Sitting tall in the saddle
Tim Blake Nelson takes the reins in Western ‘Old Henry’
VENICE LIDO, Italy – With a thriving career as a character actor, Tim Blake Nelson knows what a coup it is to star as the titular farmer in Friday’s “Old Henry.”
A classic Western set in 1906 Oklahoma Territory, “Henry” has Nelson, 57, as a widowed farmer with a teenage son. He’s isolated, with only a brother-in-law nearby on a neighboring ranch.
When Henry discovers a man (Scott Haze of “Venom,” “12 Mighty Orphans”) nearly dead in a pasture alongside a saddlebag stuffed with cash, he hides him from a gang claiming to be the law who demand to know his whereabouts.
Henry, we soon learn, is no ordinary farmer, which comes as a revelation to his son and changes their relationship forever.
“Why did they cast the gargoyle to be the lead in their movie?” Nelson joked as he sat outdoors by a Venetian tennis court, a day after the film’s Venice Film Festival world premiere.
“I was actually cooking dinner for my wife and kids” — he has three sons — “and I checked my email. There was an offer to play Henry!
“I first thought, ‘Well, I have a son named Henry. That’s kind of curious.’ Then I thought, nobody’s ever asked me to play a character who’s so old. I said all right.”
It’s a very physical role — Henry lifts bodies, gallops on horseback, murders varmints. Except for one distant shot where a stuntman rides across the horizon, Nelson did it all.
“I loved the challenge of a character who is trying to repress an aspect of his true self. And ultimately fails to do so. I wanted to find out as an actor how that feels.
“I spent a good five months preparing for this. Working with Potsy (Ponciroli, the writer-director), doing research — all this stuff that goes into finding out who a guy is so that he looks like this guy getting an axe. Who talks and exists like this guy, almost as if there isn’t a camera.”
There’s no best way to sustain a career. Nelson’s worked with the Coens (“O Brother, Where Art Thou,” “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”) and co-stars in November’s “Nightmare Alley” opposite Bradley Cooper. How does he do it?
“As an actor in the entertainment industry, where people are so casually horrible to one another, and casually disrespectful of one another and are motivated by selfimportance, if you’re just decent that makes a huge difference.
“You do your work. You can have a pretty good career.”