In 1999, Tim Blake Nelson had been working as “a complete unknown pipsqueak of a character actor” when Joel Coen asked him to read the script to his next movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Nelson knew Coen and his wife, Frances McDormand, through the New York theater scene, and he assumed Coen was just looking for feedback on his and Ethan’s take on Homer’s Odyssey , since Nelson was a classics major at Brown. He was wrong. “I had no business being the lead in a Coen brothers movie alongside [John] Turturro and George Clooney,” he says, but that is exactly what Coen offered. Nelson was in almost every scene of the movie along with its two more well-known stars, whether it was getting baptized, seduced by sirens, or lip-syncing and dancing to “Man of Constant Sorrow.”

With O Brother, W

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