Anton Chigurh

Chigurh is devoid of conscience, remorse, and compassion. He is described by Carson Wells, a central character in the novel, as a "psychopathic killer" in his 30s with a dark complexion. Other characters describe Chigurh's facial features as "exotic looking". His signature weapon is a captive bolt stunner, which he uses to kill his victims and also as a tool to shoot out door locks. He also wields a sound-suppressed Remington 11-87 semiautomatic shotgun and pistol (as well as a TEC-9 in the film adaptation). Throughout the novel and the film, Chigurh flips a coin to decide the fate of some of his victims.

The character is a recurrence of the "Unstoppable Evil" archetype frequently found in Cormac McCarthy's work. However, the Coen brothers wanted to avoid one-dimensionality, particularly a comparison to The Terminator. To avoid a sense of identification, the Coens sought to cast someone "who could have come from Mars". The brothers introduced the character at the beginning of the film in a manner similar to the opening of the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Film critic David DuBos described Chigurh as a "modern equivalent of Death from Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal."[2]

When Joel and Ethan Coen approached Javier Bardem about playing Chigurh, he replied, "I don't drive, I speak bad English and I hate violence." The Coens responded, "That's why we called you." Bardem said he took the role because he dreamed of being in a Coen Brothers film.[3]

The Coen brothers got the idea for Chigurh's hairstyle from a book Tommy Lee Jones had. It featured a 1979 photo of a man sitting in the bar of a brothel with a very similar hairstyle and clothes similar to those worn by Chigurh in the film. Oscar-winning hairstylist Paul LeBlanc designed the hairdo. The Coens instructed LeBlanc to create a "strange and unsettling" hairstyle. LeBlanc based the style on the mop tops of the English warriors in the Crusades as well as the Mod haircuts of the 1960s. Bardem told LeBlanc each morning when he finished that the style helped him to get into character. Bardem supposedly said he was "not going to get laid for two months" because of his haircut.[4]

His background and nationality are left undisclosed and largely open to speculation. When writer Cormac McCarthy visited the set of the film adaptation of his novel, the actors inquired about Chigurh's background and the symbolic significance of his name. McCarthy replied, "I just thought it was a cool name."[3]

In 1980, Chigurh is hired to retrieve a satchel holding $2.4 million from the scene of a drug deal gone wrong in West Texas. He discovers that a local welder named Llewelyn Moss, who chanced upon the money while hunting, has taken it and left town. Chigurh tracks Moss down to a motel using a receiver that connects to a transponder hidden in the satchel. However, Moss has hidden the money in a ventilation duct. When he returns to the motel, suspecting (correctly) that someone is in his room, he retrieves the money from the connected vent in a second rented room on the other side of the motel. A group of Mexican gangsters sent to ambush him occupies his original room. When Chigurh enters this room, he kills the gangsters and searches for the money, but it is nowhere to be found. Moss, meanwhile, has already fled after hearing the gunfire.

Chigurh ruthlessly tracks Moss down. The hotel confrontation between Moss and Chigurh plays out very differently in the film than in the novel. In the novel, Chigurh steals the key from a murdered hotel clerk and quietly enters Moss's room, where Moss ambushes him and takes him captive at gunpoint. Then Moss runs, and the chase/shootout begins. As Chigurh and Moss face off in the hotel and the streets, they are interrupted by a group of Mexicans, all of whom Chigurh kills. In the film, Chigurh punches out the lock on the hotel door and wounds Moss. During their ensuing face-off, only Moss and Chigurh are shown fighting; the group of Mexicans is not present.

Chigurh discovers that Carson Wells, another bounty hunter and a former colleague, has been hired to retrieve the money and eliminate him. Chigurh kills Wells, who tried to make a deal with Moss to give him protection in exchange for the money. Chigurh then intercepts a phone call from Moss in Wells' hotel room and offers to spare Moss's wife if he agrees to give up the money. Moss refuses and vows to track down and kill Chigurh. Chigurh kills the man who hired him and the Mexicans as revenge for not trusting Chigurh to complete the job. Mexican hitmen eventually kill Moss at a motel in El Paso. Unknown to the Mexicans at the time of their ambush, however, Moss had hidden the money in the vents again. Chigurh shows up after the police have left, retrieves the money from the vent, and returns it to the investor.

Moss's widow returns home after her mother's funeral to find Chigurh inside waiting for her. After hearing her pleas for mercy, he asks her to bet her life on a coin toss. In the book, she calls heads; it comes up tails, and he shoots and kills her. In the film adaptation, she refuses to call the toss, saying, "the coin don't have no say. It's just you." The movie then cuts to a shot of Chigurh leaving the house and checking the soles of his boots for blood, implying that he has killed her. While driving away from her house, Chigurh is badly injured in a car accident, sustaining a compound fracture of his left ulna and walking away with a limp. At the scene of the accident, before the authorities arrive, he offers $100 to a teenager on a bicycle to give him his shirt, seeking to use it to bind up his wounds and use it as a sling for his now broken arm. Chigurh then flees the scene before the ambulance arrives.

