The actor whose unique face landed him an iconic Coen brothers role: “I guess I’m funny lookin’”

Posted On March 31, 2025March 31, 2025

The Coen brothers are two of the finest purveyors of dialogue in modern Hollywood’s history. Their scripts are finely calibrated machines, with every “um,” “ah,” and pause accounted for because they have a rhythm they want actors to hit when they say the words on-set. There is no improvising in a Coen brothers movie because that runs the risk of poking holes in their distinctive serious-absurd tone. One of their most famous, endlessly quotable dialogue exchanges, though, was built around the unique visage of an actor they’d worked with three times before – and let’s just say, they’re lucky the poor guy wasn’t easily offended.

The scene in question comes during a 1996 black comedy noir that is arguably the Coens’ most famous movie. When Frances McDormand’s police chief, Marge Gunderson, interviews two young sex workers in a bar after they’ve spent the evening with a pair of kidnapping suspects, she asks in a singsong Minnesota accent, “OK, I want you to tell me what these fellas looked like.” The first prostitute’s response of, “Well, the little guy, he was kinda funny-lookin’” soon became iconic, and it is still one of Fargo’s most quoted lines.

Amazingly, the scene proceeds to get funnier and funnier as Gunderson tries to drill down on what exactly made this criminal so “funny lookin’.” Unfortunately, she can only get non-committal explanations like, “I dunno, just funny-lookin’” and “Like I say, he was funny-lookin’. More n’ most people, even.”

If it sounded like the Coens had a particular indefinably strange-looking actor in mind for the part of Carl, the kidnapper, well, they did: Steve Buscemi. The brothers had already worked with Buscemi on Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and The Hudsucker Proxy, but for this movie, they envisioned the brilliant New Yorker in his most substantial role yet. In fact, they told Buscemi about the part while shooting Barton Fink, which came out in 1991, but as he joked, “Then you did another movie! But OK, I’ll wait.”

Hilariously, Buscemi told a 25th-anniversary audience at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2021 that Joel may have fudged the details of exactly why they wanted him for the role. “Your character is going to be a very good-looking guy,” Buscemi claimed the elder Coen told him. As the audience laughed in anticipation of a punchline, he quipped, “I don’t know what happened after that.”

For, you see, the Coens did specifically want their old pal to play Carl, the polyester sweater-wearing criminal whose looks are constantly impugned because of his unique face. Amusingly, though, when Buscemi finally read the script and read the “funny lookin’” description instead of “good-looking,” he phoned the Coens to find out what they had in mind.

“I’ve told this story before,” Buscemi revealed on a podcast, “but when I read that in the script, and I saw, ‘Oh, my character is funny looking,” I got Joel and Ethan on the phone. I said, ‘Hey, I was thinking maybe I could, like, do something with my nose or, you know, I could do something to…’. And there was silence on the phone.”

Realising that silence could only mean one thing, Buscemi exclaimed, “Or, I can do nothing!” He then hung up the phone and contemplated the nature of the face he’d looked at in the mirror for his whole life. With a chuckle, he quipped, “Oh, I guess I’m funny-lookin’.”

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