Tim Blake Nelson names his favourite westerns: “Almost everybody in those movies is nasty”
Leading roles may not come around very often for Tim Blake Nelson, but spending the majority of his career relegated to second fiddle at best hasn’t done a thing to stop him from becoming an actor synonymous with a performance that’s never going to be any less than eminently watchable.
Whether he’s diving into the past for Steven Spielberg in Lincoln, going to war with Terrence Malick in The Thin Red Line, investigating criminality in Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco, getting into bed with Marvel for The Incredible Hulk, or collaborating with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Blake Nelson has turned being ‘that guy from that thing’ into an art form.
When he did get the rare opportunity to take centre stage, he inevitably knocked it out of the park when he headlined 2021’s Old Henry, a revisionist western where his suspicious homesteader takes in an injured stranger carrying a bag full of cash, claiming he’s a member of law enforcement on the run from a band of vengeful outlaws.
An excellent showcase for a performer who doesn’t often get the opportunity to lead from the front, Blake Nelson was suitably riveting in an old-fashioned slow-burner. He had plenty of inspirations to draw from anyway, with the star outlining his appreciation for the genre in an interview with A.Frame, where he singled out the sextet he believes is the best of the bunch.
Admittedly, there are no surprises to be found, with Blake Nelson hewing closely to the classics. Still, they gained that shared reputation for a reason, so there’s no harm in hearing him celebrate John Ford and John Wayne’s seminal The Searchers for the way in which the legendary actor/director duo weren’t “afraid to exploit” the leading man’s established screen persona “to show you a flawed character”.
In a similar vein to how he loves “really problematic, flawed characters with whom we can’t help but identify,” Blake Nelson draws a straight line between The Searchers‘ Ethan Edwards and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, “because almost everybody in those movies is nasty at some level”.
Calling it “a really grim look at westward expansion,” Blake Nelson continued riding the Leone train with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, singling out the final chapter in the Dollars trilogy for the way in which the characters “exploit the confusion in post-war, never taking a side ethically or morally, only taking sides because of what’s in it for them”.
Segueing from “a really deep and brutal film” into another all-timer starring Clint Eastwood, Blake Nelson heralds Unforgiven as “almost a perfectly made film” boasting a screenplay where “there’s not a word in there that doesn’t belong”. From his perspective, his love for Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai parlays directly into The Magnificent Seven making the cut, but John Sturges gets his own credit for the way his remake “introduced a level of violence into the western that allowed for what violence costs to enter into how we perceive the genre”.
Last but not least, Robert Altman’s “gorgeous and heart-breaking” McCabe & Mrs. Miller rounds out Blake Nelson’s contenders, with the actor once more drawn to Warren Beatty’s John McCabe for being “another deeply flawed guy” with “all the hubris of a tragic figure,” who suffers as a result.
Tim Blake Nelson’s favourite westerns:
- The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
- Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
- The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960)
- Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
