Variety’s Showrunners Sitdown: ‘Fargo’ Creator Noah Hawley on Casting Jon Hamm and Juno Temple, Portraying a Sympathetic ‘Sin Eater’ and an ‘Alien’ Update
Noah Hawley’s anthology series “Fargo” premiered on FX in 2014, and has proven to be an exceptional showcase for actors — as well as for Hawley to expand upon the ideas within Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar-nominated film of the same name. In 1996’s “Fargo” movie, Jerry, a hapless Minnesotan car dealer played by William H. Macy, comes up with an ill-fated scheme to have real criminals fake kidnap his wife in order to bilk his father-in-law of money he desperately needs. After it all goes wrong, and several people have died as a result, the investigating officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) muses about the wreckage, and says to one of the kidnappers: “And for what? For a little bit of money?” It may have taken 18 years for Hawley’s “Fargo” to premiere, but with that line, a template was born.
In the most recent season of “Fargo,” set in Scandia, Minn., Dot (Juno Temple) is happily married to Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl), with whom she shares a daughter. After Dot is arrested at a school-board melee for tasing a police officer, her fingerprints flag her whereabouts to her abusive former husband, North Dakotan Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm). He sends two kidnappers to capture her, much like in the original film — but Dot, who is wily and physically capable, escapes them, and returns home.
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Roy’s obsessive hunt for Dot continues throughout the season, but she’s aided along the way by Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris), a state trooper from North Dakota; Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani), a Scandia deputy; and eventually her formidable mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a billionaire who’s made her money off of debt.
But some of that help winds up backfiring. In one of the season’s centerpiece scenes, after Lorraine creates a humiliating experience for Roy at his debate for reelection, he returns to the ranch where he’s holding Dot, whom he’s kidnapped, and walks to his barn in one long tracking shot as a “Toxic” cover plays. Then he beats her, which the audience hears, but doesn’t see.
In one of the show’s forays into the supernatural, Dot is also helped by one of her former kidnappers, Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), who’s an immortal being once tasked with being a sin eater, and now walks the Earth as a lonely petty criminal for hire. By the end, Dot ends up safe at home, but at a cost: In the FBI’s siege of Roy’s compound, Roy manages to kill Witt in a failed escape attempt. In the season’s final season, Ole Munch comes to collect his debt, but Dot’s genuine Minnesota Nice saves her family from his wrath — and perhaps saves Ole Munch from his misery.
Starting closer to the present than any previous installment of “Fargo” — the action begins around Halloween in 2019 — there’s a darkness to this season that stretches what the franchise can be. Roy’s casual, habitual cruelty, which he says is God’s will, infects everyone around him, and his determination to reclaim Dot as his property is designed to terrify.
In a conversation for Showrunners Sitdown With Kate Aurthur presented by FX, Hawley spoke about what he wanted to do with this season of “Fargo,” casting Temple and Hamm as the show’s leads, whether it really might be the last “Fargo” ever — and his upcoming “Alien” series, also for FX, which will premiere next year.
So how does it work when you have the idea for a new “Fargo” season? Do you start to write something and then call FX, or — what’s the process?
Yeah, I want to have enough of an idea that we can have a long conversation about it. This year, I really wanted to engage with the film “Fargo,” so I needed to really figure out, “Well, what’s my game of telephone with the idea?” A man hires two guys to kidnap his wife, right? And then Joel and Ethan made their version of that story, and I made this other version of that story where the man is not her current husband, it’s the guy she escaped from and so who are the two guys? Then you just follow that out.
The theme of the season is debt. What did you want to say about that through the lens of “Fargo”?
Well, I think that debt is this thing that we don’t talk about, and that everyone has, right? Ninety percent of Americans carry some level of debt, and it comes with this morality attached to it. This idea that if you owe money, you’re somehow less than — you’re weaker than other people. You needed help! There’s something wrong with needing help. We have this long debt, student loan debt, takes 20 years to pay off, and so when you pay it off, you’re a moral person. And if you don’t pay it off, you’re an immoral person. And so for 20 years, you’re both: Because are you going to pay it off or not? That felt like a very Coen brothers idea to me.
Can you talk about setting the season in the more recent past than others? It opens up with Halloween 2019.
