Two hours before a 2006 performance at Steppenwolf Theatre, writer Cormac McCarthy asked actor Austin Pendleton an unexpected question. Pendleton, speaking recently by phone about that moment, said he needed to walk the streets of Lincoln Park to get his head around it. “Can you do me a favor,” Pendleton recalled McCarthy asking, “At tonight’s performance, could you play the whole play the way you play page 82?” Pendleton was, briefly, incredulous.
But when he returned from the walk, he knew what he had to do. It was the “thoughtful” way McCarthy asked him to play the suicidal character, White, in “The Sunset Limited” that helped him deliver his lauded performance in the existentially fraught play, which on Steppenwolf’s Garage stage and went on to New York. McCarthy “wanted me to play it calmly — not turbulently,” Pendleton said.
“It changed my whole performance.” Pendleton’s experience is one of many in the lesser-known story of McCarthy’s past. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, who died in June 2023 at age 89, was acclaimed for his sparse prose conjuring blood-drenched nomads and articulating the painful beauty of the human condition in books such as “All the Pretty Horses” (1992), “No Country for Old Men” (2005) and “The Road” (2006).
But he gave few interviews and famously avoided discussing his work. “He never talked about anything except the play,” Pendleton said. “He obviously had demons in him — he wrote that pla.
