Sam Spruell on Unlocking “The Sin Eater” in Season Five of FX’s ‘Fargo’

Sam Spruell is a veteran character actor with some terrific credits over his twenty-plus year career on film and in TV, but his role as Ole Munch in Fargo’s season five presented him with his finest character yet. In playing the incredibly complicated would-be kidnapper known as “The Sin Eater,” Spruell delivers a remarkably complex, specific, and ultimately very moving portrait of a man who is driven by code and curse. During our conversation, we discuss this most unique invention of a character, the choices that were made to get him just right, and, of course, that masterful last scene between Ole and Dot (played in terrific fashion by Juno temple).

Awards Daily: When you received this script, and you realized you were playing a “Sin Eater.” What was your response to that? 

Sam Spruell: (Laughs). It’s so funny that you bring up the sin eating, because that was absolutely the thing that unlocked the part for me. When I read it, I didn’t really understand its initial importance. I had the first six episodes of the script, and I was due to meet Noah (Hawley–Fargo show creator) to talk about the part and the show. And I didn’t realize that the sin eating aspect of this character was the key. After I’d been offered the part, I was doing a deeper dive into where sin eating originated from and the stories around it. There’s quite a lot of 19th century stories talking about sin eating in Wales in the 1400’s and talking about the poverty of the area and why people felt they had no option but to eat the sins of the rich to put some food in their belly and some money in their pocket. Then I realized that this man had no option but to live a life of sin. So he was a kind of victim of the story, if you like, and then he was trapped in sin, in a life of sin that he couldn’t extricate himself from. That is kind of a link to modern life and how a lot of people are trapped in a cycle of crime and poverty and other kinds of misdemeanors. I thought that was a really interesting parallel to reflect on modern life. It was the key to playing Ole Munch. 

Awards Daily: Ole’s speaking cadence is so distinctive, and unnerving. How did you go about creating his pace and style of speech?

Sam Spruell: I worked with a brilliant voice coach. Also I just felt like the way it was written, it was someone speaking in a language foreign to where they were from naturally. I connected his name to the famous painter, Edvard Munch. So I knew I was going to go Scandinavian. I kind of started to listen to Scandinavians with the voice coach. And then also there were other clues about how he speaks. Noah Hawley suggested that Ole hadn’t spoken to anyone for a hundred years. And I thought that was really interesting. So what does that do? Do you then struggle to form words? Have certain muscles in your tongue and mouth kind of degenerated? I just was playing around with that and it just created this vocal style, or a way of speaking that I just leaned into more and more as the show went on. It felt really right that he should struggle to speak, struggle to engage with others. He’s such an isolated and lonely character. 

Awards Daily: This may sound odd, but a character he reminded me of is Omar (played by the late, great Michael K. Williams) from The Wire because of the piece about a man having a code. Their codes were not exactly the same, but they weren’t so unrelated either. Ole has this code where he has a desire to finish the mission, even when those who have charged him with finishing the mission are no longer looking to employ him for it. They’re looking, in fact, to do away with him. What was it like to play a guy who was so committed to this code well past the point of what most of us would consider rational. 

Sam Spruell: Oh my god, that’s such a nice comparison. I think that character Omar in The Wire is just an amazing creation. I think they both come from slightly Old Testament angles. They believe in a kind of weird sense of justice, which feels to me like the Old Testament ‘eye for an eye’ perspective regardless of what extenuating circumstances there are. It comes as a very basic equation to these guys. That code is something that Noah Hawley described as being an itch that you have to scratch. No matter what kind of logic you apply to it, no matter what kind of other thinking you bring to the situation, you have to scratch that itch. Once he said that, once he laid it down in those very clear terms, I really understood it and I was able to commit to it. When you then start playing the scenes, especially in the last episode, you arrive with very clear parameters, the itch that you can’t scratch, and then the other people in the scene, the rest of Dot’s (Juno Temple) family, complicate matters. They make it less clear for him. That’s the struggle he has in the scene until finally he relents and lets love and compassion win the day. 

Awards Daily: Don’t get too far ahead of me, please. 

Sam Spruell: I’m so sorry. (laughing)

Awards Daily: Obviously, Fargo the show has sometimes indirect connections and sometimes more direct connections to Fargo the film, at least in two particular instances that come to mind. I don’t know if “taking flights of fancy” is quite the right word here but: there was the UFO in season two, and then there was this 500 year flashback in this season. When you were reading the script and got to the flashback, did you have a “what the hell” moment? 

Sam Spruell: (Laughs). It was part of what Noah said as well. He’s 500 years old, he started in Wales, he’s kind of most recently from Scandinavia, he’s been in America for 200 years, he hasn’t spoken for 100 years, all these things. You’re like wow, it’s a rush of excitement at the potential of what this character could be. It’s fantastic. But then you’re right. You then have to play it. He could be a theme almost, rather than a character. You have to make him human and so you just try and work it out. It didn’t matter how old he was in the end. It just mattered that he had been trapped in sin, living in sin, for a long time. It was absolutely in his bones, this way of life. And he could not escape that initial entrapment or victimhood, if you like, that his circumstances of poverty and hunger and having absolutely no money, led him to this life.

He ingested those sins and there was no escape from them. He had to carry them. I just thought that it didn’t matter how old he was, it was just a really interesting thing to do (the flashback). And then there was a bit of evolution. Back in Wales he really did feel the lowest of the low. I loved beginning a character there, and then him evolving over time into something more powerful, where everything had kind of hardened and become more ingrained. The thing about this character, and the thing about Noah and what he creates with Fargo, is there is so much possibility with these larger than life characters. When I say possibility, I think just the imagination that they demand, the creativity, it’s an absolute gift to an actor. There’s so little work out there that offers that. When you’re offered the chance to work like that, it’s just fantastic. You can let your imagination be infinite. 