This show is an exploration of America, and it’s looking at the struggle of decent people against cynicism — is how I would approach it. I wanted to look at Minnesota Nice. The Minnesota Nice which is this cultural idea birthed by the film “Fargo” in which people of a particular region are so afraid of offending anyone that they bend over backwards to be “nice.” As Joel Coen said once, it’s like, “People in polite societies don’t know how to bend. They just break. So it’s smile, smile, smile, smile — handgun.”
Yet I was looking around in 2022, and I thought, “Well, no one’s pretending to be nice anymore.” That was a big part of it for me about making it contemporary was to go, “All right, well, how do we get back to civility and decency and grace and courtesy?”
Generally speaking, at what point in your process do you start thinking about casting? And then once you have an idea, do you start writing toward the actor?
Yeah, it’s always after a script. Because a character needs to be a character, and you’ve got to go all the way with the character. You got to go full Roy Tillman, and then figure out who’s Roy Tillman. If you go, “Well, it’s Jon Hamm,” in the beginning, then you find yourself writing to Jon — which is not the exercise.
It’s always I’ll have written one script or two scripts, whatever it is, and we get into the casting. Then I’ll have an idea, or I work with Rachel Tenner, my casting director, and I just want to get the vibe, just want to talk to them and feel like, “Oh, did they feel right?” Sam Spruell, who plays Ole Munch, Jessie Buckley in the fourth season, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s her.”
I wanted to ask you also about just bringing contemporary politics into the show, and whether you were worried at all about bursting the show’s fictional bubble — and making it a culture war thing.
My hope was not to engage in politics with the show. My hope was to engage with civics in a way — to engage with these communal issues that we’re wrestling with and to sort of say, “We’re in a polarized moment. People are at each other’s throats, but are we just going to Hatfield and McCoy this thing forever? How are we going to get past this moment?”
That was the goal in that sort of last episode of trying to wrestle with, “Well, what’s after that? There’s going to have to be some kind of truth and reconciliation. There’s going to have to be some kind of forgiveness. Isn’t this the act of kindness that we owe to each other?”
So I think that was the goal of it, was not to sort of yell about things. I also think that Roy Tillman as a character — there’s a large portion of America in which he is the protagonist of this season of television.
Oh my God. Yes.
Let’s not mock him. Let’s not turn him into a joke. Let’s present him as he is and then ask the audience: Are you still with him? Are you still with him now? It’s the Walter White thing of how far will you go with Jon — who’s quite winning, very charming. But he takes that long walk to where Juno’s being held, and in that moment he becomes something monstrous — and are you still with him?
The inspirations for his character, he’s basically a Constitutional Sheriff combined with Cliven Bundy. What did you and Jon Hamm talk about in terms of how he could find that character?
We talked about “Tiger King” America, and the idea that if this had been a Constitutional Sheriff in 1980, it would’ve been Moral Majority — it would’ve been a very different America. You think about those sheriffs in “No Country for Old Men,” Tommy Lee Jones and the other guy, and they’re talking about girls with pink hair on our American streets and piercings. He would’ve been one of those guys: red meat, whiskey, whatever it is. But it’s not nipple rings; it’s not sex trunk in the bedroom.
It’s not smoking pot.
Yeah, and it’s not smoking pot and there’s something if you look at the reality of America right now, there is this strange combination of hedonism and Christianity in which in order to remain Christian, you have to redefine what Christianity is to fit your behavior. So that was the idea, to say he’s a paradox: He’s saying one thing, and then the behavior seems to be at odds with it. And yet isn’t that the whole conundrum? You feel a bit like you’re going insane talking about truth in the same breath as a lie.
Juno Temple is most famous for playing Keeley on “Ted Lasso,” who is very different from Dot. What did you see in her that made you realize that she could play this kind of John Wick combined with MacGyver combined with genuine Minnesota Nice?
She’s very mischievous and very playful, and what I loved on “Ted Lasso” was she was always protecting the other person in the scene. She had a moment where the one guy got the wrong message and he kissed her and then rather than react in a negative way, she was still trying to protect his feelings. You have this woman who has a 12-year-old daughter and a husband, and she gets kidnapped and then she goes home and pretends it never happened.
And she knows these guys are coming for her again and yet she allows her family to stay in that house and she staples live wires to the window. And with the wrong actor, you’re calling Child Protective Services. She’s the worst mother you’ve ever seen. So she needs to be the fun mom, the mischievous mom, where it’s like she’s just turning it into an adventure. It’s a fun project. What I liked about that I thought about later is she’s teaching her daughter to be prepared, but she’s not teaching her to be afraid.
