While the two movies aren’t connected by plot or character, Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t! feel like a merging of their unique sensibilities: Ethan’s genius with the B-movie traditions of yore plus Cooke’s experience in the LGBTQ+ world. Set in Bakersfield, California, Honey Don’t! sees Margaret Qualley play Honey O’Donahue, a smart-and-sharp private eye who gets embroiled in a case involving a religious cult and a sexually rapacious pastor (Captain America star Chris Evans).
Qualley’s horny Honey, very much the Humphrey Bogart of the piece, also beds a cop, played by Aubrey Plaza. And with so little in the way of queer genre cinema out there, it’s clear Coen and Cooke revelled in the role reversal. “That was our intention when we wrote it, to switch the femme fatale, so the hyper-feminine woman would be the detective and the butch or more androgynous love interest would be more masculine,” explains Cooke. “We told Margaret when we enlisted her: you get to play Bogey. She was really down with that,” adds Coen.
While Cooke was also the editor on both films, her influence is writ large over both scripts. A madcap road movie, originally called ‘Drive-Away Dykes’ (a title Cooke still affectionately uses), that was inspired by her experiences visiting gay bars. Likewise, Honey Don’t! drew from personal experiences, including a friendship with a manager of a New York sex store, which sold all manner of toys for his and her pleasure. “I was exposed to them for the first time in a big way,” she explains.
Although its a throwaway moment, in Honey Don’t!, Coen and Cooke show the aftermath of one same-sex sex scene, with dildos being washed. “I mean, we want to normalise the sex toys and sex,” says Cooke. “This is how women have sex often, together with these toys. And they are a bit of a gag, but…this is a real thing, and you have to wash your sex toys in the morning after you have sex. So, yeah, they are meant to take the shame away from it.” For a B-movie, especially one with a Coen brother attached, it feels very progressive.
Of course, it’s not hard to imagine how eye-opening Ethan has found all of this. Raised in a Jewish family in St. Louis Park by Edward and Rena, two academics of Eastern European Ashkenazi heritage, Coen’s Minnesotan upbringing was evidently strict, traditional and a little strange. As he’s put it in the past, “the whole incongruity of Jews in the Midwest – Jews on the Plains – it’s just odd…its own strange subculture.” Still, you can’t imagine what he and his brother’s teachers in Hebrew school would make of Honey Don’t!
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With a scene featuring Chris Evans’ sex-maniac pastor enjoying a kinky threesome with two leather-bound ladies, it’s no surprise to hear that the films of John Waters, also known as “the pope of trash”, were a big influence. “Bring back trash,” smiles Coen. “They’re good, right?” But the Midnight Movie circuit, where such films thrived in the Seventies, is no more. And outside of comic book movies or awards contenders, what Coen calls “an important movie”, the studios aren’t interested in anything cheap and cheerful. “We’re fighting hard to keep movies unimportant.”
Cooke chips in. “I feel like B movies…people were having fun making them. John Waters, Roger Corman, and all of the B movie people,” she says. Trouble is, Drive-Away Dolls made less than $8 million at the box office, and B-movies don’t belong to the algorithm-driven era of streamers. “They don’t have the B-movie sensibility,” says Coen. “None that I know about.” The only time he and Joel ever ventured into streaming was the 2018 Netflix-released anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the last time the brothers worked together.
Is it harder to get the films that he and Joel made off the ground now? “In terms of getting financing, definitely harder. Yes,” he nods. Given that he and his sibling have each won four Oscars, including Best Picture for their sublime Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men, you’d think studios would be bending over backwards to support their next project. “That doesn’t matter to anybody,” he shrugs. “Why would it? They got to make them for audiences now.”
Cooke concurs. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people aren’t going to the movies anymore, you know? I mean, most people are watching movies at home on their couch, and so they’re just not spending as much on movies. I mean, maybe more on limited series or that type of format.” Although not Coen: he’s barely watched any of the binge-able shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos or Better Call Saul. “I never saw any of them!” he giggles.
Coen admits the change in the movie business over the past few years is bewildering.
“It’s weird. Well, this is an old person talking. It’s kind of depressing for me. It’s not what I’m familiar with. But also, even in the States, even if you go to the theatre, it’s a strange environment to me because there are so few people, because the seats are so big. I’m disturbed by the large reclining seats.” Has he tried a 4D screening, where the seats vibrate? “I heard about that. I’ve not done that yet.”
It’s clear Coen is not a big event movie kind of guy. Will he go and see Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming all-star blockbuster The Odyssey? After all, he and Joel made their own curio, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a 1930s chain-gang musical that draws from Homer’s epic poem. “I don’t know, maybe. Yeah, that’s right…he’s doing The Odyssey,” he says, before cracking a very Coen-like joke. “Is there hillbilly music in it?”
Coen and Cooke may not be multiplex regulars, but others in the family are. “Our kids go to event movies, Marvel movies or big horror movies,” says Cooke. “I feel like those are still very big in the States. People show up for those kind of big event movies.” Do their kids like their movies? “They tell us they do!” laughs Cooke. “I think they’re enthusiastic. We give them our scripts. We ask them for notes…they’re smart, so we respect their opinions.”
Charlie Day as Marty Metakawitch Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC[Missing Credit]
Their daughter Dusty has even entered the business. “She’s worked on our two movies, and she’s working in the States on a Ryan Murphy show right now, in the set decorating department,” says Cooke, who has even co-written a script with her. “She’s a good writer.” For the moment, Coen and Cooke are set to continue their own working partnership, with the aim of completing their lesbian B-movie trilogy. The third script, Go Beavers!, a film in the Deliverance and Walkabout mould, has been written and is awaiting funding.
Meanwhile, Joel is about to start shooting Jack of Spades in Glasgow with Josh O’Connor in the lead, meaning a reunion with Ethan isn’t on the cards anytime soon. “We’re all kind of caddywampus in terms of schedules being in sync with each other,” says Coen. He and Joel, who turned 70 last November, wrote a new script together over a year ago, but whether they will see their careers re-align, only time will tell. And who knows? Maybe it’ll be chock full of sex.
Honey Don’t! is in cinemas now
Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue in Honey Don't! (Photo: Karen Kuehn)[Missing Credit]