Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Tim Blake Nelson

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

From "O Brother, Where Art Thou" to "Watchmen" to "Poker Face,” Tim Blake Nelson is the actor you call when you want a character’s face to tell a lifetime of stories. But Nelson’s storytelling isn't limited to acting; lately, he's turned to writing novels, including his latest book, “Superhero: A Novel.” He talks to Rachel about his delinquent childhood in Tulsa and the dangers of prioritizing the present. To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

What emotion do you understand better than all the others? Feelings of vindictiveness and recrimination are important as fuel in an artistic life. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wild Card. The show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life. Questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. My guest this week is Tim Blake Nelson.

I wake up every day in search of creative truth and creative moments. There are certain actors. I'm just going to watch no matter what. Tim Blake Nelson is one of them. Whether it's O Brother Where Art thou, or Watchman, or smaller appearances like his episode in the show Poker Face. If Tim Blake Nelson is in it, I am watching. I think it's his face. His face seems like it's holding a lifetime of stories and all the joy.

and pain that goes with them. He puts all his storytelling experience to work in his latest novel. It's called Superhero. And I am so very, very glad to welcome Tim Blake Nelson to Wildcard. Hi, Tim. Hi. You're not as glad as I am to be here. It's great to meet you.

Oh, you're very, very kind. I'm such an admirer of your work. I have long wanted to have you on the show. And I'm so glad that we could make it happen. So round one, memories. I hold up three random cards. And you pick, even more randomly. One, two, or three.

Two. Two. What's something you took away from your first job? Well, my first job was... My first job was working at the Tulsa Beef Company. Okay. Which was a meatpacking company. And this was in high school, in part, to pay off legal debts from having been arrested.

for public intoxication. This is already the best answer to this question of all time. And spending my prom night in jail. Whoa. And so, yeah. I woke up at 5.30 in the morning, every morning, the summer before I went to college. And I had to be. work by six. I worked until two in the afternoon. They called me college boy. I mostly

cleaned the latrines where meat packers would go to urinate and defecate. And I cleaned out the trucks with entrails and organs and maggots and with a high-powered and dead. And with a high-powered and hose, and I was pretty much the bottom rung. Yeah. And that was a great prelude to going off to college and putting everything in perspective. Indeed. Your parents were supportive of this? Or maybe it was their idea that in order to pay this off, you need to get a job and this will suit.

It was my second infraction. By that point, my parents were divorced, recently divorced. And so I was just being cared for my. by my mother at that point. And she said there's no way I'm paying your legal bills. Yeah, good for her. I worked those problems out in college, and I'm a much more responsible individual now at the age of 61. So you went, if I'm not mistaken, to Brown, right?

Yes, yeah. So you said that gave you perspective, but can you talk a little bit more about what that experience, what that job did for you when you started walking around to these, like, in these fancy elite circles? Yeah, I was a classics major, and it was a pretty rigorous program. And I had to get very, very serious once I got there because the work was rigorous. So the lesson I learned was don't waste these opportunities that you have. And I guess that it caused me. to take my life much more seriously, to be less frivolous with my free time.

And also, it placed me within the world to have to get up at 5.30 in the morning and do the most blue collar of blue collar work. Yeah, there's a work ethic. You have to build a foundation of a work ethic. And it sounds like that was fundamental to you. Yes. And good for your mom. Okay. One, two, or three. Three. Three. What activity gave you a sense of freedom as a kid? Fishing.

Fishing. Okay. What kind? All sorts of fishing, actually, but I started in, of all places, Jamaica. Really? Yes. We effectively lived there when we weren't in school. So from a few weeks after school ended in the summer until a week before school commenced again in the fall. And then also for our entire winter breaks, we just decamped to this place called San San outside of Port Antonio, Jamaica. So it was in something of a backwater area. But still, I imagine a far cry from Tulsa, O'Brien.

Oklahoma. That is a different culture. And I was very young when we started going there. And one of the aspects that my siblings and my parents loved about Jamaica was at that time, certainly, they could just do what they did in Oklahoma and open the door and let us roam and do whatever it was that. that we wanted. So I would venture out on my own every day and fish. And I made friends in the local community, Jamaican kids, my age. And I couldn't get enough of it. And so I was gone from about 9 o'clock in the morning

till 6 o'clock at night. Wow. Just out on a boat, on the water, with my Jamaican kid friends fishing. But then also, I did it a lot on my own. When friends didn't want to hang out or weren't able to hang out, I would spend the entire day, I could spend the entire day just by myself. And I think that prepared me most of all as a

writer because it's a solitary pursuit. Right. And I just learned as a kid to go off on my own and crack little snails and put them on a little hook and catch a fish maybe that big, a little parrot fish or maybe a mudfish and then use a bigger hook and catch a barracuda or a. or a needlefish and spend the day doing that. And no one's around. I mean, if you're not with your friends, you're by yourself, there are no adults.

