Not Your Typical Movie CopInstead of going with the typical fedora-wearing P.I. swilling booze in a seedy downtown office, the Coens create Marge Gunderson: a super-preggo police chief who's better...

A Life of Not-So-Quiet Desperation Jerry Lundegaard is… a total wreck. There's honestly no other way to put it. (Unless we were to call him a spineless total wreck.)Dude's a sales manager at his...

Carl Showalter's part of a crazy criminal duo. He's an accident waiting to happen, He's a ticking time bomb. Played by Steve Buscemi—in a role written expressly for him—Carl's a talkative, irri...

He Needs Unguent Gaear Grimsrud's a difficult character to understand, in part because he says so little… and in part because he's such a stone-cold sociopath.Unlike his partner and foil, Carl, G...

Even though Jean Lundegaard is technically the focus of the film's crisis, she gets surprisingly short shrift from everybody else. Her husband, Jerry, apparently never considers her wellbeing, and...

Wade Gustafson is a dominating presence: a wealthy, arrogant guy who owns the car dealership where Jerry, his son-in-law, works. We get the impression that Wade doesn't like or respect Jerry… and...

Norm Gunderson is Marge's husband. Every time we see him with Marge—actually every time we see him in the film—he's either eating with her or watching TV in bed with her. But this is a vision o...

Played by Tony Denman, Scotty is the accordion-playing son of Jerry Lundegaard (we never actually see him playing accordion, but there's one in his room along with an "Accordion King" poster, featu...

Shep Native American man who works as a mechanic at Wade's dealership—but he's also an ex-con with criminal connections. He's the guy who helps put Jerry in contact with Carl and Gaear in the fir...

Stan is a financial advisor to Wade Gustafson, who tells Wade that the real estate deal Jerry is bringing to them is actually a good one. However, they just want to give Jerry a "finder's fee" with...

Yanagita shows up in one of the weirdest parts of the movie. As Ethan Coen noted, " It was certainly our intention while writing this sequence that it should be a digression." While in Minneapolis,...

Reilly is a GMAC employee who keeps phoning Jerry Lundegaard and asking him for serial numbers pertaining to cars that are supposedly being sold at the dealership. (GMAC was a finance company that...

Officer Lou assists Marge in investigating the murders, showing up at the crime scene where Carl and Gaear have murdered the state trooper and the young couple who witnessed the crime. He brings Ma...