O Brother! With quirky script and a hairnet, Coens inspire Clooney's reinvention

By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle

NEW YORK (January 12, 2001) -- The Coen Brothers create quirky characters for their quirky movies. And they usually hire quirky actors to play them -- such as John Turturro, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi.

But for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they handed the starring role to George Clooney, who's the sort of hunk they used to call a matinee idol.

The Coens even gave him a moustache, and the 39-year-old actor looked like Clark Gable.

Ah, but that was just a tease. Before long, Clooney was toiling in July heat in rural Mississippi, chasing barnyard chickens through muddy fields and shellacking his hair with thick grease. Some days, he says, he thought he'd never get clean again.

To top off the image change, the Coens made Clooney wear a hairnet.

"The hairnet isn't my best look," Clooney admitted during a hotel interview. "When they came up with the idea to wear it, I said, 'Let's not.' But they said, 'Aw, c'mon, it's funny.' "

And that's when Clooney the character actor kicked in. He put on the hairnet.

"From our point of view, he is a leading man," says 46-year-old filmmaker Joel Coen. "But he's a movie star who also is a really good character actor. He seemed natural to us (for the film). ... He's both likable and goofy."

"He plays a guy who's smooth and vain, but he doesn't hit it too hard," says 43-year-old Ethan Coen. "He's just right."

As a prop, the Coens gave Clooney a can of Dapper Dan hair pomade.

"And George patterned his character from the guy on the cover of the pomade tin," Ethan says -- surely a first in the annals of actor inspiration.

Clooney was as surprised as anyone to get an offer from the eccentric Coens.

"We first had talked about doing another movie in which I'd have just two scenes and get clubbed to death with a shovel. And of course, I said, 'I'm in.'

"But then they showed up with the O Brother script, and asked if I'd like to do it. I said, 'Yep.' They said, 'Don't you want to read it?' I said, 'I'm happy to read it, but I don't have to.'

"But I read it and realized I was going to play Ulysses in the Odyssey, and I just started laughing. I couldn't believe it."

Clooney says Coen movies -- from Blood Simple and Raising Arizona to Fargo and The Big Lebowski -- are created with such a definitive style and specific point of view, "they give actors freedom to take chances. And you have confidence if you go for it, they'll protect you."

Fans of the offbeat Coens will be happy to hear another movie is completed -- and waiting in the wings.

As yet untitled, it's a film noir, loosely in the tradition of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Billy Bob Thornton stars as a cuckolded husband in the 1940s, with the Oscar-winning Frances McDormand (in real life, Mrs. Joel Coen) as the philandering wife.

Clooney also has an interesting project getting under way next month -- a remake of Frank Sinatra's Ocean's 11, about a gang that attempts to rob several Las Vegas casinos at once. Steven Soderbergh directs, and the film co-stars Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Andy Garcia, Don Cheadle and Alan Arkin.

Who'll be in charge of ego management with a superstar cast like that?

"Well, actors want to work with Steven Soderbergh, so I don't think it'll be a problem. You know, there's a chance he'll get two Oscar nominations this year? (He made Traffic and Erin Brockovich.)

"Actors clamor to work with him, like they do the Coens," Clooney says.

Presumably there will be no hairnet.