Burn After Reading: Every Major Performance, Ranked

When the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading first hit theaters, critics weren’t too impressed. But that was just an issue of timing. The duo wrote and directed Burn After Reading as a lighthearted change of pace after their bleak neo-western masterpiece No Country for Old Men, which wowed audiences everywhere and swept the Oscars. Since moviegoers were looking forward to a new No Country and instead got an espionage-themed farce, they were disappointed.

The same thing happened in the late ‘90s when the Coens followed up Fargo with The Big Lebowski. With the gift of hindsight, most fans have come to view Burn After Reading as a pretty hilarious comedy. So, here are all the main performances in the movie, ranked.

8 Elizabeth Marvel As Sandy Pfarrer

Elizabeth Marvel didn’t have a lot to do when she played Harry Pfarrer’s wife Sandy in Burn After Reading. Most of her scenes boiled down to her husband cheating on her and her being completely clueless about it, which didn’t give Marvel a lot of room for nuance or pathos.

Still, in her small handful of scenes, Marvel does a fine job of delivering Sandy’s dialogue and by being quite delightful, making Harry seem like even more of a scumbag for cheating on her.

7 J.K. Simmons As CIA Superior

HBO’s Oz and the Spider-Man movies made J.K. Simmons a recognizable face, and his Oscar-winning turn as Terence Fletcher in Whiplash made him an internationally renowned A-lister. In between, Simmons played a minor role as Osbourne Cox’s CIA superior in Burn After Reading.

Despite Simmons’ limited screen time (his character doesn’t even have a proper name), his deadpan delivery style worked spectacularly with the humor of the script.

6 Richard Jenkins As Ted

From The Shape of Water to Killing Them Softly, Richard Jenkins is great at playing a mild-mannered peaceful character against his violent co-stars. In Burn After Reading, he plays Linda and Chad’s awkward, unsuspecting boss, Ted.

Poor Ted is one of the few characters in Burn After Reading who meets a grim fate without actually doing anything to deserve it. His attempts to fix his employees’ problems end tragically when he confronts an unhinged Osbourne Cox.

5 Tilda Swinton As Katie Cox

In the role of Osbourne Cox’s mean-spirited, adulterous wife Katie, Tilda Swinton relished the opportunity to play a hatable character. As seen in Snowpiercer and the Narnia movies, Swinton is great at playing villains, and her cold-hearted turn as Katie is no different.

Katie might not be as overtly antagonistic as the White Witch, but in her bitter interactions with her husband, it certainly seems that way. If there’s one negative point about Swinton’s performance is that she’s occasionally too bitter and unlikable, and Katie ceases to feel like a real person ⁠— but those instances are rare.

4 George Clooney As Harry Pfarrer

From O Brother, Where Art Thou? to Hail, Caesar!, the Coen brothers usually cast George Clooney in the role of a buffoon. But in Burn After Reading, they cast him as a pretty sleazy guy. Harry Pfarrer has a ton of extramarital affairs while designing a sex machine for his wife.

As an A-list superstar, Clooney rarely plays unlikable characters. Most of the time, he plays lead protagonists who are required by Hollywood doctrine to be likable. So, it was a refreshing change of pace to see Clooney playing a brazen jerk.

3 John Malkovich As Osbourne Cox

At the beginning of Burn After Reading, Osbourne Cox is fired from his job at the CIA, and the abrupt dismissal makes him furious. John Malkovich’s hysterically over-the-top portrayal of Osbourne’s anger immediately establishes this as one of the actor’s funniest performances.

Throughout the movie, Osbourne tries and fails to write his memoirs, proving his discouraging wife right (which only makes him madder at his own shortcomings), and he’s eventually driven to a violent outburst. Malkovich plays his character’s blend of humor and humanity brilliantly.

2 Frances McDormand As Linda Litzke

Since she’s married to Joel Coen, Frances McDormand has appeared in a ton of the Coen brothers’ movies, going back to their very first directorial effort, Blood Simple. In Burn After Reading, she plays an aging, single gym employee who resorts to selling U.S. intelligence secrets to the Russians in order to afford a cosmetic surgery.

McDormand initially plays Linda as a tragic figure ⁠— most of the guys she goes on dates with turn out to be married men looking to sleep around ⁠— but as she becomes more accustomed to blackmailing spies, she becomes kind of a soft-spoken badass.

1 Brad Pitt As Chad Feldheimer

As shown by his Oscar-winning performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Brad Pitt has impeccable comic talents that aren’t touched on by his brooding roles in films like World War Z and Se7en. Perhaps Pitt’s funniest performance is in Burn After Reading, in which he plays bumbling gym employee Chad Feldheimer.

From the dances he does during his workouts with clients to his hilariously ill-prepared attempts to blackmail an ex-CIA agent, Chad is the character that best embodies the uniquely zany comedic tone of this movie ⁠— and Pitt nails every single one of his scenes.

About The Author

Ben Sherlock
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Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, independent filmmaker, and Burt Reynolds enthusiast. He writes lists for Screen Rant and features and reviews for Game Rant. He’s currently in pre-production on his first feature (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). You can catch him performing standup at odd pubs around the UK that will give him stage time. Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop.

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