That is, I mean, you're just wandering the world, fishing. That is, I imagine that was like the pinnacle of freedom to a young boy. Barefoot on volcanic rock with calloused feet. and as happy as I've ever been. Yeah. Okay. Last one in this round. One, two, or three.

One. Who'd you eat lunch with in high school? There was a group of us in AP Latin, and we were very serious about our Latin. I imagine. And as people interested in the classics generally are, there was also an obsession with politics and current affairs, and that was always a great time. I guess you just said there's a natural relationship between people who are interested in Latin and political affairs.

And I was someone who was very interested in politics and international governance. And I've zero percent interested in studying Latin, Tim. So make this connection for me. What was it about the classics? when you were like, whatever, 15 years old, you're like, yes, Latin. So in terms of your response, what I didn't say is that people interested in politics and international relations are invariably going to be interested in classics. It's more the other way around.

At that time, and I don't think this is as true anymore, if you were studying Latin, you mainly read beginner texts by Tacitus, Livy, and Julius Caesar. And all of those texts were either about military exploits or Roman history. If you remained interested in Latin, you usually weren't bored by reading about the military and military and politics in ancient Rome. And so therefore, you were probably interested in current affairs. I'm giggling because did you catch this little cultural moment when there was a lot going around on the internet about how a certain type of man, when left to his own devices,

and when he's just sitting in a state of emptiness, the thing that came into his mind in this prototype of a man is the Roman Empire, and that this is what men think about constantly, even if they're not conscious of it, that the rise and fall of empires and thinking about the military exploits of the Roman Empire in particular is what preoccupies men's minds. I'm embarrassed to say that I've done no reading on this topic. I was completely unaware of it. Because you just are it. You just are it, Tim.

You've piqued my interest. So we're going to talk explicitly about your new novel. People might not know if they just recognize you from your acting that writing is a very central part of your creative life. You've written many plays. Is, well, how do you, how does writing, what does writing give you in a creative sense that acting has not fulfilled for you over the years? First and foremost, it gives me a measure of control because as actors, no matter how successful we might become, we're always beholden or reliant on others to give us work. And that starts with the writer, but it also means that the director and sometimes the producer and studio, are going to approve you or going to want you to work on their project.

And so there's a lot of waiting around that goes on in an actor's life, particularly early on. And I guess I'm just too neurotic and restless to want to see that much control over my creative life to others. And so even in college, When I was learning that reality, I was writing. Yeah. And it, I learned quickly, wasn't just a panacea for this issue I had of powerlessness, but it was something I enjoyed tremendously, like fishing as a kid. Yeah.

And so I've never stopped. I just, I almost look forward to the time between parts when I don't know what I'm going to do next because I can wake up every morning and go to the computer and write. So the book is called superhero. And it's a story, I mean, the setting is Hollywood. But it's really about these, some pretty wounded folks, one in particular. your protagonist, Peter, who's this A-list actor, who's lived some life. He's dealt with addiction and bad behaviors associated with it, and he's trying to make a big comeback. And the vehicle for this comeback is a superhero movie. How did this particular story capture your imagination when you're

between acting projects and you get to your computer and you're so excited to have your writing time? How is it that this particular narrative settled into your consciousness? I was on a set of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosity's that was being directed by Guillermo's longtime DP collaborator, Guillermo Navarro, who shot his first four movies and won the Oscar for Pan's Labyrinth. And he told me a story about an actor who had taken him to dinner and shut down much of a restaurant for this dinner so that they could have privacy. And this struck me as a really interesting metaphor for the peculiarities of the, the, peculiarities of the, world of tent pole filmmaking.

And what interests me about that world is that I think it's in its own way a microcosm for America. Oh, well, let's go down that road. I mean, I was just going to ask all kinds of questions about what fame does to people and the immense amount of money that goes into this kind of filmmaking, these tent pole film. these huge, huge franchises. But I'm going to put a pin in that because I want to understand how you see the big box franchise temple movie as a reflection of our country. Movie sets are little societies. And big movie sets are not so little societies.

