Why Ross From Yellowstone Season 4 Looks So Familiar

In 2007, Barry Corbin was part of one of the most celebrated films of the decade, "No Country for Old Men." Arguably the magnum opus of Joel and Ethan Coen, this chilling, thoughtful neo-Western about a Texan man (Josh Brolin), an elderly sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), and an impossibly creepy assassin (Javier Bardem) raked in awards and accolades, and is filled to the brim with memorable scenes. 

Bardem's pageboy-haired, cattle gun-wielding Anton Chigurh obviously dominates the conversation when iconic "No Country for Old Men" moments are discussed, but one of the film's most pivotal scenes comes when Jones' Ed Tom Bell visits his elderly wheelchair-bound relative Ellis (Corbin) in the latter's cat-infested rural hovel. The scene reveals that Ed Tom intends to retire, because the ongoing case has been too much for him. Ellis — a former lawman himself — has seen this before, and delivers a pretty moving monologue that both brushes on the movie's theme of fate, and reveals why the movie is called that. "What you got ain't nothing new," he advises the aging Ed Tom. "This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity."

In an interview with the A.V. Club, Corbin revealed that he was originally pretty wary of the one-scene role, mostly taking a peek at the script because he knew Jones was in the movie. This, of course, changed the second he actually got to the powerful scene. "Then I got to that scene, read it, and said, 'Whoa, wait a minute!'", Corbin said. "I went back and read it again, and I didn't even finish the script. I called my manager up and said, 'Sure I'll take that part! That scene's the movie!'"