Emmy-Winning Composer Jeff Russo Returns To Noah Hawley’s ‘Fargo’ World, Emmy Contention

Jeff Russo is no stranger to Noah Hawley and the world of FX’s Fargo.

The critically acclaimed, 15-time Emmy nominated masterpiece of Year 5 brought Russo back into the fold and to another Emmy nomination after winning for 2017’s Year 3. Even though Russo’s shorthand with Hawley and the process he uses to approach the material doesn’t change from season to season, the characters, their environments, and their stories dramatically influence Russo’s approach to the material.

Case in point, an early piece written for Juno Temple’s Dot / Nadine eventually transitioned into a theme for Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Lorraine. Whether intended or it, that made a great deal of sense thematically as the two characters become thematically similar by the end of the series.

That thematic connectivity often serendipitously works itself out by the end of the season.

“I think that moments and themes, character themes, sort of do go hand in hand. It’s like they’re all based in the thematic material. I really do make a concerted effort to tie everything together,” Russo explained. “It just meant pulling the character themes and threading them into the score for each of those moments. That’s a little bit of a complicated thing where I’m not just taking a piece of music that I wrote and re-articulating it. I’m actually trying to figure out how to musically create something that might be a little different than the backdrop, but still have some of that thematic material in it.”

Sometimes, thematic content allows artists to explore fun and unique ways to express characters. Case in point, Russo’s Emmy-nominated episode, “Blanket,” provides for a much-discussed moment of musical thematic representation for Jon Hamm’s Sheriff Roy Tillman. As he leaves a contentious debate for his upcoming re-election bid, he stomps through his farm, seething with anger and looking to take it out on captive Dot / Nadine.

As the camera tracks Hamm’s menacing movements, Russo’s orchestral take on Brittney Spears’s “Toxic” (vocals provided by Lisa Hannigan) eerily dominates the scene. It’s a perfect way to reinforce Tillman’s toxic and often deadly relationship to women.

“It was a way that we were able to really identify the blackness, the darkness in John’s character as he’s making that walk. Noah called me and he was like that walk is going to be about two minutes long. It’s just going to be him walking and whatever we come up with ‘Toxic,’ Russo shared. “We could have very easily scored it with dark score, but it might have been too on the nose knowing where he was going, where he was going to end up and how angry he was at that moment. It needed to be something a little bit that lifted it slightly, but still really underscored how dark that really was. I think that that song and that version of it really did accomplish that.”

For more on my conversation with 2024 Emmy nominee Jeff Russo including his choice of instrumentation and his usage of a drum line throughout the series, click the link below!

Jeff Russo (Fargo)

Fargo streams in its entirety on FX on Hulu.