The two of them together, Juno Temple and Jon Hamm — that doesn’t really happen until later in the season. But they’re incredible together. Just their physicality — he’s so huge and she’s tiny. What conversations did the three of you have about what those scenes should be like?
We had a lot of conversations about them and then the violence when it occurred. If you go back in the edit, you’ll notice that he takes that long walk, he goes into that shed where she’s being held — and we don’t go in with them. He does violence to her, and we know what’s happening in that room, and I don’t want to traumatize the audience by showing them something. They know what’s happening.
And then we do cut inside after that violence is over, and then it becomes a fight — and that I show you. Jon was very protective of Juno, making sure that she was OK with things. She was sort of more traumatized by the idea that he had to be this person, you know what I mean, than she was worried about her own safety in a way.
So that was very humbling to see these two actors who were really trying to protect each other. I think that transformation, he becomes this sort of old school Bible-thumping preacher as he’s swinging this chain and everything. It’s so horrific — and we tried to make it in the most humane way possible.
How did you find the “Fargo” tone when domestic violence is so central to the story?
It was a challenge. I grew up in a household where my mother was a feminist writer in New York in the ’70s, and she wrote the first speak-out on incest. She wrote a book about domestic violence. So I knew in dealing with the story that I really wanted to be sensitive to it, but not shy away from it at the same time. But the tone is tough, and there were moments where I realized, “Oh, we’re not going to be able to do it this way. It’s too awful.” Having Juno committed by her mother-in-law, which just seemed like a “Fargo” twist, when you actually put it on its feet and do it, and this woman who’s fought so hard to be free is being captured — it’s awful to watch! And that she’s being silenced. All of it.
So I had to take a step back and reconceive, and I did some reshooting and I added this nature documentary voiceover about the tiger in order to bring us back to the tone. I always try to avoid creating fresh injury — not traumatizing the audience, or even the actors. You know what I mean? It’s like people have had their experiences. We dealt a lot with racism in the fourth season, and in order to show the characters dealing with racism, I wanted to avoid racism as much as possible. The bare minimum that I needed.
Her mother-in-law is played by the great Jennifer Jason Leigh, who you introduce in the premiere shooting a Christmas card in October with the automatic rifles for the whole family. Very Lauren Boebert. What did you want us to think about Lorraine and her matriarchy?
On some level, if you look at the game of telephone that I was playing with the movie, I sort of took the Harve Presnell father-in-law and turned it into the mother-in-law. But then I also wanted to play with this idea of strong women, whether it was Jennifer’s character or Richa Moorjani’s character or Juno — that you could look at all the characters, and they could all plausibly be some kind of Republican. But we’re not having a Democrat v. Republican conversation. We’re saying, “No, these people all have a certain sense of values or whatever, and it’s on a spectrum there.” She is the literal queen of debt, so that allows us to examine that. But I also feel like you can’t talk about debt without talking about this weird self-made American myth in which if you need help, you’re somehow morally inferior. And that she was carrying this idea of who Juno was — as a gold digger, as low rent, as a victim.
And to get to that moment where Richa’s character says to her, “Have you ever heard your daughter-in-law complain that she’s a victim of anything?” It’s like sometimes crime is done to people, and they’re victimized. That does not make them bad people. So it was very important that this evolution of Jennifer’s character, that she go from someone who’s kind of closed off to the experience of others, and then when she sees those photos of what Roy did to her daughter-in-law — we talk about the Grinch and the heart growing three sizes that day. But really it was like, “No, not on my watch. No one’s going to treat a woman that way on my watch.”
Ole Munch, played by Sam Spruell — it’s in the third episode when there’s the flashback to 1522 Wales, where we see him as the Sin Eater. It’s not the first time that “Fargo” has engaged in the supernatural, but how did you conceive of this character?
I had read this book on debt by Margaret Atwood, which was a series of lectures that she did, and in it she talked about sin eating, and I thought, “Oh, that’s a really interesting idea.” If you think about the things that people do to each other about money, that’s a pretty terrible thing to say: “For two coins and a meal, you go to hell, and I go to heaven!” So I like that idea, but it’s not a modern idea of sin-eating.
So I like the idea that Sam’s character, he’s sold his soul, and as a result is sort of doomed to walk the earth. Because he sold his soul, there’s no “me,” there’s no “I.” He has no individual sense of himself anymore. He speaks the way that he speaks about “a man this” and all of it, and he tells the story about for a hundred years, he spoke to nobody. He had to learn how to speak again. It was a fascinating character to create with Sam.
