‘Fargo’ Creator Noah Hawley on Casting Jon Hamm and Juno Temple, Portraying a Sympathetic ‘Sin Eater’ and an ‘Alien’ Update | Showrunners Sitdown
Noah Hawley, showrunner of FX's Fargo, on returning the to series' roots of "Minnesota Nice," incorporating themes of comtemporary civics, and writing violence in a way that doesn't tramatize in this exclusive conversation.
Variety Showrunners Sitdown by FX.
Variety Showrunners Sitdown by FX.
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00:00I'll just say about them what what Ethan Coen said to me about the first hour of Fargo that he watched. Yeah good
00:16Noah Hawley, thank you for doing this interview. I loved the most recent season of Fargo. Thank you
00:23She's a wolf in sheep's clothing that one
00:26I'm so sorry for biting you boys
00:31It's just if you knew the week I'm having
00:35So, how does it work when you have the idea for a new Fargo season
00:39Do you start to write something and then call FX or what's the process?
00:44Yeah, I want to have enough of an idea that that we can have a long conversation about it this year
00:49I really wanted to engage with the film Fargo
00:52So I needed to really figure out like well, what's my game of telephone with the idea?
00:56You know as a man
00:58hires two guys to kidnap his wife right and then the Joel and Ethan made
01:01Their version of that story and I made this other version of that story where the man is not her current husband
01:07It's the guy she escaped from and so who are the two guys and then you just follow that out
01:11The theme of the season is debt. What did you want to say about that through the lens of Fargo?
01:18Well, I think the debt is this thing that we don't talk about and that everyone has right
01:2490% of Americans carry some level of debt and it comes with this morality attached to it
01:29Right this idea that if you owe money, you're somehow less than you're weaker than other people you needed help, right?
01:36There's something wrong with needing help, right?
01:38We have this long debt student loan debt takes 20 years to pay off
01:42And so when you pay it off, you're a moral person. Mm-hmm
01:46And if you don't pay it off, you're an immoral person. And so for 20 years, you're both
01:50Right, are you gonna pay it off or not? Yeah, that felt like a very Coen brothers idea to me
01:55Yeah, can you talk about setting the season in the more recent past than others? It opens up with Halloween?
02:022019 yeah
02:03this show is an exploration of America and and it's looking at the sort of struggle of decent people against cynicism is how
02:12I would approach it and I wanted to look at Minnesota nice, right?
02:17Minnesota nice which is this cultural idea birthed by the film Fargo in which people of a
02:24Particular region are so afraid of offending anyone that they bend over backwards
02:30To be nice and as Joel said once it's like people in polite societies don't know how to bend
02:37They just break right and so it's smile smile smile smile handgun
02:42Right and yeah, and and yet I was looking around in
02:462022 and I thought well, no one's pretending to be nice anymore
02:49That was a big part of it for me is about making it contemporary was to go
02:54All right. Well, how do we get back to civility and decency and grace and courtesy?
02:59You know, I heard a man went into the hospital in st. Paul for a kidney transplant
03:04He ended up with someone else's brain. No way. Yeah
03:08Well, I'm not sure that don't sound accurate
03:11Generally speaking at what point in your process?
03:15Do you start thinking about casting and then once you have an idea, do you start writing toward the actor?
03:21yeah, I mean it's always after a script because a
03:25Character needs to be a character right and you've got to go all the way with the character
03:29You got to go full Roy Tillman. Yeah, and then figure out who's Roy Tillman if you go well, it's Jon Hamm
03:36In the beginning, you know, then you find yourself writing to John, which is not the exercise
03:42You know
03:43it's always I'll have written one script or two scripts when we get into the casting and then I'll have an idea or I
03:49Work with Rachel tenor the you know, my casting director and I just want to get the vibe
03:54I just want to talk to them and feel like oh
03:56Do they feel right like Sam Spruill who plays old munch Jesse Buckley in the fourth season?
04:01You know what? I mean? I was like, oh, yeah, that's her
04:03I wanted to ask you also about just bringing contemporary politics into the show and
04:10Whether you were worried at all about
04:12Bursting the show's fictional bubble and making it like a culture war thing. You know, my hope was not to engage in
04:20Politics with the show. My hope was to engage
04:23With civics in a way to engage with these communal issues that we're wrestling with and to sort of say
04:30We're in a polarized moment
04:32We're in a polarized moment people are at each other's throats, but are we just gonna Hatfield and McCoy this thing?
