Tim Blake Nelson & Mary Randolph Carter

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2018

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tim Blake Nelson is a master of his craft: a character actor with over 80 credits to his name. Roles in films as diverse as The Incredible Hulk, Minority Report and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers classic. You remember him: Tim played Delmar in that one - the lovable prison escapee who mistakes John Turturro's character for a toad. His latest role is in another Coen bros film: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He plays Buster, the star in the first of the film's six vignettes. Then, Mary Randolph Carter. Carter, as she's known, has worked high up at Ralph Lauren for decades - she's a creative director there. That's her day job. In her free time, she collects stuff. She calls it junk. And she's got a lot of junk. She's written tons of books on the topic of junk: antique shops, collections, personal stories, photographs. She talks with Jesse about her books, her decidedly un-minimal design philosophy and her unique, sometimes tragic upbringing. Finally, for the Outshot: Jesse tells you about the power of Police Squad's decidedly un-fancy comedy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:12.6	I'm Jesse Thorn. Tim Blake Nelson is an actor. He was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma
0:19.0	and he's Jewish. Growing up, he says there weren't many other families like his in town.
0:24.2	And you might think that, you know, kids being kids made that made him feel bullied sometimes,
0:28.6	tingled out, we're kind of weird. But that's not so.
0:32.6	Just Tim.
0:33.6	Kids wanted to come to your bar mitzvah. They were astounded to sit there and listen to
0:38.4	the Hebrew. Couldn't believe that they were hearing that. It was exciting, fascinating.
0:45.4	There's that line. There's a line in Kormack, McCarthy's novel, Outer Dark. And somebody
0:51.0	asks another character, do you know what a Jew is? And the character responds, well,
0:56.1	they're like, oh, time people in the Bible. And that's what I felt growing up. That people
1:05.4	embraced us, treated us as special friends. It's Bullseye.
1:18.6	Coming up, Tim Blake Nelson, star of the new Cohen Brothers film The Ballad of Buster
1:23.1	Scrubs. He majored in classics and studied a lot. He actually didn't do a lot of acting
1:28.5	until he got what you would probably call a very strong push from his mom. And she said,
1:34.5	look, why don't you spend the summer acting at one of these summer theaters? He said, oh,
1:41.5	mom, it's not that easy. And she basically said, don't give me your excuses. You have no
1:47.5	family. You don't have any financial concerns right now. You don't even have a girlfriend.
1:53.5	You're totally unaffiliated. Go get a job at a summer theater. Then Mary Randolph Carter.
2:00.5	She's an author and an expert on what she calls junk, collecting old stuff from antique
2:06.0	stores and flea markets. She's got a whole design philosophy behind it, too.
2:10.8	And I think that when you do find and borrow things that have had that are old and weathered
	...

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