Awards Daily: It was funny, it was like having one of the crazier scenes from The Northman just dropped into the show. I was completely caught off guard.

Sam Spruell: I love the fact that Noah was brave enough to disorientate his audience. Now we’re here. Keep up. This is the story. This will feed the characters and your knowledge of the characters. There’s no spoon feeding. It’s just the type of material I love. 

Awards Daily: Talk to me a little bit about acting with Jon Hamm and Juno Temple. Your scenes with them, while they are somewhat spread out, there’s a significant, but different, intensity to the way you treat them. You have more respect for Juno’s character than you do for Jon’s character and by some distance. But Jon’s also, at least at first, your employer. Tell me about the dynamic of working with those two. 

Sam Spruell: I think that’s such a true and interesting observation. Let me just talk about quickly why Munch treats them differently. With Juno’s character, Dot, I think he absolutely sees another victim. He feels their similarities, where whatever has happened to them, they haven’t invited it, so to speak. They haven’t had any option but to endure it. I think that they both recognize each other’s victimhood. I think with Jon, Munch has this speech about kings, and how everyone wants to be a king. Everyone’s expectation is that they should lead a king’s life with the level of freedom and privilege that affords them. He can’t get his head around why people would expect that, but they do. Roy Tillman is a man utterly entitled. He’s full of religious preach, but actually he doesn’t live by the same rules that he preaches. For Ole, he just can’t find any kind of calm with Roy’s behavior. It just deserves some retribution. He just feels unbelievably cold towards Roy, not anger, but just a kind of disengagement with who he is.

Oh my goodness, it was interesting working with the both of them. Juno is so emotional. Her heart is as broad and as wide as the landscape in Calgary where we shot it. She really is a deep feeling soul. When you’re working with people like that, you can’t help but have all that feeling wash over you and affect you. I almost had to kind of prepare myself to be even harder because I knew that those eyes of hers were going to get to me. With Jon, it was really interesting how the two of us work very differently. We knew that each of our characters had this internal power that would butt up against the other. So we were very respectful of each other actually, and wouldn’t speak much before the scene and then almost shake each other’s hands afterwards as if saying well done. It was quite formal. I think it’s funny how actors get through these difficult scenes and playing these challenging characters as well. With Jon, it was an absolute mutual respect of each other’s skills. 

Awards Daily: Let’s get to the final sequence with you entering Dot’s house. There is an amazing amount of tension because, even though you have been released from this duty in terms of what you owe to Roy, you have this duty to self to follow through. The only two people in the room who really know what’s going on are you and Dot. There’s this sort of dance that’s going on where she’s talking about a good meal and you’re trying to find a way not to be who you’ve been for so long—you’re internally battling with that. How did that feel to play out? It was almost unbearably tense because Fargo is the kind of show where the person you like the most doesn’t necessarily survive the season. 

Sam Spruell: No, I know. When I read that last scene, I read the script and I just thought oh my god, this is an amazing arc suddenly. I tried to actually stay calm. I remember reading it and telling myself to be blasé about it because I was so wowed by that ending. The writing was so balanced and immaculate and so full of feeling and humanity that I had to kind of hold myself back from getting too excited, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play it, I wouldn’t get my head around it right. That was the last scene we shot of the whole show. The whole show wrapped on that. We’d had six months of shooting this show to get ready for it in a way, and in the end, we shot it pretty quickly. The first bit was tricky when she comes in the house, because I think there was such deep feeling for my character, oddly. I remember it took me a while to not be upset seeing her. It was like seeing an old lover or something like that. It had that depth of emotion.

I think we just played it truthfully. You talk about coming in as a man with a code or, as Noah would say, an itch on the inside of his skull that you can’t scratch or that you need to scratch, there was all that, but then you come across someone who is powerful as well, meaning Dot. So if you think Roy Tillman’s powerful, or Ole Munch’s powerful, then you come across the power of this woman, this tiger, with her family behind her as well, who has also developed her own code. When I came up against that, it was very confusing suddenly for Ole Munch. He’s trying to hold on to who he is, who he’s been for the last 500 years, and he can’t quite do it. That just came out of playing the scene, which is fascinating. I thought I knew how I was going to play it, and I executed that to a certain point, but then when you’re in the scene, then it’s alive, because other people are doing different things, and doing different things to you. It was fascinating to do, but actually, it happened pretty quick, because I think we knew what we were doing by that stage. We knew who our characters were. And I loved it. I loved doing that final scene. 

Awards Daily: The last moment is you taking a bite of that biscuit. It’s remarkable to think of how emotional that last shot is, because it was Ole’s choice of mercy to bite that biscuit. He had made a choice to go in a different direction, probably for the first time in a very, very long time. 

Sam Spruell: Exactly. I think that’s why it’s so powerful. And I think that for people who are in real trouble, who are trapped in a life of sin, to accept compassion and love is one of the most frightening things to do. It makes them truly vulnerable in the context of where they’ve come from and who they are. That’s why that gesture, accepting that offer of compassion and of love, suddenly became much bigger than just taking a bite. It became a huge step, because it really is someone stepping out of one life and potentially moving into something completely different. It was so cleverly written and is such a brilliant ending.