Show Creator Noah Hawley on the Concept of Debt and Decency in FX’s ‘Fargo’: Season 5

I’ll admit it. When I first heard back in 2014  that there was going to be a series based on the Coen Brothers’ classic upper-midwestern comedic noir Fargo, I thought it sounded like a terrible idea. Yet here we are some five seasons later, and not only has the show proved me incredibly wrong, with this most recent run in the anthology, has actually reached new heights. While the performances of Jon Hamm, Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lamorne Morris, Sam Spruell, Joe Keery, and Richa Moorjana (just to name a few) could carry many a series even if it was underbaked, show creator Noah Hawley brought in this latest installment like a perfectly cooked biscuit (being from Kentucky, I know a good biscuit when I encounter one). 

In our conversation, Hawley and I discuss both moral and financial debt, the value of decency, and the weight of sin.

Awards Daily: I have to admit, I never thought a Fargo series was a good idea until I saw it.

Noah Hawley: I think you’re in pretty good company there. (Laughs).

Awards Daily: There was a critical sense that the fourth season, the Kansas City season, which was very different, was not as good as the three previous seasons. Was that reception at all in your mind when you were heading into this season?

Noah Hawley: No, as you said, it was very different. Each season is fundamentally different than the prior one. The first season was a sort of one-to-one correlation with the movie. And then year two was a 1979 crime epic. And year three was a modern Faustian tale. And then with year four, I really wanted to look at the original sins of American capitalism and explore a larger tableau of characters. It was probably at the peak of peak TV in terms of episode length. It was a very ambitious show thematically. And it may not have moved fast enough for some people. I didn’t really need it to. When you’ve already made 30 hours of something and you’re now into the next 10 or 11 hours, I’m okay with it being something else. Obviously, I’m not living and dying by the ratings the way we used to. I think that the 51 hours of Fargo would be much poorer without those 10. But I will say that, as a storyteller and even as a viewer, I myself have begun to really want to get to the point faster. If you notice this season, there’s no episode longer than 44 minutes. We come in on action and it never really slows down. That was also a creative choice and clearly it was the right one for this moment.

Awards Daily: You were referencing the sins of capitalism being part of the theme of season four. This is the season closest to the modern day. Not that the sins of capitalism ever go away, but these are newer sins. What was the impetus for going in that direction? 

Noah Hawley: I would say starting in season two, I really began looking at each story and at Marge’s line: “and here you are and it’s a beautiful day and for what? A little bit of money,” The reason that most people end up committing crimes or are involved in crime is about money. And so each year we started looking at different versions of those stories. This year was about debt in a larger economic sense, but also in a moral sense. The fact that borrowing money somehow makes you morally inferior to the lender is a bizarre idea. The idea that if you pay your student loans back after 25 years, you’re a moral person, and if you don’t, you’re not, is an absurdity. All those ideas of obligation and debt, I wanted to explore here as well. 

Awards Daily: For Jon Hamm, who’s done a lot of good work since Mad Men, obviously, I think this feels like a second signature role. A lot of people only get one, if they get one at all. What did you see about him that would make him so good for this part? 

Noah Hawley: The thing about Jon is that he may be the most American actor of all time. He’s so quintessentially American, not just as a St. Louis guy, a Midwestern guy, but there’s just something about him that represents the best of us in a Gary Cooper, handsome guy, solid Midwestern guy way. But also clearly, in roles like Don Draper and this one, the worst of us as well, the abuses that can come from being a golden boy or the dominance and power that he offered. We had many conversations going into this show and I really wanted him to understand that this is a character actor part. It’s not a leading man part. I think that’s why he embraced it so fully, because he could shake off all the obligations of being accessible or likable, and perversely, he became more likable as a result. It’s always the danger with the Fargo villains. They’re often the most fun characters, certainly the most controversial and saying what’s on their mind in a way that the other more uptight Midwesterners aren’t allowed to say what’s on their minds. And Jon, he’s a big guy. He beefed up for the role. He humored me and put on nipple rings. He just went all the way. He understood that there’s no half-assing this thing. And I think that’s why we’re having the conversation we’re having. 

Awards Daily: And to speak of somebody who is not necessarily quintessentially American, there’s Juno Temple. She is a bit of a chameleon as an actress. For her to hit that accent so perfectly and not come off as cartoonish, there’s a risk there when you go that deep into an accent, especially if people know you from other things. And she’s so slight of frame as well, to be so convincing as someone who could handle herself physically. 