But we have a history on “Fargo,” and the Coens have a history as well, of dealing with these sort of elemental figures and issues. Yes, there’s a UFO in “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse and Anton Chigurh and all these figures —
He seemed resonant of Anton Chigurh specifically.
Yeah, and they’re larger than life. Like Billy Bob’s character in the first year — you think, well, maybe not this guy literally, but some version of this guy has always been blowing around the American landscape.
Richa Moorjani who plays Indira — such a wonderful character. Other than the immediate relief that she’s ditched her deadbeat husband, Lars, what are we to make of her choice to go work for Lorraine?
I think it’s about where you can do the most good — and power. I think that Lorraine’s argument to her is sound, to say not only, “Look at what they make you wear on the police force”, but “I’m talking about coming to work for me, being the boss of all these guys. You can look at it as selling out on some level, but on the other hand, I think it’s a false narrative that you have to suffer in order to do good, or you can’t be compensated for the good work that you do. I think that on some level that the FBI never would’ve shown up at the compound if she hadn’t been there to make that happen.
She called “the orange idiot.”
Exactly.
What’s her money going toward anyway?
What good is it if I can’t have somebody killed?
I wanted to ask you about some of the music selections this year. It opens to Yes singing “All Good People,” and then there’s “YMCA” when all the militia people are coming onto the Tillman Ranch. And then the slow-down, you mentioned Roy Walking to the barn.
Yeah, the “Toxic,” the cover.
The “Toxic” cover.
Yeah. I have Lisa Hannigan, who’s the singer, and I was like, “I want to do a cover of Toxic” — but like a funeral dirge version of “Toxic.” I think that worked out great.
Did Witt Farr have to die?
Lamorne was tremendous in the show, and it’s one of those things that I wrestled with — I don’t want to put it on anybody else. And I thought, “Well, we’re saying it’s a true story, and in the real world, the good guys don’t always win, and the bad guys don’t always lose.” It’s a tragedy with a happy ending, and it felt like the right thing to do in the story. The goal was to make him heroic, and leave him with his dignity. The tragedy of it, of course, is that Roy got away in that moment.
If you look back at how I played it leading into that moment, the moment that Juno has a gun on Jon, and the FBI shows up, I was like, “We’re never going to play that. This is an action suspense sequence. We’re going to play the tragedy, and we’re going to do it now.”
Because the moment that she doesn’t finish him off, the audience knows without a doubt something bad is going to happen. So let’s not pretend that that’s not true. I think that allowed us to make Lamorne’s death tragic in a way where it’s not a disposable death in the end of a TV show, but it’s meaningful.
How did you get the idea for the flash-forwards in the finale?
You’re always wrestling with, where does the story end? The first season of “Fargo,” Martin Freeman fell into the ice and she gets the call, then the show’s over. The second season, 15 minutes into the last hour, the action was over, and we had a 30-minute denouement to it. Season to season, it just depends.
Here, I designed this whole season with this idea that Sam Spruell’s character and Juno collide in the first episode, and then in the ninth episode, he just happens to be there and sees her in the hole, and he saves her. But that’s not the end of it. I thought about the scene in “No Country for Old Men” — Brolin’s dead, the action’s over, Kelly MacDonald comes home to her house, she’s just buried her mother. And Chigurh is sitting there, and she’s like, “I knew this wasn’t over.” He said, “I promised your husband I would kill you,” and she says, “That doesn’t make any sense,” and he leaves that scene.
I thought, “Well, that’s the moment that we want.” Munch shows up, and just when you thought it was over, it’s not over. I imagine that I set off to write that scene with the idea that it was going to be one last she’s got to figure her way out of this suspense-action thing, and then I just thought, “What if she said to him, ‘That’s your scene. I’m not going to be in your scene. You’re going to be in my scene. And in my scene, we’re halfway to dinner, and it’s a school night.'” And the moment that I did that, I thought, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m really excited to find out.”
Enlisting him in making biscuits!
“Wash your hands and help.” Then it ended at the dinner table, with the biscuit and him telling the story about this despair and this trauma and all this, and her saying, “Well, you can be forgiven for that, and forgive yourself.” And I thought, “Well, that’s the healing.”
Maybe that’s the way out of this polarized moment — is we’re going to have to give each other a biscuit and move past it.
And debts should be forgiven sometimes. Not collected upon.
