Hermit Bob, the woods-dwelling recluse in director Jim Jarmusch’s celeb-studded new zombie film, The Dead Don’t Die, is like a character in a Tom Waits song. He lives on the fringes of civilization. He has a vast, Hagrid-like beard. He mutters to himself as he watches zombies attack people in his small Midwestern town. It’s easy to imagine Hermit Bob commiserating with equally unsavory characters from Waits’ songbook, like Dave the Butcher and Table Top Joe.
So it’s fitting that Jarmusch gave the role to Waits himself. The celebrated independent filmmaker famously loves to cast musicians in his films—The Dead Don’t Die also includes Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, and RZA in its ensemble cast—but he has a special working relationship with Waits dating back 33 years. As Barney Hoskyns writes in his Waits biography Lowside of the Road, Jarmusch and the musician met in the early 1980s at a party hosted by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both men felt awkward and shy among glamorous art people, so they ditched the party and went on a bar crawl instead.
They became fast friends, sharing a similar bent sensibility. “Tom and I have a kindred aesthetic,” Jarmusch told Hoskyns. “An interest in unambitious people, marginal people.” Plus, they both looked astoundingly fly in a decade in which most famous men looked like unwashed poodles. Just look at this vintage shot of the pair sitting on a park bench in 1985.
By the mid ’80s, both Jarmusch and Waits were enjoying major breakthroughs: the former with Stranger Than Paradise, a career-making indie hit; the latter with Swordfishtrombones, which had Waits trading in his piano crooner roots for a gruff, clanging new sound. The filmmaker promptly recognized Waits’ acting ability—his raspy voice, his knack for portraying devilish outsiders and absolute weirdos—and cast him in 1986’s Down by Law. Waits has enjoyed a Hollywood side-hustle ever since, cropping up in films as varied as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Seven Psychopaths, and the Coen brothers’ recent The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Jarmusch, though, knows how to bring out the best in Waits the character actor, having worked with the reclusive singer more than any other filmmaker. Here’s a guide to the wonderful and strange ways Jarmusch has included Waits in his films.
Down by Law (1986)
After taking odd parts in a string of films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Waits got his first shot at a leading role in Down by Law, Jarmusch’s gritty and endearing fable about three cellmates who break out of jail and prowl the Louisiana bayou together. Waits, looking impossibly young and handsome at 36, plays Zack, a sullen, down-on-his-luck disc jockey who’s been framed for murder. The joy of this movie is watching Waits’ character interact with his fellow escapees, a pimp (John Lurie) and an upbeat Italian guy who never shuts up (Roberto Benigni); Robby Müller’s acclaimed cinematography frequently captures all three men in the same shot, bickering about the inanities of life.
The film’s ramshackle sensibility is a perfect match for Waits. “It was a movie out of time about the very street creatures that peopled his songs,” Hoskyns observes in Lowside of the Road. Jarmusch wrote the screenplay with Waits in mind. According to Hoskyns’ book, the burgeoning actor expected it to be a modest part and was “shocked” to be offered a lead. While Waits does not play a musician (as Jarmusch originally intended), it is nonetheless a musical role: Zack croons while driving a stolen Jaguar and does his fast-talking DJ routine from his jail cell. And the movie opens and closes with two classic Waits songs: “Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Tango Till They’re Sore,” from the then-new Rain Dogs.
Down by Law gave Waits a chance to be respected as an actor—a New York Times critic praised the three leads as “extraordinary”—and helped launch the big-screen career he’s enjoyed since. Waits himself has much affection for the film. In 2002, he described it as “like a Russian neo-fugitive episode of ‘The Honeymooners.’”
Mystery Train (1989)
Jarmusch followed up Down by Law with his first anthology film, Mystery Train, a three-part narrative involving a series of outsiders and lowlifes all spending the night at the same rundown Memphis flophouse. The film reflects Jarmusch’s musical obsessions—it co-stars Joe Strummer and is literally haunted by the ghost of Elvis Presley. Of course the filmmaker involved his old friend Tom, albeit in a much smaller capacity this time. Waits’ DJ voice, from Down by Law, can be heard in each of the three stories, as the characters separately tune in to the same late-night radio broadcast. In the category of Fictional Radio DJs in Acclaimed 1989 Films, the part is not quite as iconic as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy in Do the Right Thing, but it’ll do.
Night on Earth (1991)
This inventive and underrated film contains five vignettes, each revolving around a cab driver and their passengers. The best one stars Giancarlo Esposito as a frustrated New Yorker who gets so exasperated with his confused foreign cab driver, he takes over the wheel. Waits didn’t play the cab driver (if only), or even act in the movie at all. He did, however, compose its soundtrack, which is filled with rickety, fragmented interludes that sound as though they were executive-produced by Satan, all linked together by a thumping upright bass motif and some cinematic string embellishments. We also get “The Good Old World (Waltz),” a fine Waits ballad, and “Los Angeles Mood (Chromium Descensions),” with its eerie feedback sculpting. It’s a minor work compared to his classic albums, but it does much to establish the film’s atmosphere of nocturnal urban surrealism.
It should also be noted that Night on Earth is a puzzle piece in the mysterious link between Waits and Winona Ryder, who plays a grungy cabby with a fondness for gum. In 1987, a teenaged Ryder unknowingly babysat for Waits’ kids. (The singer apparently paid her with a T-shirt.) Four years later came Night on Earth, and then both of them appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula the following year. Ryder, by the way, really loves that Tom Waits T-shirt—it’s one of her most iconic outfits:
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Coffee and Cigarettes (2004)
Another anthology film linked by a simple conceit, Coffee and Cigarettes is a series of vignettes about… well, people chatting over coffee and cigarettes. It’s notable for featuring musicians who hadn’t done much acting, including Jack and Meg White, and Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA and RZA. Waits and Iggy Pop play themselves in an endearingly awkward clip about two rockers who share a cigarette to celebrate the fact that they quit smoking. (If you have ever wanted to hear Waits utter the line “I performed a tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen,” here is your chance.) Though Coffee and Cigarettes was released in 2004, Waits’ vignette was filmed a decade prior and screened as a short film at Cannes in 1993. On the day of filming, Waits was grumpy and exhausted from promoting his 1992 LP Bone Machine: “Maybe you better just circle the jokes ’cause I don’t see ’em,” he reportedly barked at Jarmusch. Eventually, he settled down. But, as Jarmusch recalls in Lowside of the Road, “I wanted him to keep some of that paranoid surliness in the script.”
The Dead Don’t Die (2019)
Which brings us back to Hermit Bob, a character that drifts along on the far margins of human civilization and takes full advantage of Waits’ eternal ability to appear 20 years older than he is. In The Dead Don’t Die, Waits stumbles around the woods, eating bugs and talking to himself. By the end, he’s the film’s de-facto narrator, as he watches the zombie carnage from afar and interprets what he sees. When he mutters things like “the ant colonies—all jacked up like it was the end of the world” and “I guess all them ghost people lost their goddamn souls,” it sounds like one of Waits’ more deranged spoken-word pieces. This is just one of Jarmusch’s talents: making the kind of movies where Waits’ apocalyptic soothsayer energy is not only welcome but encouraged.
