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A person could be forgiven for thinking that there must be two different Tim Blake Nelsons. In part, this confusion might arise thanks to the plague of tri-named actors: you've got your David Hyde Pierce, your David Ogden Stiers, your Charles Nelson Reilly, your Anthony Michael Hall, and, of course, the Phil(l)ips: Baker Hall and Seymour Hoffman.

But the real confusion flows from the fact that you've apparently got one Tim Blake Nelson who directs (and often writes) thoughtful, controversial, and daring films -- such as O, the recent drama that set Othello in a high school, and the upcoming The Grey Zone, a film about Jews pitted against their fellow prisoners in a Nazi prison camp.

Then you've got this other fella named Tim Blake Nelson, who looks like he can't tie his own boots or sign his own name, exceptin' for a big black "X" wherever y'all tell him to put it. He walks around a-yuckin' and a-cluckin'. He's a flyweight, greasy-haired, ass-scratchin' rube, who you wouldn't trust with an Instamatic, let alone a film crew.

He's the Tim Blake Nelson who shows up in O Brother, Where Art Thou? as Delmar O'Donnell, the dingbat country boy who's the stupidest and rubiest in a trio of phenomenally stupid rubes. And, why, there he is again in Minority Report, as the creepy, kind of rube-esque, organ-tinkling prison warden who watches over all the pre-crime convicts locked away in their glowsticks. And, hey, isn't that him again, as a guy named "Bubba," in The Good Girl, which is itself a kind of Rube-apolooza? He even played a part labeled, simply, "Cockroach" -- one of many actors to carry that credit in MTV's unjustly forgotten cockroach musical Joe's Apartment. (We can't, however, confirm that his particular cockroach was, in any sense, a countryfried cockroach.)

But yes, gentle reader, this is one in the same man. Why Tim Blake Nelson -- respected actor, daring director, and seasoned writer -- is constantly typecast as a slack-jawed country dunce is beyond our ken.

Perhaps he developed a particularly amusing "rube" act that he'd trot out at fancy Manhattan cocktail parties and, well, one thing led to another. Or maybe he's some sort of real-life idiot savant, a male version of Nell, discovered in the backwoods and let loose on Hollywood. Maybe he directed O in bare feet and overalls with no shirt on and a stalk of buckwheat hanging off his lip, and he was constantly holding up equipment like, say, the boom mike, and proclaiming loudly, "Now, what in dangnation is this thang fawr?" Or maybe he's just a really good actor, who likes playing hayseeds to pay the bills while he works on less profitable projects about Nazi prison camps. Hard to say.

But he makes for a damn fine rube, in any case. And we can solemnly report that, if we should ever meet him at one of those fancy Manhattan cocktail parties we keep hearing about, we won't entirely be convinced that he doesn't have a burro and his granpappy's moonshine still stashed away in the coat check.