Tim Blake Nelson on His 12-Year Battle to Make ‘The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd’ and Joining ‘Task’ Season 2

TIFF: The filmmaker talks about casting Amanda Seyfried and Scoot McNairy: "I like to write roles I could never play," he tells IndieWire.

Tim Blake Nelson spent 12 years trying to bring “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” to the screen. He’d assemble a cast, cobble together some financing, only to see the whole thing collapse — again and again and again.

“It was a nightmare,” Nelson admitted over Zoom. “I’m an avid journal writer, and there’s so much despair in the pages of my journal over my failure to get it made.”

Part of the problem was the subject matter. “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” largely unfolds in a maximum-security prison, where an English teacher (Amanda Seyfried) finds herself unexpectedly drawn to a charismatic inmate, Wilson (Scoot McNairy). For good measure, some of the film also takes place on death row, with all the horrors that entails.

“People would say, ‘Well, we’re not going to finance this, but show us the final product, and then we’re really going to be interested in seeing it,'” Nelson remembered.

Compounding matters, Nelson’s last film as a director, the ensemble drama “Anesthesia,” received only a token release when it debuted in 2015.

“It didn’t perform well, so that didn’t help,” Nelson said. “The nature of getting movies financed right now, as is evidenced by ‘Wilson Shedd,’ is that they require a level of past success.”

Despite the setbacks, Nelson persisted, and “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” will premiere on Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival. V42, a company looking to back socially conscious films, provided the financing. It was founded by Miles David Romney, the producer of a 2022 animated film that Nelson had worked on called “Ninety-Five Senses.” After several stops and starts, production finally began last year in Georgia.

Nelson ultimately believes the delays were fortuitous because they brought him to Seyfried and McNairy, who give revelatory performances as two wounded people drawn together with tragic consequences. Originally, another actor had been attached, only to fall out. So Nelson approached Seyfried about the part while the two were filming the 2025 religious drama “The Testament of Ann Lee” in Hungary.

“Within 30 seconds of us meeting for the first time in base camp in Budapest, I knew she was perfect for this role,” Nelson said. “She has an openness, an unpredictability, a preternatural decency, a wit, and an incredible work ethic. There are little turns that Amanda makes when she’s teaching, where she’s surprising even herself in that ineffable way that we do as humans. She’s so in the moment, and then it’s just mercurial, and it flits away. You would never think that there was a camera on her.”

As for McNairy, a veteran character actor whose profile is rising thanks to a showy supporting turn in Hulu’s breakout series “Furious,” Nelson was mesmerized by his audition tape. On set, he found himself marveling at the way McNairy shaded the character — finding his humanity while never denying his dark side.

“I like to write roles I could never play. For actors, you know, who can do things I can’t do,” Nelson said.

It’s a surprising admission given that Nelson has delivered scene-stealing turns in the likes of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” “Minority Report,” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” for legendary directors like Spielberg and the Coen brothers. In “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” Nelson plays a pivotal supporting role as the prison warden. So what is it about the title character that Nelson found so out of reach?

“I don’t think you would believe me as Wilson Shedd, just physically,” Nelson said. “No matter what I did as an actor in the milieu of this movie, I don’t think that I could make myself attractive to a character like the one that Amanda plays. It’s just not my role. I’m playing the role I should be playing in the movie.”

Nelson is against the death penalty. However, one of the strengths of “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” which contains a grueling execution sequence, is that it isn’t a political screed.

“I have no issue with the movie not changing someone’s mind if they’re for capital punishment, because it’s not a polemical movie, and its main issue isn’t capital punishment,” Nelson said. “Its issue is what we are capable of doing to one another.”

Nelson is hoping that “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” leaves Toronto with a distribution deal on the strength of its reviews and that, despite its challenging subject matter, it ultimately finds an audience. He’s also fine-tuning other scripts and eager to direct other projects, and, as he said, it helps to have a track record of commercial successes. But he’s not abandoning his first love of acting. In the weeks leading up to the festival, he’s been in Pennsylvania shooting the second season of HBO’s “Task” alongside Mark Ruffalo.

“The creator Brad Ingelsby is such a great writer, and they offered me a really challenging, interesting character,” Nelson said. “I get to be around some of my favorite actors. I was in a scene the other day with Mark, with whom I’ve always wanted to work, and Mahershala Ali, Édgar Ramírez, and Harry Melling.”

The only drawback, Nelson said, is that he doesn’t have any screen time with Julianne Nicholson, who will be reprising her role from “Mare of Easttown” in a crossover.

“Despite that one regret, it’s been an absolute privilege to get to be a part of that world,” Nelson said. “It’s the last thing I need to be doing right now while I try to get ‘Shedd’ out there, but I just couldn’t say no.”