“Entering puberty, I read books like Marathon Man and Jaws,” Nelson says, “which in addition to being chockablock with adventure, had some incredible sex scenes in them.” He chuckles warmly. For one thing, they always had to be reading and delivering dinnertime reports on books, some of them (Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, Flannery O’Connor) assigned by their parents, others of their own choosing. There were certain house rules that the kids had to follow. This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father was a petroleum geologist and wildcatter, his mother a well-known social activist, and he was the youngest of three boys. “It’s some good Sunset Boulevard fare,” he goes on, a bit enraptured.Īnother thing about Nelson is, he was raised differently. And now I see a hipster with a very cool satchel and in front of him a man on a bike with some sort of cape.” Pauses. “To my right is an Absolute Caviar store. After that, he looks out the window at the passing scenery and reports on his findings. He smacks his lips a little, a sound that evidently revolves around the satisfactions of a job well done.

Buster needs to seem like he’s been using those things his entire life. But I had to learn to use ’em with my eyes closed, backwards and underwater. “I have three boys” - Henry, 19, Teddy, 16, and Eli, 13 - “who watched me work with the pistols on a daily basis, and whenever they could get their hands on them, they molested them. “I worked on them both two hours a day for five-and-a-half months,” he says.

For a while, he talks about some of the challenges he faced while preparing to become Buster Scruggs, especially when it came to the pistols and guitar playing. Today, still in the black sedan, still on Sunset, Nelson is wearing what he calls his “daily uniform”: a natty Paul Smith corduroy blazer, some Levi’s 511 slim-fits and a pair of Lucchese roper boots, the ones with the round toe and a walking heel, which used to be favored mainly by experimental-jet pilots (“I don’t wear anything but,” he says, intelligently). How he accomplished this feat has long been a mystery, even to Ethan Coen, who once said, “He’s a Jewish guy from Oklahoma, so go figure.” Nelson’s own explanation is a bit more evocative: His Delmar is “innocent of knowledge the world without context.” Which makes sense. No matter: He stole everyone’s thunder by, among other things, making a convincing show of believing that some backwoods sirens had turned one of his chain-gang brethren into a toad. In it, he plays addlepated escaped-convict Delmar O’Donnell and is billed third behind George Clooney and John Turturro. John Turturro on 'Plot Against America' and Resurrecting Jesus Quintanaīut then, in addition to Buster Scruggs, there is the one other big standout - 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which was also written and directed by the Coen brothers. Then he’s saying things like, “That one front tooth is a crown and I’ve had the opportunity now to have it fixed, but I’ve just, you know, thought, ‘Well, why? It’s fine.’” A few minutes later, as a kind of corollary, he adds, “I’ve always known I’d never adorn the covers of magazines. The destination is Netflix’s headquarters, where he’ll plump for the new Coen brothers’ movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in which he plays the happy-faced, cowboy-song-singing, white-hatted, guitar-strumming, pistol-twirling, ornery-cuss-killing title character. He’s lank bordering on gaunt, well abbreviated in height, and the altogether effect is of the kind of guy you see on inner-city street corners, scratching his head while waiting to be mugged.Īnd yet it’s just these turnip-truck-rube qualities that have allowed Nelson to be where he is today, sitting snug inside a black, chauffeur-driven sedan in Hollywood, easing along Sunset Boulevard toward yet another opportunity. Ebbing hairline, a wide-open-plains-type forehead, blues that seem almost beady, a top right central incisor that stands disturbingly aloof of its neighbor, and an oddball horseshoe mustache.

Frankly, he doesn’t look all that impressive. Travel hither and yon and it’s probably only once in a great long while that you come across someone like Tim Blake Nelson.

Ballad of buster scruggs