20 Things You Didn't Know About O Brother, Where Art Thou?
3. George Clooney's Religious Uncle Tried To Remove All The Swearing
On the set of O Brother, Where Art Thou? the Coen brothers were impressed by George Clooney's delivery of all their loquacious dialogue but for one thing. He nailed every word except for the cursing.
It turned out that Clooney had been unsure of how to approach the role so had sent the script to his Uncle Jack, a Southern Baptist from Kentucky. By getting the uncle to say the lines into the tape recorder, Clooney could get the accent and delivery down. Before long he had thrown away the script and was just learning his dialogue from his uncle's tape recording instead.
That was when the brothers were forced to pull their star to one side. "Let me ask you something, you say every word exactly as written, except you don’t say hell and you don’t say damn. Why do you do that?" Clooney remembered them asking. It was only then that the actor realised that his uncle had been editing the notoriously intractable writer-directors' work.
"Well, George, I don't think people talk like that," was the religious Uncle Jack's excuse for censoring one of the Oscar-winning writers' milder screenplays. You'd hate to think what Jack would have made of the far more foul-mouthed Big Lebowski.
The problem was resolved and Clooney got to say "damn, we're in a tight spot" repeatedly until the words almost lost their meaning anyway.