“That was a heartbreaker”: Reliving Kathryn Hahn’s disastrous audition for the Coen brothers
Joel and Ethan Coen, collectively the Coen brothers, are a writing and directing duo who have operated with a remarkable degree of consistency for over four decades.
There’s an argument to be made that, collectively, they are the single most defining filmmakers in American history, who have managed to make classics in nearly every genre, all while retaining a unique and peculiar style of writing that has been prone to significant analysis.
The affinity for the duo doesn’t just come from pundits, as they’re clearly also loved by actors, with a few stars who regularly show up in many of their films, such as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand, John Turturro, and George Clooney. A role in a Coen brothers film is often too good to pass up, regardless of its size, like when Woody Harrelson showed up for a few scenes in No Country for Old Men, even though he was already an acclaimed, Oscar-nominated actor.
The desire to work with the Coen brothers is shared by many stars, but not all of them have fulfilled their dream as of yet, such as Kathryn Hahn, who admitted that she had auditioned to appear in their dark comedy A Serious Man, but bombed her moment, saying, “I was way gung-ho. Should have learned from my stillness what I learned from stillness, and I did not, and I brought in a bag of props, and just…it was too much. It was just way too much for the space, and they were very polite and very kind, and I did not get the part.”
In fairness to Hahn, A Serious Man was released in 2009, and she had only just been acquiring more weighty parts at the time. It was only a year prior (and perhaps even before her audition) that she gave her funniest, most scene-stealing performance ever in Step Brothers, and also showed her dramatic range with a critical role in Revolutionary Road.
The actor has continued to impress with smart turns in indie projects, including a heartbreaking one in Tamara Jenkins’ independent dramedy Private Life that should have earned her more award season attention. The issue that may prevent her from getting another chance to work with the Coen brothers isn’t anything to do with her talent, but that the duo has seemingly stopped working together.
The Coens had their ‘last hurrah’ with the 2018 western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology that featured six different stories set in the Wild West, and since then, they have gone their separate directorial ways, with Joel directing the acclaimed adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth that earned Denzel Washington an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’, and is set to helm Josh O’Connor in the thriller Jack of Spades.
Conversely, Ethan and his wife Tricia Cooke made the B-movie crime comedies Drive-Away Dolls and Honey, Don’t!, both of which are nearly unwatchable.
Rumours persist that they might end up reuniting, which would be a good thing for an industry that really doesn’t need another painfully unfunny effort from Ethan Coen and Cooke. Should the brothers reunite and seek to expand their repertoire to work with actors who have yet to appear in their films, it would be worth it to give Hahn another shot.
