Perched on the edge of his chair in a Toronto hotel, Michael Stuhlbarg radiates an enthusiastic, confident energy. He’s a completely different man from Larry Gopnik, the nervous, self-doubting character he plays in Joel and Ethan Coen’s new farce, A Serious Man.
A respected stage actor – he won a Drama Desk Award for his performance in The Pillowman – Stuhlbarg’s spent most of this decade toiling in cinematic obscurity, playing forgettable functionaries in movies like Body Of Lies and Cold Souls. A Serious Man gives him his first leading role and a pretty memorable one at that.
Your character is a physics professor who spends a lot of time discussing complex mathematical theories. You’re not a numbers guy. Was there a lot of research?
Yes, yes, there was. I went to a physics professor in Massachusetts, a really sweet guy named Jeff Williams at Bridgewater State College. And he helped me through all the physics, breaking down Schrödinger’s cat and the uncertainty principle as well as anybody could for a layman. I just pounded it into my head until I could explain it to other people.
The Coens are notorious for being moviemaking machines. Was this a fast shoot?
We actually ended a week ahead of schedule, yeah, so the schedule was rigorous. But they’re amazing – we had weekends off. They’re so well-prepared, scheduled and organized that they know wherever the camera is going to be whenever you show up on any particular day. They’d burn through it, and we’d be ahead of schedule, and that would give them time to improvise if they wanted to.
A Serious Man is the closest the Coen brothers have come to making an autobiographical movie. They grew up in 1960s Minnesota, where the film is set, and their father was a university professor. Did they discuss any of the personal elements with you?
These characters are amalgams of people they grew up with. All the boys are named for people they grew up with, guys they knew. The Coens grab from the strangeness of lives and add their own wonderful sense of humour, and these movies come out of that.
See review here, and an interview with directors Joel and Ethan Coen here.
Interview Clips
Michael Stuhlbarg on the experience of landing the lead in the movie:
Stuhlbarg on fitting into the movie’s vision:
Stuhlbarg on how the period wardrobe helped him get into character:
normw@nowtoronto.com
