Michael Stuhlbarg

In A Serious Man (2009), Michael Stuhlbarg has to listen to Fred Melamed’s Sy Ableman explain himself at leisure. As Larry Gopnik, he makes the effort to remain receptive look increasingly tiring. He still expects something useful to be said, which is why the exchange hurts as well as amuses. We value that persistence: Stuhlbarg lets a character struggle without making every pause a request for sympathy.

Joel and Ethan Coen give him a physics professor who believes reasonable questions ought to produce reasonable answers. When a student attempts to bribe Larry, Stuhlbarg makes even the business of replying seem an unfair demand. We laughed at the bribe, then grew anxious for Larry because he still had to find a way to answer. The Coens sometimes make the people tormenting him too easy to ridicule, but his bewilderment keeps the suffering from becoming merely another joke.

The lead in A Serious Man was his film breakthrough; much of the work that followed has been in supporting parts. Arnold Rothstein in Boardwalk Empire (2010–2013) and Mr. Perlman in Call Me by Your Name (2017) belong to that later stretch. He is frequently cast as intellectual or professional men, and the patient attention he gives another speaker helps explain the appeal.

Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (2025) gives him Frederik Mendelssohn, a psychoanalyst and the husband of Julia Roberts’s Alma. Roberts plays a woman practised at not reacting; Stuhlbarg’s Frederik cooks and listens. He has the film’s funniest scenes and its saddest, making these ordinary activities worth our attention. It is a good supporting performance in a film whose prolonged indecision remains a substantial flaw.

We would welcome another part as demanding as Larry, rather than more evidence that he can improve a supporting scene. There is still something to explore in a man who wants to understand people who offer him no help. Start with A Serious Man, provided a comedy that makes its central character suffer sounds like an agreeable evening.