Like any society, you have status, you have pecking orders, you have jealous, you have jelly, You have gossip. You have politics. You have ego. And you have politics writ large that express politics that are national and international just in the very nature of the project. And the superhero narrative is a distinctively American thing. It only could have happened in America. And I'm not just talking about the superhero.

movies, I'm talking about the comic books as well. And the kind of manichy and black and white look at good and evil, the morality, the morality, the optimism that good can triumph over evil coming out of either the First Great War or the Second World War could only have occurred in America a relatively young country whose borders have never really. shifted other than the great crime that was westward expansion but then the superhero movie

as an outgrowth of that if only because only American studios can afford to make those sorts of movies and then they're projected out into the world to where you know you can be at a the most remote village in the Amazon, and you'll encounter a kid with a Hulk t-shirt.

Oh, yeah. The exportation of American culture through the superhero movie, yeah, that's the ultimate soft power, right? So all of that is why it's America. Right. And I'm wondering as a person, you've done a turn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an actor.

I mean, are these, is it interesting to you, the work itself in a creative way? Or is it just, you're clearly interested intellectually in it, right, from a remove. But when you're doing it, when you're in it, is it satisfying?

Is it creatively satisfying? I've done three Marvel movies at this point. All three were creatively, quite rewarding. And I really deeply admire what's been accomplished in the MCU. I'm all for it. And my novel, as a result, is not some hit piece.

But I'm also interested in the deeper conflicts. And one of the big questions that has arisen, and, you know, from people like Martin Scorsese and many other great filmmakers in the industry who've said, look, these movies aren't art. I don't agree with that. I think that Marvel movies are incredibly artistic and can be incredibly daring. But I'm interested in the argument. Yeah.

It's a compelling read. It is a literary read. It's the most literary thing I've ever read about a superhero movie. So congratulations. I hope you had a good time writing it. It seemed like you did. I did. I had a blast writing it and I hope to continue to be able to write books. Yeah. This is round two. Insights is what we have happening here. All kinds of insights will emerge. One, two, or three. Two. Two. What's the biggest risk you've ever taken? I'm going to say marriage. I love that answer.

I never imagined it would work long term. Any marriage or your particular one. Both. Yeah. Even when I proposed to my wife of now almost 32 years. And so I took what I considered at the time an enormous risk. Because I certainly didn't want to go through divorce, having watched my parents do it.

And I didn't want to put children through a divorce, having experienced that as a son. And wow, it felt like I was out there, as they say, flying without a net. And then as it became more and more rewarding, I wondered why I even considered it a risk in the first place. And then discovering that everything I felt was important and essential. Much of it was actually secondary. and there was stuff that I didn't even imagine needed to animate a growing marriage that had to be there and that I had to learn. Like what? I think most of all it was, and this is going to sound terrifically cliche.

day. But learning that my wife wanted most of all to be known and heard. And I just thought, well, the hardest thing here is going to be, which it is for anyone, you know, particularly men, to be just blunt about it, staying faithful. and remaining interested and in love and reliable. And I thought, you do those things, and you're just generally nice to a person. Then what more do you want? Right. I'm upheld my end of the deal.

Right. Yeah. And so I guess, there needed to be more of a commitment to mutual growth, I guess. Yeah, a mutual understanding and really committing to knowing a person. Yeah, there's a lot more to it than that. Turns out, yeah. And then the raising of kids, I didn't know what the hell we were getting into.

And even there, you know, I said, I don't want to have girls. I want to have... I don't want to have boys. I don't want to have boys. I want to have girls. Because Philip Roth had said to my friend John Totoro, they were working on a project together. And Philip Roth said to John, do you have children? And John said, well, yes, I have a boy. And Philip Roth said, well, it's over for you.

And John said, what? He said, well, he has to kill you. Whoa. You're done. Now, I love Philip Roth. And I had my own version of this. I said to my wife, they're going to argue with me and try to destroy me, and they're going to play the electric guitar really loud. Your mythical boy children?

Yeah. Yeah. And I want girls. It's just going to be so much easier. Well, we had three boys. I was just going to say you totally jinxed yourself, Tim. You can't say that stuff out into the universe. And I just have had the best time.

