🏆 Hall of Fame Movie
Photo: John Bauld from Toronto, Canada · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons Photo shows actor Sam Elliott
The Stranger
The sarsaparilla-sipping cowboy narrator of The Big Lebowski, played by Sam Elliott and a mustache that abides.
- Actor
- Sam Elliott
- Film
- The Big Lebowski
- Year
- 1998
- Medium
- Movie
- Style
- Walrus
- Fan Votes
- 0 legendary · 0 meh
Why The Stranger's Mustache Matters
The Coen brothers needed someone to narrate a shaggy Los Angeles bowling noir in the voice of an old western, so they hired Sam Elliott and his mustache. The Stranger appears only briefly in The Big Lebowski (1998), perched at the bar of a bowling alley, but the silver walrus and the molasses drawl make him unforgettable.
The mustache here is doing comedy by contrast. It is a cowboy lip in a world of bathrobes and White Russians, and the film gets a laugh simply from the absurdity of Elliott's gravitas sitting next to the Dude. The Stranger even breaks the fourth wall to ask, "Do you have to use so many cuss words?"
It is arguably the most famous cameo mustache in film, and the reason an entire generation knows what sarsaparilla is.
- *The Big Lebowski* was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and released in March 1998.
- The Stranger's closing line — "The Dude abides" — became a cultural catchphrase.
- Sam Elliott (born 1944) also lends his mustache and voice to Virgil Earp in *Tombstone* (1993) and to Butch the cow in the animated *Barnyard* (2006).
How to Grow the Walrus
Big, bushy, and draped over the mouth like a velvet curtain. The mustache of wise men and Sam Elliott.
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