In the new film from the Coen brothers, A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik is a Jewish physics professor content to be living what he believes to be a perfectly normal life with his wife and two kids in the Midwest in 1967. However, as he faces one bad turn of events after another he begins to wonder what could possibly be wrong that such misfortune seems to keep finding him. Eventually Larry turns to the very religion he has founded his life upon for real answers to his life's problems. The result is just about everything but what he expected.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with the man who brought the character of Larry to life, Tony award winning actor Michael Stuhlbarg, and talk to him about how his own background and thoughts on religion and how Judaism played a role in his portrayal of this thought-provoking character. Here is what he had to say.

Let's start off with your background a little bit. The entire film is founded upon the Jewish religion and all that being Jewish in the Midwest in the 1960s brings with it. What kind of personal background did you bring to that and how did you incorporate all those elements into this character?

Michael Stuhlbarg: I was really lucky heading into this project because the Coens tend to work with a lot of the same artists over and over and over again (Mary Zophres, the costume designer, being one of them), and when I showed up for my first fitting for what Larry might look like she had created these magnificent boards covered with photographs of people who lived in Minneapolis at that time period and so you could see pictures of what Larry could look like in all these pictures. Those gave us a real sense of what the people were like, looking at those pictures and sort of getting them into our heads.

I found that in terms of getting into what the period was like, a lot of the physical stuff that was given to me, like the clothing and the glasses and the time that I spent with Fríða Aradóttir, the hair designer, to create the hair and Jean Black [make-up] to create what we called our haggard chart in terms of how Larry might look on any particular day, those little elements were so important in terms of bringing him to life.

In terms of playing something within the 60s, you know, you take the confines of any particular order, in this case it's Minneapolis, it's 1967, and you surround yourself with the nuances of what that life must have been like and then you behave accordingly to the life that's around you. And I asked a ton of questions [to Joel and Ethan] in terms of what my character might be like, and I got answers for a lot of them and those things I didn't get answers to they said, you know, it's up to you to create that for yourself and so they allowed me a lot of leeway as well. Simultaneously you have very strong structure in terms of the kind of the specificity of the words they put down on the page and at the same time they allow their actors, once they're chosen, to run with it and create their own thing to make them feel comfortable within the confines of the order they create.

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