The Coens' quirkiest characters

George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

If characters like Visser and Smalls represent the spectrum of Coen villainy, then Everett is a prototypical Coen hero: a hayseed who hides his lack of common sense behind a stream of (often misused) high vocabulary yet still retains his heroic dignity. Loquacious, bumbling, and proud of his smelly Dapper Dan pomade (“the pleasin’ odor’s half the point!”), Everett fakes an intelligence his two Mississippi-chain-gang buddies lack, but he’s not fooling the audience.