Ralph Fiennes Is Playing Robert Moses in ‘Straight Line Crazy’
The Coen Brothers are still filming The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the title project of the Coens’ latest collaboration with Paramount. And in addition to it, they’re shooting another film with director Paul Thomas Anderson, titled The Master.
Paradoxically, Fiennes has been cast in the latter. The story is a reworking of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (minus the part played by Robert Duvall), and Fiennes plays Milton Reisner, the former governor of New Jersey.
We don’t know much about the movie, except for that it’s an adaptation with the same story and characters and the same cast already lined up: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Rylance, and Tom Hanks. And we know Anderson has been planning to take on Moses, in a re-imagining of the great civil rights leader.
How is Fiennes playing Moses? That’s unclear. The Coen Brothers have cast him in three other films, and also in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (where he is played by fellow Brit, Colin Farrell) and in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (played by his son, John). But Fiennes wasn’t in one of those films: Neither Lebowski nor Scruggs was directed by Anderson, and Fiennes was not involved in the Scruggs project whatsoever.
So how is Fiennes playing Moses here? Well, it’s the perfect role for Fiennes. While Anderson is going for a much more realistic portrayal of the civil rights leader, Fiennes is really a great choice: His character’s story is one that everyone can identify with, and he’s certainly an iconic character.
The Master stars Aaron Paul as a college professor who is being forced to retire after a series of bizarre events cause him to see the world from an entirely new perspective. When he looks back at
