Tim Blake Nelson
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What is Tim Blake Nelson's background and early influences?
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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 Wildcard, 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 Watchmen 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 working at the Tulsa Beef Company, 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 at work by 6. I worked until 2 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... With entrails and organs and maggots and with a high-powered industrial 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. Yeah. 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 by my mother at that point. Uh-huh. 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 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.
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