Hopefully when you go to see True Grit you walk away thinking about the quality of the performances, the beautiful score and cinematography, or at least trying to decipher the garbled dialogue coming from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. But if you were paying close attention to the credits you may have noticed a particularly strange one: "Mr. Damon's Abs Double" credited to one Buster Coen. Wait, but did Matt Damon ever take his shirt off? And is Buster somehow related to the brother directors of the movie?
The answers are "no" and "yes," as learned by Scott Feinberg at a Q&A for the movie last month. He asked about the mysterious credit, and got the following answer from a laughing Damon:
Ethan’s 15-year-old son Buster had served as an assistant to the script supervisor on the set during the making of the film, but had indicated that he wanted a more important-sounding credit than that, and had apparently requested that one!
Not only is it cool that Ethan Coen brings his son on to the set not as some bullshit producer or child actor, but as a regular lowly assistant, but that his son is cool enough to request a more interesting credit on the movie, using nepotism for its best result ever, surely. We probably ought to look for Buster Coen as a filmmaker himself sooner or later, but in the meantime, just keep an eye out for him in the True Grit credits.