04:39Forever. Yeah, how are we gonna get past this moment? And and that was the goal and that sort of last
04:45Episode of trying to wrestle with well, what's after that? Right? It's good
04:49There's gonna have to be some kind of truth and reconciliation. There's gonna have to be some kind of
04:54Forgiveness, right? Isn't this the act of kindness that we owe to each other?
04:59It's like, you know
05:00so I think that was the goal of it was not just to sort of yell about things and I also think that
05:06You know Roy Tillman is as a character
05:09There's a large portion of America in which he is the protagonist of this season of television, right?
05:15Yes, and so the question is not let's not mock him. Let's not turn him into a joke
05:20Let's present him as he is and then ask the audience. Are you still with him? Are you still with him now?
05:27It's the Walter White thing right of like how far will you go with John who's quite winning, right?
05:34Yeah, very charming
05:35But you know, he takes that long walk to where Juno's being held and in that moment he becomes
05:42Something monstrous, right? And are you still with him? Right the inspirations for his character basically a
05:50Constitutional sheriff combined with Cliven Bundy
05:54What did you and Jon Hamm talk about in terms of how he could find that character?
06:00We talked about Tiger King America. Mmm, right and the idea that if this had been a constitutional sheriff in 1980
06:08Right, it would have been moral majority. It would have been a very different
06:12America, you know you think about those sheriffs in no country for old man
06:16Yeah, Tommy Lee Jones and then the other guy and they're talking about girls with with pink hair on our American streets and piercing
06:23You know, he would have been one of those guys red meat whiskey
06:28Whatever it is, but it's not nipple rings, right? It's not sex trunk in the bedroom, you know
06:34It's not smoking pot. Yeah, and it's not smoking pot and there's something if you look at the reality of
06:41America right now there is this strange
06:43Combination of hedonism and
06:48Christianity in which in order to remain
06:52Christian you have to redefine what Christianity is to fit your behavior
06:57Right, and so that was this the sort of idea is to say he's a paradox
07:02He's saying one thing and then the behavior seems to be at odds with it and yet isn't that the whole conundrum?
07:09You know, you feel a bit like you're going insane
07:13Talking about truth in the same breath as a lie, right?
07:18I know you think I'm this kind of
07:21perfect woman wife
07:24mother
07:26But you know even I got a breaking point
07:31Juno temple is most famous for playing Keely on Ted lasso, which is very different from dot
07:38What did you see in her
07:40That made you realize that she could play this kind of John wick combined with MacGyver combined with genuine, Minnesota
07:47Nice, she's very mischievous and very playful and you know
07:51What I loved on Ted lasso is like she was always protecting the other person in the scene
07:57She had a moment where the one guy
07:59Got the wrong message and he kissed her and and then rather than react in a negative way
08:04She was still trying to protect his feelings, right?
08:06You have this woman who has a 12 year old daughter and a husband and she gets kidnapped
08:12And then she goes home and pretends it never happened and she knows these guys are coming for her again
08:18And yet she allows her family to stay in that house and she staples live wires to the window and you know with the wrong
08:25Actor you're calling child protective services, right? She's the worst mother you've ever seen
08:30And so she needs to be the fun mom the mischievous mom where it's like she's just turning it into it
08:36Let's listen adventure, you know, it's a fun project and what I liked about that
08:40She's teaching her daughter to be prepared, but she's not teaching her to be afraid, right?
08:45The two of them together, you know temple and Jon Hamm that doesn't really happen until later in the season
08:52but they're
08:54Incredible together just their physicality. He's so huge and she's tiny and what?
09:00Conversations did the three of you have about what those scenes should be like?
09:04We had a lot of conversations about them and and then the violence when it occurred, you know
09:10You'll if you go back in the edit, you'll notice that he takes that long walk
09:14He goes into that shed where she's being held and we don't go in with them
09:19yeah, you know and he does violence to her and
09:23We know what's happening in that room
09:25And I don't want to traumatize the audience by showing them something
09:29They know what's happening and then we do cut inside after that violence is over and then it becomes a fight
09:36And that I show you right John was, you know, very protective of Juno making sure that she was okay with things
09:43She was sort of more traumatized by the idea that he had to be this person
09:47You know what? I mean, she was worried about her own safety in a way
09:51So that was very humbling to see these two actors who were really trying to protect each other. I think that transformation
09:57He becomes this old-school
10:00Bible thumping preacher as he's swinging this chain and everything and it's it's so
10:05Horrific and we tried to make it in the most humane way possible
10:10How did you find the Fargo tone when domestic violence is so central to this story?
