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Twitter Users Ponder Actors Who Did a Lot With a Small Role

By Petr Knava | Social Media | April 13, 2022 |

By Petr Knava | Social Media | April 13, 2022 |

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I miss the Coen Brothers. The American writer-director duo are without a doubt some of my favourite filmmakers ever. Not very long ago I would have said my most favourite. But, with their last feature together before their recent (maybe temporary, maybe not) split being the the largely unimpressive The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, and with the fantastic Hail Caesar! now being all of six years in the past, their direction of travel has tamed my once rabid enthusiasm. For a long time, though, damn—they were the guys to beat. It helps that some of their greatest hits arrived in a streak of unparalleled quality just as I was coming of age and learning to love cinema. And what a treat for someone’s film education to be delivered by a run like Fargo, The Big Lebowksi, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis, and the aforementioned Hail Caesar!. The majority of those I was lucky enough to go see in the cinema, and I did so without even needing to know what they were about; the words ‘Coen Brothers’ attached to the project were enough.

I love the films of the Coen Brothers for a lot of reasons, but maybe one of the things I adore the most about the worlds they create is their characters (all of whom, incidentally—as our good friend Caspar has pointed out before—have the most deliciously crafted names). Not so much their main characters, though these are obviously brilliant too, but the bit players that populate their universe. In my gushing write-up of Burn After Reading a few years ago, I devoted a section just to the way the Coens cast and used actor J.R. Horne. The Brothers have a unique talent for finding the exact right people for these smaller roles, and for giving them material that lets them absolutely shine. It was all I could think of when I saw this Twitter prompt doing the rounds the other day:

Twitter users had other great suggestions, but I was particularly happy to see another great Coen Brothers example popping up in the replies to Childress’ prompt. Let’s have a look:


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Petr is a staff contributor. You can follow him on Twitter.


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