Pushed off the road by the pandemic, Jason Isbell spent a good chunk of 2021 in Oklahoma, where he was acting in director Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
That experience — from meeting Oklahomans in the rural areas where the movie was shot to watching Scorsese work — figured into “Weathervanes,” Isbell’s new album, from the writing of the songs to his production of the record.
So how and why did Isbell end up in the movie? Did he always want to be an actor?
“I didn’t really want to be an actor, but I think I wanted to act,” Isbell said during a phone interview. “I was looking for a way to help somebody tell a story. We were locked down, COVID kept us from touring. So I asked my manager to see if there were any television shows or movies I could get on. I’d never done that before. I played myself on an episode of ‘Billions’ and was an extra on the ‘Deadwood’ movie on HBO, because I loved ‘Deadwood.’”
What the motion picture management found for Isbell was Scorsese’s adaptation of the 2017 best-selling non-fiction book about a series of murders that took place in the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on tribal land, triggering an FBI investigation. The film will hit theaters on Oct. 20.
“I just kept auditioning. I knew I didn’t have any experience. But I told them if they gave some instruction, I could do it,” he said. “And I wound up on set with Scorsese, (Robert) DeNiro and (Leonardo) DiCaprio. It was terrifying. I was scared to death. That felt really good. It is important to challenge myself as I get older and do some new things creatively.”
Isbell landed the role of Bill Smith (spoiler alert – he was one of the murder victims back in 1917) and found himself spending time on the movie set observing Scorsese and meeting folks who live nearby.
Some of them made their way into the songs that populate “Weathervanes,”…
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