How often does Tim Blake Nelson think about ancient Greece?

Tim Blake Nelson Photo by Stephanie Diani

By PJ Grisar September 15, 2025

Tim Blake Nelson, the writer, director, actor and Jewish Okie, had a regimen for his three sons.

Outside of school, Nelson — known for his folksy-but-cerebral turns in collaborations with the Coen Brothers, a handful of Marvel films and HBO’s Watchmen — required the boys to read with him and his wife every day. His oldest and youngest read newspapers: The New York Times, The Economist and editorials in the Wall Street Journal. The middle child read fiction. One day they picked up Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” in which an explorer is given a tour of an execution device that bloodily inscribes a prisoner’s offense on their bare skin.

Nelson was struck by the dramatic potential of the grisly, oddly detached tale of crime and punishment, but felt it wasn’t quite right to do a strict adaptation.

“It was more broadly philosophical, but kind of less relevant than what I’m sure it was at the beginning of the 20th century for Kafka’s audience,” Nelson, 61, explained in an interview at a rehearsal space near the Bowery in Manhattan.

But as Nelson noodled with the idea, a variation arose. He was then reading Richard Powers’ novel Galatea 2.2, a metafictional account of an AI that can write stories. Nelson was thinking about how the book connected to Moore’s Law, an axiom about the steady growth of computing power. And every time he turned on his computer, Nelson felt it was anticipating his next move. This was, mind you, around 2019, before the popular ascension of tools like ChatGPT.

Nelson melded the idea of algorithmic thinking with Kafka’s story, spawning the drama And Then We Were No More, debuting at La Mama in Manhattan on Sept. 19.

The play takes place in an unnamed country, a carceral surveillance state governed by “the function,” a superintelligence that decides career tracks and destinies. The function assigns a lawyer to defend a woman who poisoned her mother, husband and children.

As in Kafka’s story, the characters are never identified by name, and central to the action is a revolutionary machine that both delivers a death sentence and serves as a powerful deterrent to criminals. But while Kafka’s contraption palimpsestically writes the crime over the body of the condemned with a harrow full of needles, the one Nelson imagines is supposedly painless.

Even so, the inmate is appealing for a more conventional end to her life. Taking her on as a client, the lawyer soon learns that she was “harvested for physical data,” tortured with daily blood draws and brain tissue samples in a search for “genetic and environmental predispositions to violent criminality.”

While the setting suggests the future, the show’s ideas — including eugenics, authoritarianism and capital punishment — are old. And they’re ones Nelson has tackled in the past.

Nelson’s play The Grey Zone, which he adapted and directed as a 2001 film, is about the 1944 Sonderkommando Uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Jewish men who guided new arrivals to the gas chambers and disposed of them in the ovens also destroyed crematoria with the help of women prisoners smuggling explosives. The story is drawn in part from an account of Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor who performed autopsies under the infamous Nazi physician Mengele, who, like some characters in We Were No More, conducted cruel experiments in the name of medical “research.”

Nelson’s most recent play, Socrates, which played at the Public Theater in 2019, deals with the philosopher’s state-mandated death by hemlock.

Asked if he saw a theme, Nelson, wearing worn brown cowboy boots tucked under gray khakis, connected it to questions that have dogged us since Socrates’ time.

“I’m obsessed with the ideas that came out of ancient Greece and spread through a kind of intellectual diaspora, mainly then through Central Europe, and a lot of the debates that evolved in the middle of the 20th Century,” Nelson said, adding that this Greek thought first came back in fashion during the Enlightenment.

Foremost among the ideas is how utilitarianism — the greatest good for the greatest number — collides with individual rights. In the play, the conflict is dramatized by an analyst for the death machine, who argues AI-backed surveillance takes away “meaningless freedoms” and replaces them with greater ones. On the other side, the lawyer contends constant monitoring makes the idea of freedom “a lie.”

But beyond that dialectic, Nelson said he’s preoccupied with the question of whether an objective, morally right position exists.

Paying the bill for surviving

He thinks this idée fixe comes from growing up with his mother, Ruth, a childhood Holocaust refugee who left Germany in 1938 with her parents, resettling in London before coming to the United States in 1941.