Just be a little kinder. That’s all we need.
There’s also, in the scene before, the Lorraine-Roy prison showdown. Did you have that idea for their finale face-off from the start?
Yeah, I think so. I didn’t want to kill him off — on some level that seemed too easy. Justice, the whole season was a lot about like how justice should actually work: It’s not just one man on a horse, it’s a system of justice and consequences. But that doesn’t mean that Lorraine Lyon can sit down across from you in the prison and say, “It’s about to get a lot worse for you.”
Thank God. What did you learn about “Fargo” by setting it closer to the present?
If you don’t want to do satire, and you don’t want to do farce, it becomes more complicated to be comic about the things you’re struggling with in this moment. Because the moment that you’re mocking people, you’re losing audience. The whole point of the “Fargo” exercise for me is we’re not mocking the people of the fictional Midwest. We’re honoring them and their dignity. Now, there’s idiots everywhere, but we’re not projecting that. I think that’s what set Frances McDormand’s character — that’s what made her stand out, and that’s my hope here as well. I think in wrestling with the contemporary moment, I didn’t want “Fargo” to choose sides, and I didn’t want to choose sides. I just wanted to say, “Well, look, this is what I’m seeing. These are the people that I’m seeing, and let’s play this out and see what decency leads to.”
So we’re winding down. Rapid fire. Or — whatever you want.
Lightning round.
Who do you think Dot would’ve voted for in 2020?
The Green Party. No, I think she would’ve voted for Biden.
In the flash-forward scenes, according to the timeline, those would’ve been late 2020. No one’s masked. Did COVID happen in the “Fargo” world?
Eh, don’t logic police me.
Fair enough. People love to rank the seasons of “Fargo.” Do you have a ranking in your mind?
I went back for the first time in gearing up for Season 5, and rewatched all the seasons. I’d never done it before. I mean, I spent so much time editing them, but I thought, well, let me see what I’ve accomplished and what this is. At the end, I’ll just say about them what Ethan Coen said to me about the first hour of “Fargo” that he watched: “Yeah, good.”
I mean, I’m very happy with all of them, and I think they have a collective power. And I love that you can watch them in any order. But I think they hold up for me.
You’re doing the “Alien” prequel series for FX, which is premiering next year. How’s it going?
Horribly! No, it’s going very well. It’s certainly bigger than anything I’ve ever done, and yet the same rules apply. I remember seeing Denis Villeneuve say that he couldn’t have made “Dune” unless he’d made all of his other movies, and I feel similarly. Everything that I’ve done to date has prepared me to do something on this scale. Having done experimental filmmaking with “Legion” and “Lucy in the Sky” — how to use the camera, different ways of creating feeling in an audience, using lighting, camera — whatever it is. All of it’s come together to prepare me to make a show that I’m hoping is going to blow your mind.
I know you can’t talk about it much, but you’ve said it’s set on Earth in the future. So there are aliens on Earth?
Yes. You are going to see that thing that has only ever existed in space or on a prison world come to Earth. And that is a portion of what the show is about.
Do you have an idea for another season of “Fargo,” since the Alien show is supposed to be an ongoing series?
Yeah, I’m starting to have thoughts about it. Again, there’s so much that goes into it, it takes so long, and I always wrap a season thinking, “Well, that’s got to be it.” And then some period of time later, I’ll wake up and go, “Oh, I could do that.” I’m not at the, “oh, I could do that stage yet”, but I kind of see what I might like to play with about it.
I didn’t want to do a fifth season unless the response was going to be back and better than ever. And it has been, which has been great.
Sure was.
Then you always start to go, “Well, I don’t want to mess that up!” I don’t want everyone to go like, “Oh, you should have gone out on the high notes.” You always have to think about, well, this could be another great season of “Fargo,” but are people going to feel like this deserves to exist? Or are they going to go, “He should have left well enough alone.” So for the first time, I guess I’m having those thoughts as well.
Interesting. You’ve published six novels.
Yeah.
When do you have time to write books?
Someone once ask me if I could have any superpower, what would it be, and I would say the ability to make more hours in the day. I tend to write books in periods of time in which I’m not filming something or writing something — or editing something.
When’s that!
We had a pandemic. We had a writers strike, which allowed me to start an idea that I don’t know when I would finish. But unfortunately, it’s global health event or major labor disruption is when I get to write.
Well, the xenomorphs are coming, so you’ll have time.
There you go.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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