After more than 20 years in the movie business, Richard Jenkins got his first Oscar nomination at the age of 60, for his role in Tom McCarthy’s tiny and wonderful The Visitor. For Jenkins, it was one of four or five moments in his career that really and truly changed things. But don’t ask Jenkins to credit this all to some master plan: “I'm 70 years old, and I look back on my life, and it’s just a bunch of dumb accidents that happened.“

On this week‘s Little Gold Men podcast, Jenkins sits down with Richard Lawson to discuss several of those “dumb accidents”—including his acclaimed performances in everything from Flirting with Disaster to Step Brothers—as well as his latest film, The Shape of Water, in which he has a supporting role alongside Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Doug Jones as the sea creature at the center of his unconventional love story. Writer and director Guillermo del Toro didn’t exactly write the role for Jenkins (“I think he wrote it for Ian McKellen”), but Jenkins said he connected immediately with his character, Giles, a closeted gay man who lives next door to Hawkins’s mute character, forging a friendship through a shared love of old movies and skepticism about the outside world. “He was a man alone,” Jenkins says about Giles. “I'm an only child; I spent a lot of time alone. I understand being alone. I understand not liking it, wishing for something else. So it spoke to me.”

Also on this week‘s episode, Katey Rich and Mike Hogan discuss the National Board of Review and Gotham Awards, both of which were good news for awards contenders Get Out, Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird. Steven Spielberg’s The Post also got a huge boost from the NBR, winning best film as well as the top two acting prizes—but as Mike points out, its celebration of journalism may only go so far in a time when the media, like Hollywood itself, is being rocked by sexual assault scandals.

Listen to this week’s episode above, and find the show on Apple Podcasts, where you can rate it and leave a review.