10:16Yeah, it was a challenge. I
10:19Grew up in a household where my mother was a feminist writer in New York
10:2470s and she wrote the first speak out on incest. She wrote a book about domestic violence
10:29So, you know, I knew in dealing with the story that I really wanted to be sensitive to it
10:34But but not shy away from it at the same time
10:37but the tone is tough and and there were moments where I
10:41Realized oh, we're not going to be able to do it this way. It's too awful
10:47You know having Juno committed by her mother which just seemed like a Fargo twist
10:52When you actually put it on its feet and do it and this woman who's fought so hard to be free is being capped
10:59Like it's awful. Yes to watch and and and that she's being silenced all of it
11:04and so I had to take a step back and kind of
11:09Reconceive and I did did some reshooting and I added this nature documentary voiceover about the tiger
11:15You know what? I mean in order to bring us back to the tone the tiger
11:20Spelled
11:22T-i-g-e-r is one of the fiercest hunters on earth
11:28The tiger is most dangerous
11:30When cornered I always try to avoid creating fresh injury
11:34Traumatize an audience or even the actors, you know what? I mean?
11:37It's like we people have had their experiences
11:40Right, we dealt a lot with racism in the fourth season and I did not want this show in order to show
11:46The characters dealing with racism I wanted to avoid racism as much as possible
11:51Use the bare minimum that I needed her mother-in-law's played by the great Jennifer Jason Lee and who you introduce in the premiere
12:00Shooting a Christmas card in October. Yes with automatic
12:05Family very Lauren Bobert. What did you want us to think about Lorraine and her matriarchy?
12:12You know on some level if you look at the game of telephone that I was playing with the movie
12:16I sort of took the heart Fresnel
12:18Father-in-law and turned it into the mother-in-law, but then I also wanted to play with this idea of strong women
12:26Right, whether it was Jennifer's character or richer more Johnny's character or Juno that you could look at all the characters
12:33And they could all plausibly be some kind of Republican. Yeah, we're not having a Democrat versus Republican
12:39Conversation we're saying no these people all have a certain sense of values or whatever and it's on a spectrum there and
12:47As she is the literal queen of debt. You can't talk about debt without talking about this
12:53weird
12:54Self-made American myth in which if you need help
12:58You're somehow morally inferior and that she was carrying this idea of who Juno was
13:04You know as a gold-digger as low-rent as a victim to get to that moment where riches character says to her
13:11Have you ever heard your daughter-in-law complain that she's a victim of anything, right? It's like sometimes
13:17Crime is done to people and they are victimized that does not make them bad people, right?
13:23so it was very important that this evolution of
13:26Jennifer's character that she'd go from someone who's kind of closed off to the experience of others
13:32And then when she sees those photos of what Roy did to her daughter-in-law, you know
13:37We talked about the Grinch and the heart growing three sizes that day
13:40But really it was like no not on my watch. No one's gonna treat a woman that way on my watch. That's right
13:48In forgiveness of your debts to man
13:51Will you consume his Lordship sins to God?
13:54I will ulam mook played by Sam Spruill
13:57It's in the third episode when there's a flashback to 1522 Wales
14:03Yeah, where he we see him as the sin eater
14:06It's not the first time that Fargo has engaged in the supernatural, but how did you conceive of this character?
14:12Well, I had read this book on debt by Margaret Atwood
14:15Which was a series of lectures that she did and in it she talked about sin-eating and I thought that's a really interesting
14:22Idea if you think about
14:25The things that people do to each other
14:27About money. That's a pretty terrible thing to say for two coins and a meal you go to hell and I go to heaven
14:35Right. Yeah, and so I like that idea, but it's not a modern idea of sin eating
14:40And and so I like the idea that Sam's character
14:44He sold his soul and as a result is sort of doomed to walk the earth
14:50Because he sold his soul. There's no me. There's no I he has no
14:54Individual sense of himself anymore. And so he speaks the way that he speaks about a man this yes and all of it
15:01And he tells the story about for a hundred years. He spoke to nobody, you know
15:06He had to learn how to speak again, and you know, it's a fascinating character to create with Sam
15:11But we have a history on Fargo and the Coen's have a history as well of dealing with these sort of elemental figures and issues
15:17and yes, there's a UFO and the man who wasn't there and
15:21The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse and Anton Chigurh and all all these right figures. He seemed like a resident of Anton Chigurh
15:29Yeah, yeah, they're larger than life and like Billy Bob's character in the first year you think well
15:35Maybe not this guy literally but some version of this guy has always been blowing around the American landscape
15:40Richa Morjani who plays Indira?
