Peter Stormare, the tall Swedish actor who plays brutes so well, appeared in the back-to-back Coen brothers classics Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Much to the delight of fans, Joel and Ethan Coen wrote an inside joke into The Big Lebowski for Peter Stormare's character that calls back to his role in Fargo.
Fargo is the tale of a kidnapping for hire that goes horribly wrong. In it, Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi play a pair of low level criminals hired to pull off that kidnapping. Stormare's character is Gaer Grimsrud, a quiet and intimidating brooder. Gaer also proves to be a heartless killer, shooting police and witnesses with little or no thought. His partner, Carl Showalter, is Gaer's exact opposite. Carl is weaselly, nervous, and never without something to say. Their sloppy way of doing dirty work propels Fargo along, until Gaer famously kills Carl with an axe and then feeds his corpse into a wood chipper.
The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, tells the unlikely story of The Dude (Jeff Bridges), who is a laidback guy just sort of floating through life until he gets caught up in a convoluted scheme because he shares the surname Lebowski with a man of affluence. Stormare and Buscemi are also both in the cast. Unlike in Fargo, here they're on opposite teams. But similarly to Fargo, Stormare's character is involved in a kidnapping -- of sorts.
Stormare plays an unnamed member of a bumbling band of German nihilists. This group devises a flawed plan to demand ransom for the return of the affluent Lebowski's young floozy of a wife (Tara Reid). The catch, of course, is that the wife is out of town on her own accord and not actually in the clutches of the nihilists. And while Stormare's nihilist and Buscemi's character (Donny, a bowler who is frequently and rudely told to shut up) are rarely in the same scenes, Stormare's role is pivotal in leading to the death of Donny, who has a heart attack in a bowling center parking lot when the nihilists clumsily attack.
So how were the Coen brothers able to connect the lives of The Big Lebowski's unnamed nihilist and Gaer, Fargo's cold-blooded killer? Simply put, with pancakes. In Fargo, Gaer, smoking a cigarette, announces to Carl that he is hungry and wants to go to the "pancakes house" as they drive across the vast, snow-covered emptiness of rural Minnesota. Carl shoots down the idea, citing that they had pancakes for breakfast. He instead suggests that they go to a place where they can get drinks and steaks, "not more f***ing pancakes." Two years later, in The Big Lebowski, Stormare's character sits in a diner with his nihilist buddies (including musicians Flea and Aimee Mann) and orders "the lingonberry pancakes" as he hands the waitress an oversized menu shaped like a stack of pancakes. This, he finally gets his wish.