'Fargo' Season 2 Preview: The Cast on '70s Hair, Minnesota Accents, and Ronald Reagan

Fans of the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning 1996 film Fargo were understandably skeptical when FX announced they were turning it into a TV series. But those who did tune in were rewarded with one of last year’s best TV shows, one that honored the original movie while telling a fresh story all its own.

And a similar leap of faith may be needed as Fargo moves into Season 2 (debuting Oct. 12): The new season, a prequel set in 1979 and starring Patrick Wilson as a young version of Molly’s dad Lou Solverson, is strikingly different in style, using ‘70s-style, Tarantino-esque split-screens and freeze-frames to tell another tale of small-town murder, but still keeping its pitch-black sense of humor intact.

Watch the trailer for Fargo Season 2 right here:

“It’s a completely new invention, it’s a completely new story,” showrunner Noah Hawley told reporters Friday during FX’s summer press tour. “It’s a much bigger story… kind of an American epic.” And the Fargo panel was indeed epic, with eight cast members — including Kirsten Dunst (via satellite), Ted Danson, Jean Smart, and Jesse Plemons — joining Hawley and producers Warren Littlefield and John Cameron to get us ready for Season 2.

This is Fargo, so of course the subject of Minnesota accents came up at one point, and it turns out Dunst had a head start on her co-stars; “a lot of my family are from Minnesota,” she says, so “it was kind of within my wheelhouse already.” Her character, Peggy Blomquist, is a small-town hairdresser and wife who still harbors a burning desire to run off to Hollywood.

Dunst says she hadn’t seen the first season of Fargo when she signed on, but then she binge-watched all of it in a day: “I was just so blown away by the acting, and the writing, and the way it looked.” And then she read a couple of scripts from Season 2, she remembers, and said to herself, “Wow, this character is going to go places! And I need to play her.”

And with Season 2 being set in 1979, of course the subject of '70s hairstyles came up at one point, too. Dunst’s Peggy has Farrah Fawcett-esque blonde waves, and Bokeem Woodbine’s enforcer character Mike has an afro and thick sideburns. “When the sideburns came on, I felt like a completely different person,” Woodbine laughs.

But after years of sporting perfect hair as Sam Malone on Cheers, Danson is more than happy to tuck his hair underneath a hat here as Sheriff Hank Larsson. “For so much of my career, I’ve been so coiffed with hair spray,” he says. “It was so liberating to just be my 67-year-old self.” (In related news: Ted Danson is 67?!?)

More highlights from today’s Fargo panel:

* The Fargo Season 2 cast is so deep, today’s panel didn’t even include Bruce Campbell, who plays Ronald Reagan (yes, that Ronald Reagan) on the show. No word yet on how the Gipper will figure into the plot, but Hawley hints that he and Campbell “had a long conversation about it: the accents and the mannerisms. I think he did an amazing job.”

* Season 2 shows us Lou Solverson as a young Minnesota cop, a few years removed from serving in the Vietnam War. Hank’s a WWII vet, too, and Hawley says their wartime experience helps them investigate this season’s murders: “They knew what they were capable of. Their mettle had been tested. And they knew the storm clouds were coming… because they’d seen it before.”

* Smart, such a sweetheart on Designing Women, is a revelation here as tough-as-nails matriarch Floyd Gerhardt, who oversees a family of dim-witted criminals. “There’s nothing you can do to faze me,” Smart says of her character. “There’s nothing you can do to scare me. I’ve seen it all.”

* Like Dunst, Danson admits he hadn’t seen Fargo before he signed on, mostly because he liked the original film so much. But “my kids told me I was an idiot, that I needed to watch it,” he says. “Then I devoured it in two days. I fell in love with what I saw.”

* The '70s filmmaking flourishes are not only a stylistic choice to match the era, according to Hawley; they also serve a storytelling purpose. “I realized I had a much bigger cast, and I wanted to keep track of all of them,” he says, so he used a split-screen to show two characters at once.

* We haven’t even started Season 2 yet, but some people are already thinking about Fargo Season 3 and beyond. Will every season feature a member of the Solverson family, one reporter wondered? Hawley didn’t want to get ahead of himself (Season 3 hasn’t been ordered yet), but he would say: “I don’t think there always has to be a Solverson. I think it’s a big world with a lot of stories.”

Season 2 of Fargo premieres Monday, Oct. 12 at 10 p.m. on FX.