The hardest role the Coen brothers ever had to cast: “We thought we’d written the uncastable”
Many things make the Coen brothers the distinctive, idiosyncratic, and offbeat auteurs who’ve helped define American cinema over the last four decades. As strong as almost all of the weapons in their filmmaking arsenal have been since Blood Simple, casting has arguably been the strongest.
Think of any movie Joel and Ethan have collaborated on, and there’s guaranteed to be at least one memorable character. Not only that, but the siblings quickly developed a knack for finding the perfect actor for every role, regardless of whether they’d worked with them previously or not.
Sometimes, like in the case of Jeff Bridges’ ‘Dude’ in The Big Lebowski, they’ve written the role for a specific performer. In many others, they’ve created a character and then embarked on an extensive casting search to find the person best suited to bring it to life, and they rarely miss.
Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, Nicolas Cage’s HI McDunnough, John Goodman’s Charlie Meadows, Brad Pitt’s Chad Feldheimer, Albert Finney’s Leo O’Bannon, and George Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill are all pitch-perfect marriages of actor and part, with the Coens making it look easy.
However, they thought their gifts had deserted them when they began thinking that perhaps they’d stretched themselves too far. The script had been written, the character was there on the page, but the brothers couldn’t find anyone who was capable of doing justice to Llewyn Davis.
“He had to be bona fide as a musician, but we were also asking him to carry a movie as an actor,” Joel explained to Time Out. “We idiotically assumed it might be possible with a non-actor. So we’d audition musicians, and they would play great. Then we’d ask them to do a scene, and it was alarming.”
When he auditioned, Oscar Isaac was best known for bit-parts in blockbusters like Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies and Robin Hood, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, and Tony Gilroy’s The Bourne Legacy, but he was also a Juilliard-trained thespian who’d experienced minor musical success with his ska-punk band The Blinking Underdogs, which had even opened for Green Day.
“There was a point in the casting process where we thought we’d written something that was uncastable,” Joel explained. “It wasn’t about looking for a needle in a haystack: the haystack wasn’t there.” Fortunately, Isaac immediately washed away their doubts, with the Coens realising that the perfect Llewyn Davis had walked into the room and landed in their lap.
He’d earn a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ for his breakthrough performance, which elevated his career to the next level. Meanwhile, the Coens could breathe easy knowing the single most difficult casting search of their career wasn’t only over but had yielded the best possible candidate for the job.
