This Marvel Villain Actor's 2021 Western Is Quietly Dominating Netflix

Tim Blake Nelson is one of our great character actors, an always-dependable presence who seems to liven up any movie he's in, even if his role is minor. And to be fair, Nelson almost always plays supporting characters in films — he's not exactly a traditional leading man. Which is probably why the folks at Marvel cast him as villain Dr. Samuel Sterns aka The Leader, who showed up first in Edward Norton's awful "The Incredible Hulk" before returning again as the character in "Captain America: Brave New World."

But every now and then, Nelson gets to take the lead, as he did in "Old Henry," a Western from 2021 that's suddenly doing very well on Netflix. According to FlixPatrol, "Old Henry" is sitting at number 5 on Netflix's Top 10 movies of the week. It's just another example of an obscure, smaller film that didn't get much attention in theaters suddenly finding an audience on Netflix. And while I'd prefer for more of these films to attract people to theaters, I'm happy for Tim Blake Nelson, an actor I've always liked ever since I first became aware of him in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

In "Old Henry," Nelson plays a widowed farmer living with his son in the Oklahoma Territory in the early 1900s. Henry finds himself having to protect his son from gun-slinging outlaws after getting mixed up in a situation beyond his control. "This is a guy, he's a dad trying to raise his son as best he can, with a past that he's trying not only to hide, but to utterly repress," Nelson told us when we interviewed him about the film. "And because of an act of compassion, he fails to do so and tragic events ensue."

"Old Henry" isn't Nelson's first Western, nor is it his first Western to stream on Netflix. In 2018, Nelson appeared in the Coen Brothers' wonderfully morose dark comedy Western "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (which, at the time I'm writing this, is the last film the Coen Brothers made together before they went off and started doing their own solo projects), which originally started out as a Netflix series before being edited into a movie.

If you're a fan of Nelson's work (and you should be, because he rules), it's definitely worth checking out "Old Henry" on Netflix right now.