It's just been, I just, we have a blast. And they're all, there's one is a junior in college and the other two are out of college. And I am love and life. You're not watching your back. But at the outset, it was all a monster. monumental risk. Yeah. And one that I couldn't be happier to have taken.

Well, congratulations. Thank you. It's a thing to celebrate a long love. Next three. One, two, or three. One. What's a sound that instantly puts you at ease? You.

Oh, come on. Give me a break. No, I'm saying you. Answer it. I'm so vain. I'm like, come on, Tim, the sound of my voice. I do have to say, however, that I do love, I did love on Morning Edition. Oh, God.

And it's great to associate your face with that wonderful voice. Okay. So you're flipping of sound that instantly puts me at ease. I will tell you, it is the sweetest. sound. It is when my oldest child comes in at the end of the school day. He's 13, and he sings almost every time when he walks in the door, it makes me weepy. He sings. He sings whatever is in his heart. He'll sing a random pop song. He'll sing a, he'll hum a song he's learning on the piano. He'll sing a made-up song that we've made up while making breakfast in the morning. He just sings. And when that happens, then I know it

has been a good day for him. And they're not all good days. But when Wyatt walks through the door and he's singing, it's just, it's my peak joy to hear that. That is a great answer. It's a great answer. I hadn't even, I, it's just what came to mind because I was thinking about it yesterday when he came in the door. I'm like, God, I love that you do that, kid. I love that you do that. And that he's not self-conscious about it either because a 13-year-old can get all kinds of twisted up

and self-consciousness. And anyone can when they sing too. Yeah, yeah. Well, we do a lot of singing in our house. I'm glad it's carried over. Okay, you. Jazz piano. And it's an interesting history.

I'm lucky to have a father to whom music, and in particular jazz music was incredibly important. And it gave my siblings and me an understanding of music that, goes beyond the intellectual and theoretical because it was always playing on his little cassette recorder in the house while he worked. Always. He couldn't work without it. And it animated for me a lifelong interest in music to the extent that I worked at a record shop also to pay off legal bills.

There's a through line here. But always have worked to music. But then I married a woman who loves music and is a wonderful singer and plays the guitar. And as we were raising our three boys, she said, I want a piano in the house. And so we have a piano in the house. And all three boys. are musicians. And it brings me incredible comfort.

Do you like Keith Jarrett? Love Keith Jarrett. I love Keith Jarrett. It's not, I'm very limited exposure to jazz and jazz piano. But someone, I lived in Japan after college and this Italian. Yeah, the Kyoto concert. Yes. This Italian scientist who I knew gave me, it wasn't the Kyoto concert.

He gave me the Kern Concert. The Kern recording. There's a movie about that, by that. Oh, is there? Yeah, there's a German film about that. And it just came out. It was the most beautiful, emotive thing I had ever heard at that point. And to think that it was all just happening organically in him, and then you can hear him breathing and working the sounds of the piano.

And I just, I'd never heard something so alive. I absolutely adore Keith Jarrett. And with him, you have the melding of classical and jazz in such a beautiful and delicate way. Yeah. One, two, or three? Three. Three. What emotion do you understand better than all the others?

I want to be honest here. And so I'm checking off all the negative ones. because I suspect it's going to be one of those. And because if you're not honest, why is a show like this useful? That's true. I certainly understand love deeply because I have so much of it in my life

between my wife and my children. And so I'd love to say that that's number one. And maybe it is. It's around me always now. And I can only hope that that will persist. But I've been writing lately about how feelings of vindictiveness and recrimination are important

as fuel in an artistic life and how they're not to be repudiated or ignored or dismissed but since I believe

they're inevitable in the human condition that they can be used constructively. And I've endeavored to do that in my life in a pretty serious way. Because when I've been angry about a rejection, I think back on those moments and how I've gone home or back to my computer or thought about the next audition or the next meeting with a direction.

or the next meeting with the director, and I've said, I'm going to overcome that and to hell with them, and I'm going to show everybody. I learned not to feel bad about that, but to consider it inevitable and to use it. And I just have to admit that it was, useful in not giving up. Right. Right. And so in whatever successes I've had, that the, the malady associated with negative

feelings have been ones I've tried to turn to my advantage. I mean, that's a fundamental tool of resilience in living a life. Yes. Because we're all going to suffer rejection. And so how do you not quell your anger, but treat it with care and turn it into something useful? We want to think of artistic pursuits as purer, but I don't think you can do without turning rejection and the feelings associated to your advantage. Last round. Beliefs. One, two, or three. Two.

