Michael Stuhlbarg on his role in ‘A Serious Man’

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s new 1960s-set film, “A Serious Man,” Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry Gopnik is a modern-day Job, an earnest, upstanding individual utterly baffled by the mounting series of woes that fate sends his way. Out of nowhere, his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), wants a divorce. His disturbed brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), has a ruinous encounter with the police. Accidents and attorney’s fees abound, even as a brewing bribery scandal threatens to undermine his chances of securing tenure in the college physics department where he teaches.

As his troubles pile up, Larry questions why God would want him to suffer and turns to various rabbis to help him puzzle out the meaning of it all. As with any Coen brothers’ movie, though, answers aren’t always easy to come by.

“A Serious Man” marks Stuhlbarg’s first leading role in a film, but he’s already well known on the New York boards, earning a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk award for his work in “The Pillowman.” He was born in Long Beach and attended UCLA before transferring to the Juilliard School in Manhattan. Back on the West Coast for a visit, he sits down to talk about the Coens, the Gopniks and ambiguous endings.

“A Serious Man” was filmed in Minnesota, where the Coen brothers grew up. Is it true that it’s something of an autobiographical tale?

Yes and no. Which one of them was the stoner son Danny?

It’s probably a mix of both of them. So you were playing their dad.

Yes, I was. Did they say as much?

Their father was an economics professor at the University of Minnesota; Larry is a physics professor there. So I think that’s the only similarity between the two. They didn’t say ‘you have to play our father’ . . . they weren’t trying to make us be anything other than what we brought to it naturally, and what we thought might be appropriate. What’s their set like?

They are very loose. They’ve been working with the same crew for years, since “Blood Simple” in some cases. So they’ve got their friends around them and people that they trust implicitly. They don’t have to explain things twice. Roger [Deakins, the cinematographer] is kind of like the third Coen brother. They don’t make a decision without him.

Joel was discussing the other night that they probably don’t give him enough credit. I think he’s done 10 films with them. So the visual style they’ve developed over the course of the last 10 films is as much his influence as theirs. I’ve lost the question . . . About the set.

It was just loose and easy, and a place where you can just show up and do your best work. Throughout the film, Larry keeps saying, “I didn’t do anything,” as if that should protect him from all these terrible things that happen. How do you prepare to play a character who is more sinned against than sinning?

I just started with what the facts were. I dove deeply into the physics. I went to a physics professor and worked on Shrödinger’s cat and the uncertainty principle. I asked questions about the background of the relationship between Judith and Larry, and Arthur and Larry, and tried to be specific about those things.

It’s interesting because a lot of people consider him to be passive, but I feel like within the realm of what happens to him, he does defend himself. He does have a backbone . . . I think he’s just trying to be a good person about the whole thing. Are you getting a lot of philosophical or theological questions these days?

People are often interested in the end of the movie and what I think it means. I haven’t really a way to answer it. [The Coens] like to leave things open to let people make up their own minds about it.

This is your first lead role in a film. What has it been like to read all the glowing reviews?

I couldn’t be happier. There were a lot of jokes going around the set that nobody was going to see the movie. ‘All five of us add up to one Tilda Swinton,’ was one of Richard Kind’s quips, which made me laugh. And it’s true -- it’s like making a little independent movie and people are embracing it, and that’s lovely. You can’t ask for more than that.

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