After first grabbing attention in “Saving Private Ryan” 12 years ago, Canadian actor Barry Pepper has quietly cultivated a career of guys’ movies, including “We Were Soldiers,” “Flags of Our Fathers” and his latest, the Coen brothers’ “True Grit.” But he swears the testosterone-heavy resume wasn’t by design.
You seem to do a lot of Westerns and war films — movies with male camaraderie at the core. Is that intentional?
No, there’s no conscious sort of rhyme or reason to it. This time it was just, “Would you like the opportunity to work with the Coen brothers?” Yeah, absolutely. There are certain legendary directors like that — and the Coen brothers are in that pantheon — that you just would do anything for. They’re in everyone’s sort of top 10, on every actor’s wish-list of must-work-with filmmakers.
Your character, Lucky Ned Pepper, is one of the film’s bad guys — but he’s sort of an honorable villain.
He has sort of this fair-play sense of justice. I think back then, it was a simpler, Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye world — and there was a simpler sort of code, you know? Westerns tend to overemphasize the ruthlessness of the Old West, but many people were sort of raised and schooled on the King James Bible. And that’s also why they talked the way they did, I think. They had this sort of almost American Shakespearean vernacular. It’s got this wonderful musicality to it.
A lot of the dialogue comes straight from the novel, but it feels like something the Coen brothers could have written, doesn’t it?
It really does, because a lot of their films really have that quality, don’t they? They really create their own world with the language that they use. And you go, “Wow, that’s really an oddball choice of words.” And yet somehow it works for them. It’s like music.
How was working with Jeff Bridges?
He brings a joy to a film set — or really everywhere he goes. I remember I spent my 40th birthday there in Santa Fe on ‘True Grit,’ and he has a bad back, so he has this sort of ergonomically correct recliner chair that he takes with him everywhere — it’s more like a fully reclining lawn chair that’s kind of spring-loaded. And he bought me one. So there we are in the big pasture doing the shoot-out scene, in our recliner chairs, waiting for them to set up.
