Inside Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke's 'Non-Traditional' Marriage: She's 'Queer and Sweet and I’m Straight and Stupid'

Drive-Away Dolls would resemble a Coen brothers movie in many ways, were it not for one glaring exception: it’s a queer comedy with its fair share of wild sex scenes. 

Starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as a pair of lesbian friends trekking cross-country while toting sensitive materials in their drive-away vehicle, the new movie (in theaters now) comes from the minds of co-writers Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, the director’s wife of 33 years. 

The pair told Collider in June that Drive-Away Dolls was first drafted almost 20 years ago. Cooke called the film “a queer kind of caper that doesn't take itself too seriously, and that's very lighthearted and fun and kind of outrageous at times… all of those things.”

Coen chimed in: “And a little sex.”

Cooke added that the movies her husband and his brother Joel make — such as award winners Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) — differ from the husband-and-wife’s sensibilities. “Ethan and Joel make highbrow movies and we make lowbrow movies.”

“It's inconceivable that me and Joel could have made this movie,” said Coen, noting the main reason why: “The main characters are two lesbians, and [Cooke] is queer.”

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In a January interview with MovieMaker, Cooke went into more detail about her sexual orientation and “very non-traditional marriage” with Coen, revealing the two each have different partners while raising their two kids. 

After meeting on the set of the Coen brothers’ 1990 film Miller’s Crossing, Coen asked Cooke for a date. “I told him, ‘I’m a lesbian, I’m not interested,’” recalled Cooke. But a friendship and marriage developed nevertheless. 

“Being married to Ethan and being queer there’s always a little disconnect sometimes,” said Cooke, who after years as a film editor began screenwriting. She and Coen wrote Drive-Away Dolls “many, many years ago as a way for us to spend time together,” she added. 

The movie, which costars Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal — and, in an uncredited cameo, Miley Cyrus — is Coen’s first directorial effort since 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and one of his only projects filmed without his brother. (Joel Coen directed 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth solo.) 

Cooke is “queer and sweet and I’m straight and stupid,” Coen told ABC News in an interview published Tuesday. “That could be the slogan of the movie: ‘Straight and stupid.’ Me and Joel couldn’t do that because we’re both straight and stupid.”

At Drive-Away Dolls' New York City premiere on Tuesday, Coen noted that when the duo first penned the script in the early 2000s, Hollywood wasn’t as open to queer comedies. “We couldn’t get it done then,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “People are more receptive to that, it’s less of an issue now than it was then.”

Also at the premiere, Feldstein told PEOPLE it was “any actor’s dream” to be directed by Coen. “Ethan and Tricia coming together and creating a movie that’s just super gay and super fun and an absolute wild ride, I kind of couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Drive-Away Dolls is in theaters now.