“I always felt like my mother considered her very life a privilege and was kind of retroactively paying the bill for that privilege with the way that she conducted herself morally,” Nelson said of Ruth, a Tulsa housing activist and philanthropist who was active with organizations like Planned Parenthood; she passed away in 2023. “The question of what is good, what is morally right, and the ultimate bankruptcy of thinking that way, even though we really must, has obsessed me for my whole life. And I keep going back to it in the stories I write.”

Nelson started writing seriously as a grad student at Juilliard, often penning material for his classmates. He’s continued — his fellow alum Elizabeth Marvel plays the lawyer and is also in his forthcoming film, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, set in an Oklahoma prison.

In the room with Marvel, he chats about the U.S. Open, asks if she read The Alchemist (and asks this reporter if he’s yet tackled the English translation of Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters or Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel about a 1933 Jewish German family, The Oppermanns). He effuses over a courtroom scene, where Marvel appeals to the audience for mercy a la Shakespeare’s Portia, saying it’s a “nice run of crispness.”

I can tell he’s in his element in the rehearsal room where we met, but Nelson says he’s never happier than when writing a draft of something he knows will work. His second novel, Superhero, about the production of a Marvel-like tentpole film, is due in December.

Nelson has starred in three superhero films, most recently Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World, which proved controversial both due to Shira Haas’ Israeli character — and, later reports that the studio would change her nationality to do an end-run around the outrage — and also for its original title New World Order. Critics said it was insensitive to use that phrase, associated with an antisemitic conspiracy theory, in a film where Nelson, a Jewish actor, played the villain.

“It’s addressed in the book,” Nelson said of his upcoming novel.

In between rehearsals for the play and editing Wilson Shedd, Nelson went to the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of The Testament of Ann Lee, a musical about the founder of the Shaker movement.  (As if all this wasn’t enough, after a run at Tribeca, he’s also doing Q&As around the city for the film Bang Bang, in which he plays the lead role of an over-the-hill boxer.)

This year, Venice was a staging ground for pro-Palestinian protests. There was a petition to keep Gal Gadot from attending, and a film about slain Palestinian child Hind Rajab won second place — some speculated it only didn’t take the top prize for political reasons. Nelson and I spoke a few days before hundreds of his peers in Hollywood signed a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people. “

That pledge seems to mark a change from a time earlier in Israel’s war with Hamas, when pro-Palestinian activism — at least when not carefully couched — meant career consequences.

“People in my industry, by and large, are only able to have one public point of view,” Nelson said, reaffirming that he is for a two-state solution, but adding that “if somebody feels differently they should be able to articulate that without worrying that they’re not gonna get hired.”

Nelson has said that growing up in what his wife jokingly refers to as the “Upper West Side of Tulsa,” with a small but vibrant Jewish community, he didn’t encounter antisemitism.

He’s alarmed by what he sees today, but takes particular umbrage at the idea that Jews are somehow “worse than white privilege” for supposedly having power and influence, and the false assumption that Jews benefit from “all the advantages that your cabal has managed to arrange for itself.” (Nelson, whose grandfather was a lawyer disbarred by the Nuremberg Laws, knows better than most how flawed this premise is.)

While he’s surprised by an uptick in antisemitism, beyond a conflation of Jews and Israel, he’s also shocked how timely his play, about using an artificial intelligence to enforce the law, feels during the second Trump administration.

“I never anticipated the cultural conflict, and the vehemence of the cultural conflict that’s going on right now between a zeal for law and order and the protection of individual rights,” Nelson said. “And that was going on with BLM and now it’s evolving into asylum cases and we also have a reaper drone taking out a drug boat without due process. And probably if you were to poll most people in the United States, they are in favor of that policy, even though it flies in the face of principles upon which this country was founded.”

Coming from refugees, raised in the Southwest and playing such icons of Americana as cowboys and chain gang escapees, in his writing, the polymath embodies yet another American ideal: dissent.

It was there with the ancient Greeks, and lives on in Nelson.