15:43Yeah, such a wonderful character other than the immediate relief that she's ditched her deadbeat husband Lars
15:50What are we to make of her choice to go work for Lorraine? I?
15:55Think it's about where you can do the most good and and power and I think that Lorraine's argument to her is sound
16:02To say not only look at what they make you wear
16:05Yeah, right on this on the police force, but I'm talking about coming to work for me
16:11Being the boss of all these guys you can look at it as selling out on some level
16:16But on the other hand, I think it's a false narrative that you know
16:20You have to suffer in order to do good or you can't be compensated for the good work that you do
16:26I think that on some level that the FBI never would have shown up at
16:32The compound if she hadn't been there to make that happen called the orange idiot exactly. Yeah, what's her money going toward anyway?
16:39Oh, what good is it if I can't have somebody killed? I wanted to ask you about some of the music
16:46Selections it opens to yes singing all good people and yeah
16:50Then there's YMCA when all the militia people are coming on to the Tillman ranch and then the slowed-down
16:56You mentioned Roy walking. Yeah
16:59Toxic the toxic cover
17:06Yeah, I mean I have Lisa Hannigan who's a singer I was like I want to do a cover of toxic but like a funeral dirge
17:14Version of toxic. I think that worked out worked out great
17:17Did Whitfar have to die?
17:20Lamorne was tremendous in the show and it's one of those things that I wrestled with
17:24I don't want to put it on anybody else and I thought well, we're saying it's a true story
17:28and
17:29In the real world the good guys don't always win and the bad guys don't always lose and it's a tragedy
17:35With a happy ending and it felt like it was the right thing to do in the story
17:40And the goal was to make him heroic and leave him with his dignity and the tragedy of it
17:45Of course is that Roy got away in that moment?
17:48If you look back at how I played it leading into that moment, you know
17:53The moment that Gino has a gun on John the FBI shows up
17:57I was like, we're never gonna play that. This is an action suspense sequence
18:00We're gonna play the tragedy and we're gonna do it now because the moment that she doesn't finish him off
18:05The audience knows without a doubt something bad is gonna happen. Yeah, so let's not pretend that that's not true, right?
18:11And I think that allowed us to make Lamorne's death
18:16Tragic in a way where it's not a disposable death in the end of a TV show, but it's meaningful
18:23How did you get the idea for the flash-forwards in the finale?
18:27You're always wrestling with where does the story end the first season of Fargo?
18:32Martin Freeman fell into the ice and she gets the call and then the show's over the second season
18:3715 minutes into the last hour the action was over and we had 30 minute denouement to it
18:44Season to season it just depends
18:46Here, you know
18:47I designed this whole season with this idea that you know
18:50Sam Spruill's character and Juno collide in the first episode
18:53Yeah
18:54And then in the ninth episode he just happens to be there and sees her in the hole and he saved saves her, right?
19:00But that's not the end of it, right and I thought about this scene in no country for old men
19:06Brolin's dead the actions over Kelly McDonald comes home to her house
19:11She's just buried her mother and sugar is there sitting there and she's like I knew this wasn't over right and he said I promised
19:18Your husband I would kill you and she says that doesn't make any sense and he leaves that scene and I thought well
19:23That's the moment that we want is monk shows up and just when you thought it was over. It's not over
19:29I imagine that I set off to write that scene with the idea that it was gonna be one last
19:35She's got to figure her way out of this
19:38Suspense action thing and I just thought what if she said to him?
19:43That's your scene. I'm not gonna be in your scene
19:45You're gonna be in my scene right and in my scene, we're halfway to dinner and it's a school night
19:51Right, and the moment that I did that I thought I don't know what this is
19:55But I'm really excited to find out in listening and making wash your hands and help and then it
20:01Ended at the dinner table
20:02Yeah with the biscuit and him telling the story about this despair and this trauma and all this and her saying well
20:10You can be forgiven for that and forgive yourself and I thought well, that's the healing
20:14Maybe that's the way out of this
20:16Polarized moment is we're gonna have to give each other a biscuit and move past it
20:21No, and debts should be forgiven sometimes. Yeah, of course, of course
20:24It's you know, it's not collected upon. Yeah, you know, just be a little kinder, right?