Noah Hawley: We always say it’s a true story, right? It’s never a true story, but we always say it’s a true story, and so believability is really important. The idea that she is going to escape from all of these situations, that when violence is done to her, she will return it with violence. But we’re not making Alias, or Charlie’s Angels or something where you’re supposed to believe that size doesn’t matter at all. And the action has to feel realistic. What I liked most was not action for action’s sake, but the creative problem solving. It was how’s she going to use a kitchen spray and a lighter, wire the windows, or put a ladder in the laundry chute, all the things that she did. She tried to buy a gun, they wouldn’t sell her one, so now she’s got to get creative. I think what really resonated for the audience is that she never gave up. 

Awards Daily: You do have in Fargo, these occasional flights of fancy, if you will: the UFO, the David Lynch-ian Wizard of Oz episode in season four, and then the medieval flashback this year. Where does that thought process come from to take these creative leaps, which are pretty risky, I think. 

Noah Hawley: They are unless your text is the Coen Brothers movies. At which point you say they had a UFO in The Man Who Wasn’t There, and if Anton Chigurh isn’t some immortal American element, I don’t know what is. So for me, I’m just trying to tell the story the best way possible and really explore it thematically and in looking at debt, and there really is no clearer sin of capital than this idea that you could pay a poor man to eat your sins so that he goes to hell and you get to go to heaven. It is one of the most disturbing things a human being has ever done to another human being, but they don’t do it anymore. I had to figure out how to connect it and was it just going to be a sort of cold open like in A Serious Man or was it meant to connect? I thought, since we’re really exploring the idea of trauma and how we get to the other side of it, I thought no, it needs to be something that he did and was done to him. He spent these however many centuries sinning more and wandering around as a man without a soul and feeling like he can never be forgiven. We’re going to get him to a place where he realizes it wasn’t his fault and it’s not too late. 

Awards Daily: No one is surprised when Jennifer Jason Leigh is amazing. That’s been well founded for years. I spoke to Sam before the nominations and I was disappointed that he didn’t get nominated, but I was very pleased to see that Lamorne Morris got nominated because I didn’t think that performance was going to be big enough to be noticed. I thought he’s, in a way, the heart of the season. He is the truest good that there is in this season. 

Noah Hawley: I agree. I agree about Sam as well. But I’ve sat at awards tables with Colin Hanks and with Patrick Wilson and those roles are rarely rewarded. What I said to Colin the first year was what you did is so much harder, to be that strong, silent type, that good guy, and to really hold the screen and make that interesting. Patrick Wilson should be on a poster for the man we want to be, but that doesn’t mean you win an award for it if there’s a flashier part that you’re up against. I’m thrilled that Lamorne was nominated. I’m all for rewarding decency in all of its forms. We’ll see in a few weeks if he’s ultimately rewarded. But the nomination is extremely valuable to the idea that the control that he had over this character, to show you the insults that he was forced to swallow, and that level of control arguably is a lot harder than just indulging every outburst that enters your mind as an actor.

Awards Daily: The last scene. Sometimes when I’m watching something I’m falling in love with, which this season was definitely one of those times, my usual reference is the movie Moonlight, I always say to myself you’ve been so good so far, please stick the landing. In this case the tension that is created while having this conversation, with all this anxiety and danger just under the surface, and then to come to this moral and strange happy ending, it had to be very difficult to write and I would think it would be very difficult to have those actors play that, because there’s a lot unspoken that’s going on in that scene.

Noah Hawley: Let’s just put it this way, it’s not the scene I sat down to write. I knew that she came home with her daughter and I knew that Munch was in the living room waiting and, I assumed, like the audience, that we were in for one last nail-biter, roller coaster ride, maybe action, maybe not, but the danger was super high. Then I just thought that’s his scene, that’s the scene he came to have, but what if she says I’m not going to be in your scene. You’re going to be in my scene and in my scene, it’s dinnertime so wash your hands. Then suddenly it was really fascinating. You also retain all that tension because at any moment he could reclaim the scene, and there are several moments in the living room and in the kitchen where you feel like now she brought it up and now you can see him getting agitated. She always managed to diffuse it and to say you made a choice and you can’t be mad at the risk that you took. You knew you were taking it. And then it did allow me to get into the dining room for the dinner scene and to approach the question of what’s next? How do we get past it? If we have this damage that’s been done on both sides and these bad feelings that have been done on both sides, are we just doomed to attack each other forever? Or can we find forgiveness somehow?

So that was a really magical writing experience, certainly. And then the filming of it, I wasn’t the director of that hour but I was very closely involved with the process and the prep. It was very emotional for all the actors, of course. They filmed literally on the last two days of production, so it was the goodbye scene and the goodbye scene that involves a big emotion. In the editing room those scenes were longer, certainly, and they needed to be as condensed as possible to really hit the feelings but not linger on them because you start to lose the tension if there’s too much back and forth. I knew I was going to use the original Carter Burwell theme, which I always use very sparingly. I think I used it twice this season, but it’s usually once. The moment that starts to play, there’s such a swell of emotion that comes with it that you really can’t abuse it.