Chigurh is a psychopathic killer who follows his own ethics and murders without compassion or remorse but always with deliberation. He is described as having his own twisted set of morals (e.g., attempting to kill the gas station owner because he believed he obtained the benefit of the business by marriage). He also displays little emotion, has no empathy for others, and can be described as calculated, calm, methodical, and antisocial. While he does not kill without purpose, his reasons are sometimes abstract and typically selfish (e.g., murdering someone for the sole intention of taking their vehicle). He sees himself as an agent or a hand of fate, an instrument that exacts what is supposed to happen upon those he sees accountable. Chigurh seems to react based on natural signs, such as the coin toss deciding the fate of some individuals. When an outcome is not influenced or caused by his own hands, it makes him feel powerless and not in control of his own fate such as when a kid gave him his shirt for free and tried refusing the money that Chigurh insisted he takes, as Chigurh thought he had not earned that shirt. He gives many of his victims a chance to survive by making deals, either personally or by flipping coins in making decisions. He is incredibly unsettled when one of his victims points out that the coin has no say in his killings, thus suggesting that his means of avoiding responsibility and hiding pleasure in murder are a facade. He is depicted as having a great deal of pain endurance, such as withstanding pain from multiple shotgun blasts or a fractured arm.

Chigurh kills or tries to kill almost every person he meets in the film. In the words of Javier Bardem, in the movie version, Chigurh also kills whoever does not fit in his view of a better world. The only people he spares are the gas station proprietor (who correctly guesses Chigurh's coin flip), the woman at the trailer park office (when Chigurh hears a toilet flush in a nearby room), the woman at the motel front desk, the accountant (possibly), and the two bicycle riding kids who give Chigurh one of their shirts after his accident.[5]

Chigurh's depiction as a seemingly inhuman foreign antagonist reflects the apprehension of the post-9/11 era.[6] Many of McCarthy's works portray individuals in conflict with society, acting on instinct rather than emotion or thought.[7]

Critics have praised Bardem's portrayal of Chigurh, for which he received an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA.

Yale professor Harold Bloom labeled Chigurh the main weakness of No Country for Old Men, saying he "has none of the legitimacy or grandeur that Judge Holden has."[8]

UGO.com ranked him in its list of top 11 "silver screen psychos", saying, "Chigurh is an assassin of little words and interesting choices of weaponry—is a man without a sense of humor. Others might say he's got a warped sense of principles. One thing that most can agree on, is Chigurh is one crazy S.O.B.—ruthlessly killing damn near anyone who sets eyes on him, let alone those who get in his way. And apparently, the only way you can survive a run-in with the man is the 50–50 chance of a coin toss, but Dear God, don't question his motives, it just seems to irritate him even more so."[9]

Empire.com ranked him #46 in their list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time, praising the look on his face when he strangles a cop with his own handcuffs and that "when American novelist Cormac McCarthy wants to throw a dark character at you, it's a safe assumption that you're not going to be able to get them out of your head for a good, long while—if ever. One of his best is Chigurh, and between the Coens and Bardem, they never missed a beat in bringing this monster to the screen. With the kind of unholy relentlessness usually reserved for horror icons, the hired killer has an almost supernatural ability to track his prey, and is rather short in the mercy department, preferring to leave the tough decisions to a coin toss. And that bowl cut is utterly terrifying."[10]

Being well received after the theatrical run of No Country for Old Men, Chigurh has been parodied in other media, mainly as a spoof of the film's most memorable scenes. Ike Barinholtz plays Anton Chigurh in the spoof movie Disaster Movie, while Carlos Areces plays Anton Chigurh in the spoof movie Spanish Movie. The British comedy series Benidorm also parodied the character in the 2009 special.

The Simpsons episode "Waverly Hills, 9-0-2-1-D'oh" spoofed Chigurh as a city inspector for Waverly Hills, while the episode "Daddicus Finch" showed character Nelson Muntz portraying a Chigurh-like character during a school performance.

A parody titled There Will Be Milkshakes for Old Men was featured in Episode 5 of Season 33 of NBC's Saturday Night Live, which aired on February 23, 2008. Fred Armisen appears as Anton Chigurh, complete with a captive bolt pistol and pageboy haircut, mimicking his famous gas stop scene.[11][12] The same Saturday Night Live episode also featured a parody of No Country for Old Men titled Grandkids in the Movies.[13] Professional wrestler Chris Jericho has stated the heel version of his character debuted in 2008 was directly inspired by Anton Chigurh's calm, indomitable demeanor.[14]

In the police procedural parody Angie Tribeca, the episode "Freezing Cold Prestige Drama" features an ominous hitman resembling Chigurh, who is looking for a stolen truck and hauls a soda gun, complete with a giant metal tank, around. He kills his victims by asking them to open their mouths and then drowning them in soda water.

In the animated series Bob's Burgers, Louise dresses up as Chigurh for Halloween in the episode "The Wolf of Wharf Street".

In the animated series The Amazing World of Gumball, Nicole pictures a chase involving stolen bills, a tracking device, and a hitman dog looking exactly like Chigurh in the episode "The Box".

In the animated series South Park's 23rd season episode "Band in China", Randy Marsh chokes and kills Winnie The Pooh in a reference to the scene of Chigurh choking a police officer to death with a pair of handcuffs, complete with blood, the scene being drawn-out, and the crazy expression on the killer's face.

Kevin James spoofed Chigurh in the short film No Country for Sound Guy, released July 17, 2020.[15]

• Doom, Ryan P. (2009). "The unrelenting country: No Country for Old Men (2007)". The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence. Praeger. pp. 149–162. ISBN 978-0-313-35599-8.