How do you think your life should be judged? I, based on the father that I've been, that's number one. And artistic pursuit is tied up in that. Because part of parenting for my wife and me has, has involved interlacing the rearing of children with a sensitivity that is foundationally artistic, because that's the way we've spent our lives. Arguably, our most traditionally academic kid, which is our youngest kid, is also a really serious jazz drummer.

And we, if he wanted to do that as a profession, I'm, you know, my wife and I would be delighted with that. I don't think that's what he wants to do. The other two are, at least at this point, pursuing professional lives as artists. And I most want to be remembered as the parent of these three kids alongside. my wife. That's beautiful. Three new cards. One, two, or three.

One. Are you preoccupied with the past, the future, or neither? I think probably I'm more preoccupied with the present. And that's a battle. Because I think it's a dangerous game. In which way? Not thinking about the future in a conscious. and conscientious way can be pernicious.

And there is a preoccupation culturally right now to just be in the present all the time. And I'm guilty of that. Yeah. I'm absolutely guilty of that. And I use it to my advantage, but ultimately it's going to be to my disadvantage. because I stick my head in my work, which in a way is sticking my head in the sand. And I hide from the future by devouring the moment. And by doing so, I'm going to run out of time without knowing it.

It's sort of that phenomenon that my wife and I rehearsed, constantly in our discussions of our lives since our children have gone with the one junior in college. So he'll come back and live in our place this summer, but we effectively consider that we're not. Yeah. Yeah. Look, there's all this stuff.

that we said we wanted to do, like live in another country. And we're not doing it because you're writing your novel or you're doing the next acting job. And so I guess that's kind of what I'm talking about in a very specific way. Right. But it's bigger than that. Yeah. Because I do get caught up in how extraordinary I think what's right in front of me is and how it is going to demand all of my attention. But then when that's done, I'll have time.

Yeah. Yeah. But then when it's done, there's always something else. And that's a kind of prohibited. existence in the present, at the present, that becomes dangerous. I get it. And I need to get better at that. Last one, Tim.

One, two, or three. One. What truth guides your life more than any other? Creativity, which I guess perhaps is not a truth. Does that suffice? I wake up every day in search of creative truth and creative moments, which are the same thing,

because I do believe in that Tom Waits line, everything you can think of is true. And when I think, I want to be thinking creatively. And when I wake up in the morning and I'm going to go and write or I'm going to be on a set playing a part, I'm always in search of what I never could have predicted, but which once it occurs in retrospect feels that it was inevitable. And that dichotomy is that those surprising truths are the ones that are most important to me. And I live my life for those. Timberlake Nelson, we end the show the same way every time with a trip in our memory time machine. Okay?

You get in the time machine and you revisit one moment from your past. It's not a moment you want to change anything about. It's just a moment you'd like to linger in a little bit longer. What moment do you choose? I loved soccer growing up. Just loved it. I was obsessed with it. And I played varsity soccer in high school, but I always rode the bench.

I was never a starter. So I wasn't very good. But one Saturday, during the spring, in club soccer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was right-wing. Yep. And I accomplished what is called a diving header. Yes. Which means that I dove and hit the ball with my head as a header, and I scored a goal.

Oh, my God! In the most dramatic fashion. Yes. And this was something that I practiced with my... my little buddies when we would just play soccer constantly among ourselves. Yeah. We would throw the ball in the air and do a diving header to act like we were canalia or Pele and somebody.

And we would do bicycle kicks and I actually scored one in a game. I can't believe it. And that is probably as meaningful a childhood memory as I have. Isn't that incredible? It was my one moment. moment of athletic prowess. Tim Blake Nelson, it has been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for doing this.

His newest novel is called Superhero and it's out now. Thank you so much. This was my pleasure. If you'd like that conversation, you should go back to my episode with Nick Offerman. He's another actor where if I see his name in the cast list, I'm definitely going to check out that project. In our conversation, he was thoughtful and he was kind. And his profound love for his wife, Megan Malolli, just chish.

shines through the entire conversation. You can watch it by searching for NPR Wildcard on YouTube. This episode was produced by Summer Tomad and Mitra Arthur and edited by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Becky Brown. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni, and our theme music is by Romteen Arablewee. You can reach out to us at wildcard at npr.org. We're going to shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.