters names that linger in the memory, whether it’s Brad Pitt’s Chad Feldheimer, George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, or Frances McDormand’s Linda Litzke, making the moniker an extension of their personality.
Then there’s Marge Gunderson, Donny Kerabatsos, Norville Barnes, Jack Lipnick, Bernie Bernbaum, and Herbert McDunnough, to name just a very small few. These are all names that people in the real world could conceivably have, but there’s something about them that’s distinctly Coen-esque.
Many protagonists, antagonists, antiheroes, and supporting players in their stories have names so specific that it’s easy to imagine Joel and Ethan sitting there for hours trying to come up with the perfect nomenclature that reflects who these people are and how they serve the narrative. That’s partially true, but as they once confessed, it isn’t an exact science.
When quizzed by Uncut about their process, Ethan admitted that even though their choices and personal whims drive it, there have still been some regrets. “It’s so arbitrary,” he pondered. “And yet sometimes you do go, ‘Right, it has to be this’. And sometimes you make a mistake.”
As the writers, directors, producers, and editors of 2001’s neo-noir crime caper The Man Who Wasn’t There, it’s an understatement to say the Coens had complete creative autonomy. However, in the years that followed the film’s release, they began to realise that one major figure in the plot had been christened in a way they gradually felt more uncomfortable with.
Richard Jenkins’ Walter Abundas, Tony Shalhoub’s Freddy Riedenschneider, and Michael Badalucco’s Frank Raffo all had names pulled directly from the Coen playbook. Still, there was one they were left to rue. “We realised a few years too late that Jon Polito’s character in The Man Who Wasn’t There should have been named Larry London. I can’t even remember what name we gave him. But it was the wrong one.”
“Creighton Tolliver, yeah,” Joel interjected. “But he should have been Larry London. True.” As the Coens mentioned, it feels like such an arbitrary thing, but it sounds like they continued to be haunted by the spectre of not calling Polito’s unscrupulous customer something else: “So we fucked that one up,” Ethan concluded.
Does it really matter? It depends on who gets asked. For the audience, what the characters are called is largely unimportant so long as they’re part of a good movie. On the other hand, Joel and Ethan have never forgotten that Polito should have been playing Larry London and not Creighton Tolliver.
