Anton Chigurh explained: the coin, the code and Javier Bardem's performance

Anton Chigurh explained: who he is

In 1980 Chigurh is hired to recover a satchel of money from a drug deal gone wrong. He kills the men who hired him and tracks the money to Llewelyn Moss, a welder who found it while hunting, using a receiver linked to a transponder hidden in the case. Along the way he kills three armed men at a motel and later his former colleague Carson Wells, who was sent to stop him. McCarthy's novel gives no backstory, describing him only as medium height, medium build, perhaps in his mid-thirties.

Why does he flip a coin?

The coin toss is Chigurh's philosophy in action. He sees himself as an instrument of fate rather than a man making choices. Bardem told NPR the character comes out of nowhere and goes back to nowhere, acting like a force of nature, and described him as a philosophical killer who thinks every murder is inevitable.

The rule cuts both ways. Win the toss and he lets you go, as with the gas station owner. But he will not abandon his word either, which is why the ending with Carla Jean is so cold.

Key scenes: Carla Jean and the car crash

After Moss is killed by Mexican hitmen, Chigurh finds Carla Jean waiting at home after her mother's funeral. He keeps a promise he made to Moss that he would kill her. He offers the coin. In the novel she calls heads and loses; in the film she refuses, saying the coin didn't have no say, it was just him. The film cuts to Chigurh leaving and checking his boots for blood.

Driving away, he is hit by another car and breaks his arm. He pays a boy for his shirt to use as a sling with a bloody $100 bill and limps away. The crash shows that chance, the force he claims to serve, applies to him too.

• His captive bolt pistol, a livestock tool, is used on a motorist and to punch out door locks.
• He strangles a deputy with his handcuffs in the opening minutes.
• He listens at motel doors before blowing the lock out of Moss's room.

How the Coens and Bardem shaped him

The Coens wanted to avoid a one-note Terminator and sought someone who could have come from Mars. Bardem tried to turn them down, telling them he did not drive, spoke bad English and hated violence; they replied that maybe that was why they called him. Concerned about his schedule, they briefly lined up Mark Strong as a backup.

The haircut came from a 1979 photograph in Bill Wittliff's book Boystown, recommended by Tommy Lee Jones. Hairstylist Paul LeBlanc was asked for something strange and unsettling and drew on Crusades-era mop tops and 1960s mod cuts. Bardem said it helped him get into character, while fellow actors said he was so embarrassed by it that he hated leaving the house.

What Chigurh means

McCarthy reportedly chose the name because it sounded cool, and Chigurh fits the unstoppable-evil figure found throughout his work. Critics have compared him to Death in Bergman's The Seventh Seal and to the shark in Jaws. In a story about Sheriff Bell feeling the world has outgrown him, Chigurh is the thing Bell cannot understand: violence with its own logic and no interest in anyone else's.

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