Tim Blake Nelson is a busy man. Suddenly, the 61-year-old actor most folks recognize from Coen brothers movies like “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is hitting screen, stage, and book outlets with a spate of projects within a few months.
Before we sat down in late September for a Zoom conversation (we last spoke about his 2001 holocaust drama “The Grey Zone”), I watched Vincent Grashaw’s well-reviewed boxing indie “Bang Bang“, FX’s scruffy hit series “The Lowdown,” read large chunks of the dead-on accurate Hollywood depiction “Superhero: A Novel” (November 4, The Unnamed Press), and after we spoke, I checked out the La Mama production of his chilling and prescient dystopian play “And Then We Were No More,” starring the commanding Elizabeth Marvel.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anne Thompson: Why are you suddenly so productive?
Tim Blake Nelson: Oh, it’s an oversubscribed year. I hadn’t planned it like this. I also directed a new movie this year that I wrote that I’m finishing right now.
The romantic prison drama “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” starring Amanda Seyfried?
Yes. The performances by Amanda Seyfried and Scoot McNairy are extraordinary. It’s an ambitious movie. It’s not finished. We’ve locked picture, but we have a lot of work to do: sound and score and VFX. We’ll try to sell it next year.
“Superhero” is your second book, after “City of Blows.” What did you want to accomplish with this one that’s different from the first one?
I started writing “Superhero” in 2022. I like the way my wife describes it, because I think she’s right: “City of Blows” was in large part about the venality of the movie industry, whereas so much of “Superhero” is about what I love. It celebrates at the same time, even in its most ridiculously true moments that expose how myopic and selfish we can be [while] doing what we do and making movies. It’s also always loving that process. There’s more of a tenderness to “Superhero.”
The book felt accurate, like you’re trying to give us a sense of what’s going on. You focus on a movie star who accepts a superhero role that changes his life.
There is little in “Superhero” that I haven’t observed personally or heard from reliable sources who experienced it personally.
Was it easy for you to write that book, or hard? You got to do some firsthand research!
“Superhero” was easier to write than “City of Blows,” partly because “Superhero” is my second go at it, so I have more experience. “Superhero” is more of a celebration of moviemaking, and that made it more fun to write. I also knew earlier on where “Superhero” was headed, and so there was less anxiety in the writing of it as to whether or not it was going to amount to a full-fledged cohesive narrative. Also, while writing “Superhero,” I got cast in “Captain America” [“Brave New World”] as the villain [The Leader]. It became two months of paid research, being on that set and spending time with producers on that movie who were eager to share a lot of process stuff, of which, as an actor, I might otherwise have been unaware.
Your comic-book empire Sparta is run by Max Kleiner. Is he a version of Marvel CEO Kevin Feige?
It’s loosely based on my experiences. I don’t know Kevin well enough to have based a character on him. So he’s my own version of somebody running a comic book studio based on what I know of the comic book studios, and I’ve worked for several of them, so it’s not meant to be Marvel, but having worked with Marvel, and having worked on movies at Warner Bros. and all the studios and knowing studio heads, and hearing them talk about their work and studio executives, it’s all a stew.
You’ve written how many plays?
It’s my fifth. It’s directed by Mark Wing-Davey. In the near future, an algorithm has taken over the justice system, in addition to much of life in an unnamed country. The algorithm has determined that anyone who is deemed beyond rehabilitation should be dispatched [via] a machine that executes people in a manner that’s called “without pain.” You walk into this machine, and you’re gone. In the play, Beth Marvel plays a lawyer who’s been summoned to an incarceration facility to represent a young female inmate [debuting Juilliard grad Elizabeth Yeoman] who has elected to change the manner of her execution from “without pain” to “with pain.” The institution doesn’t want to. It was inspired by, not based on, Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” which I was reading with one of my sons. I set out to do my own version suited to our moment.
I first met your “Bang Bang” director Vincent Grashaw when he produced “Bellflower.” How did you two connect? He had some fighting background, but you did not?
Oh, I didn’t. I extensively trained, which was great. That’s part of what I love about acting. He had wanted me to [play the title role] in “What Josiah Saw,” and I couldn’t do it. But we had a good back and forth, and they asked a bunch of people to play “Bang Bang,” and actors kept saying no.
You take an irresponsible, drug-loving, down-on-his-luck once-great boxer, and make us care about him anyway.
Eventually, they got around to me. It’s exactly the role I want to be playing: challenging, unfamiliar, arduous process in prep, arduous process making it. Why live life if you’re not going to take that kind of thing on? It’s truly what I wake up in the morning and want to do in whatever I’m pursuing, whether it’s writing a book or a play or directing a movie or getting to act in a role. And I said, “Absolutely, so long as the producers are going to support Vince’s vision.” And then the second one was, “I want six months to prepare.” And so they scheduled for that, and I went to work boxing, training five times a week, for several hours a day.
You were 59? It’s harder at that age, right?
Yeah, obviously. And also, I’m a scrawny Jew. I’m not a natural boxer, and I’m not a physically aggressive person. My default position isn’t: How do I take somebody apart? I needed the time to let the character seep in. And there was the Michigan accent and the fact that the guy doesn’t shut up. So it was a lot of lines to learn. When I go do a movie, I learn the whole part before I get on set. It’s something I learned from Daniel Day-Lewis, just a new level of prep that has been much better for me with these movies, especially as I’ve been getting to play larger roles, and the responsibility has increased. When the movies are severely under-resourced, you have to be ready to go in and get it in a couple of takes. I’ve learned that confidence. Vince is a great guy. He’s smart. He directs with no self-importance, no frills. He tells stories in the most beautifully basic way.
The movie felt gritty and authentic. It’s the kind of independent movie I admire. It’s hard to get them made.
The platform for seeing movies of that sort is now more and more the home television screen. So movies are made, you could even say, to a degree responsibly, not with a 14-foot-high screen in mind, but a small screen in mind. That makes for less interesting photography, sound, casting choices. Because the bar for recoupment becomes lower, and so there’s less money spent, but also the aesthetic bar becomes lower. You get fewer wide shots. You get less attention to text or sound design, because it’s all going to be compressed anyway, and it has slowly but surely chipped away at the artistic nature of so many of these films.
Well, “The Lowdown” is a fun example of something that you can get away with on television, right?
I’m delighted to be in “The Lowdown” and happy to work with Ethan [Hawke] and Sterlin Harjo, who is an incredible storyteller, not to mention that he’s loyal to my home city of Tulsa.
Next Up: Rookie filmmaker Ari Selinger’s Montauk true romance “On the End,” which is playing the Hamptons, Woodstock, Newport Beach circuit in search of distribution.
P.S. Like the rest of us, Nelson is rooting for the Coens to get back together. (Joel is currently shooting “Jack of Spades” in Europe with Lesley Manville, Damian Lewis, Frances McDormand, and Josh O’Connor.) The brothers have many unproduced scripts in their trunk. Let them direct one!