The only actor to get a compliment from the Coen brothers: “You’ve got to be fucking kidding”
While some directors like to encourage their ensemble, praise the cast for a job well done, and use affection to enhance their performances, the Coen brothers have never been the type of directors to fawn over their stars and offer an endearing word of kindness in their ear following a scene.
Joel and Ethan have always taken a more economical approach to their work: they’ve hired these people because they believe they’re the best ones for the job, and they expect their actors to do the bare minimum, if not even more in some instances.
That’s one of the main reasons they’ve acquired such a lengthy list of collaborators over the last four decades. Whenever one of their regular troupe gets a call informing them they’ve got a role in the next Coen brothers film, it’s because they’re trusted enough to understand the assignment from day one.
However, there are always exceptions to the rules, and Josh Brolin was pissed off that it wasn’t him. He’s starred in No Country for Old Men, True Grit, and Hail, Caesar! for the siblings, and at no point has he ever been the recipient of a glowing notice from the writers, directors, and producers.
“After every scene I’ve ever done, especially in the beginning, I’ve never gotten, ‘Great scene,'” he raged on the SmartLess podcast. “I’ve never gotten a thumbs-up. It’s literally moving on and looking up and seeing their backs walking away to the next set.”
Illustrating their no-frills approach to filmmaking, which clearly works a treat considering every Coen brothers movie has at least one knockout performance, Brolin’s pleas for feedback fell on deaf ears. “Maybe later on I’d go, ‘What’d you think of that scene?'” he said. “And they go, ‘Meh, yeah’. Basically, we got what we need, and you did your job correctly, that’s why we hired you.”
It’s a method that’s worked for Joel and Ethan since the mid-1980s, and they’re too far into their careers to change now. That said, Brolin was fuming when the directorial duo broke the habit of a lifetime to celebrate an actor who couldn’t even remember their lines, leaving the Oscar nominee pissed off.
“Woody Harrelson was the only guy who couldn’t remember his lines during No Country, and we had that scene in the hospital together, and he talks the majority of the time, and he couldn’t get through his fucking lines,” he explained. “Then finally he did one take where he kind of stumbled through his lines, and then I saw the Coens come from behind the set, and they looked at him and they go, ‘Wow, that was amazing.”
What was Brolin’s response to being constantly ignored and witnessing Harrelson get that rarest of things from the Coens? Indignance, mostly. “I was like, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. This dude is literally stuttering through his shit. I get nothing!” Maybe they realised that a gentle nudge in the right direction would stop Harrelson from ruining any more takes, but his co-star was incandescent nonetheless.
