“I didn’t like the part”: The role Frances McDormand admitted she shouldn’t have played
Frances McDormand is blunt and honest when describing the mistakes she’s made in her career, even if they involve her husband, Joel Coen.
McDormand is among the rare group of actors to have three Academy Award victories, all of which were completely deserved, and while there’s more than a few instances in which actors attain their Oscar trophies for ‘career achievements’, even if their work is more mediocre in the given years, it’s hard to argue against her work in Fargo, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Nomadland.
Alongside this, she has also earned a reputation for being plainspoken and direct, which is of immense value in an industry where people are scared to speak their mind. It’s often that stars have to be diplomatic when discussing films that they did not enjoy making, as it could impede their potential to get more work in the future, but McDormand has never been in danger of losing jobs because of what an acknowledged genius she is, meaning that she has been free to admit to any mistakes made in her selection of roles.
McDormand has one of the best track records of any current star, as her misfires are few and far between, but surprisingly, the one film she mentioned as regretting was Burn After Reading, a 2008 dark comedy directed by the Coen brothers.
“I didn’t like the part in the script, and I didn’t enjoy playing the character,” she said.
Although Ethan and Joel are known for telling highly idiosyncratic, unusual stories with a jarring sense of humour, Burn After Reading, set in the covert world of espionage, is among the strangest films that they have ever made, which is saying something. It follows the duplicitous secret agent George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, who is having an affair with Katie Cox, played by Tilda Swinton, the wife of the legendary spy Osborne, portrayed by John Malkovich, who has decided to write down his memories for the sake of producing a memoir, but it contains secret information that could be dangerous should it fall into the wrong hands.
The drive containing his secret information is eventually intercepted by McDormand’s character, Linda Litzke, a long-suffering gym employee who is obsessed with getting cosmetic surgery, and even though her manager, Richard Jenkins’ Ted, has long since been in love with her, she teams up with her dim-witted co-worker Chad, played by Brad Pitt, to take advantage of the drive.
Burn After Reading was off-putting because of its incredibly bleak portrayal of American life and the complete incompetence of government institutions, with all of the characters pathetic, self-absorbed, and willing to cheat to get ahead, which only makes it funnier when they face tragic consequences. McDormand has certainly played her fair share of dark characters, but Linda is such a transparent figure that she’s willing to put other people in danger for the sake of manipulating her own sense of physical beauty.
The film was more moderately received than some of the other Coen brothers’ films, as it marked a sharp difference from their previous effort, No Country for Old Men, which won the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’. While McDormand may have had misgivings about the role that he husband cast her in, he certainly gave her a much better opportunity with their next collaboration on The Tragedy of Macbeth, in which saw her take on the legendary anti-hero Lady Macbeth.