20:31That's that's all we need there's also in the scene before the Lorraine Roy showdown
20:36Yeah, did you have that idea for their finale face off from the start? Yeah, I think so
20:41I didn't want to kill him off on some level that seemed too easy
20:44Justice I the whole season was a lot about like well how justice should actually work
20:50It's not just a one man on a horse, right? It's a system of justice and
20:55Consequences, but that doesn't mean that Lorraine Lyon can sit down
21:00Across from you in prison and say it's about to get a lot worse for you
21:04Thank God, what did you learn about Fargo by setting it closer to the present if you don't want to do satire
21:11And you don't want to do farce
21:13It becomes more complicated to be comic about the things you're struggling with in this moment, right?
21:20Because the moment that you're mocking
21:23people
21:24You're losing audience the whole point of the Fargo exercise for me is we're not mocking
21:31The people of the fictional Midwest we're honoring them and their dignity now
21:36There's idiots everywhere, right, but we're not projecting that and I think that's what set Francis McDormand's character
21:44That's what made her stand out and that's my hope here as well
21:47And and I think in wrestling with the contemporary moment, I just I didn't want
21:52Fargo to choose sides and I didn't want to choose sides. I just wanted to say well look
21:57These are this is what I'm seeing
21:58These are the people that I'm seeing and and let's play this out and see what decency leads to you know
22:05Okay, so we're winding down. Yes rapid-fire. All right, or whatever you want, whatever you lightning, right?
22:11Okay, who do you think dot would have voted for in 2020 in 2020? Yeah, the Green Party
22:18No, I I think she would have voted for Biden in the flash-forward scenes
22:22According to the timeline those would have been late 2020, right? No one's masked did kovat happen in the Fargo world
22:30Don't logic police me
22:33Fair enough people love to rank the seasons of Fargo. Yes. Do you have a ranking in your mind?
22:39I went back for the first time in in
22:43You know in gearing up for season 5 and rewatched all the seasons. I'd never done it really or I mean, you know
22:48I spent so much time editing man, you know, but I thought well
22:52Let me see what what I've accomplished and and and what this is and and I you know at the end
22:58I'll just say about them. What what do you think Cohen said to me about the first hour Fargo that he watched?
23:04Yeah good, you know, I mean, I'm very happy with all of them and I think I think they they have a collective
23:11Power and I love that you can watch them in any order
23:15But you know, I think I think they hold up for me
23:18You're doing the alien prequel series for FX which is premiering next year. Yeah, how's it going?
23:26Horribly no, it's going very well, you know
23:30It's certainly bigger than than anything I've ever done and yet the same rules apply, you know
23:36I remember seeing Denis Villeneuve say that he couldn't have made doing unless he'd made all of his other movies, right?
23:42Right, and I feel similarly like everything that I've done to date has prepared me to do something on this scale and having done
23:49Experimental filmmaking with Legion and Lucy in the sky how to use the camera
23:55Different ways of creating feeling in an audience using lighting camera, whatever it is
24:00Like all of its come together to prepare me to make a show that that I'm hoping is gonna blow your mind
24:06I know you can't talk about it much, but you've said it's set on earth in the future
24:11Yeah, so there are aliens on earth
24:14Yes, you you're going to see that thing that has only ever existed in space or on a prison world come to earth
24:21and that is a
24:24Portion of what the show is about. Do you have an idea for another season of Fargo?
24:30Since the alien show is supposed to be an ongoing series. Yeah, I'm starting to have thoughts about it
24:36Again, there's so much that goes into it. It takes so long and I always wrap a season thinking well
24:41That's got to be it right and then some period of time later. I'll wake up and go. Oh I could do that
24:46I'm not at the oh I could do that stage yet, but I kind of see
24:49What I might like to play with about it
24:52I didn't want to do a fifth season unless the response was gonna be back and better than ever
24:56And it has been which has been great was yeah, and then you always start to go
25:00Well, I don't want to mess that up, you know, I don't want it everyone to go like
25:04Oh, we should have gone out on the high note
25:06So you always have to like think about like well, this could be another great season of Fargo
25:10But are people gonna feel this deserves to exist or are they gonna go, you know, he should have left well enough alone
25:16So for the first time, I guess I'm having those thoughts as well. Interesting. You've published six novels
25:21Yeah, when do you have time to write books?
25:25Someone wants to ask me if I could have any superpower
25:28What would it be and I would say the ability to make more hours in the day, right?
25:31I tend to write books in periods of time in which I'm not filming something or writing something or editing something
25:38When so we had a pandemic. Yes, right. We had a writer's strike which allowed me to start an idea
25:46That I don't know when I would finish but unfortunately
25:50It's global health event or major labor disruption is when I get to write. Well, the xenomorphs are coming
25:56So you'll have time there you go. Um, Noah Hawley. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was great. Thank you
26:08You