Fargo Year 5 Creator and Cast on Episode 1’s Deliberate Coen Brothers Homage
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The post Fargo Year 5 Creator and Cast on Episode 1’s Deliberate Coen Brothers Homage appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Fargo, Season 5 Episode 1, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”]
Fargo the series has always dwelled in the same universe as the Coen brothers film which inspired it. But in Year 5, creator Noah Hawley paid tribute to one of the original movie’s most iconic moments — with a twist. “It’s such an homage to the film,” star Juno Temple tells Consequence. “And I was thrilled to be a part of that.”
The tragedies of the 1996 film include the haunting kidnapping of housewife Jean Lundegaard (Kristin Rudrüd), who’s attacked in her home by masked men. What’s so chilling about the sequence, as executed, is the startling mundanity of it: One minute, she’s just sitting on the couch with her knitting, and the next she’s spotted a stranger on her porch, through the glass doors, and the peril is all too real.
In the season premiere of Fargo, meanwhile, housewife Dot Lyon (Temple) is experiencing a similar quiet day when she, too, spots men outside her door, who have come to take her away. However, unlike Jean Lundegaard, Dot has a complicated backstory which means that in some way, she’s been preparing for something like this for a while — and she’s ready to fight back, knitting needles in hand. It’s a deliberate acknowledgment to what came before, and speaking with Consequence, Hawley says that taking on the sequence was the culmination of, in his words, “10 years of riffing on the movie Fargo.”
“It’s an uncanny feeling,” he continues. “We didn’t copy the house exactly, but those elements of where the sofa was and the TV and the porch on the side, and the windows and the stairs — all of that in order, so that we could recreate some of those shots and that feeling.”
The results resonated with Temple, who says that “there were moments where you’d walk into the space and be like, ‘Oh my God, the kitchen’s like the same. What’s happening? Oh my God.’ Which was exciting.”
Fargo (FX)
Hawley compares mimicking the Lundegaard family home with another FX project he’s currently working on, a series inspired by the Alien films: “I had a similar feeling, standing on a spaceship that feels very much like the Nostromo — there’s a moment where you’re like, ‘I’m in the movie.’ It raises that hair on the back of your neck in the best way, to feel space and time collapse between what I’m doing in 2022 and what they did in ’96.”
Plus, Hawley notes that while the show has nodded back to the movie from time to time, this is the most direct homage to date. “It took me five years [seasons, in Fargo speak] to get there. We didn’t ride their coattails — we really established what Fargo could be on TV. No one’s like, ‘Oh, he’s just copying the movie.’ It’s a different exercise. I think for audiences to finally reach this moment where the show is a literal echo of the film, but also a game of telephone with the film, where something different happened — I think that that’s fun for the audience.”
Year 5 of Fargo isn’t just a riff on what came before, though, as it targets a very specific time and place in recent history: the fall of 2019, in Minnesota and North Dakota. Doing something relatively contemporary was something Hawley wanted to do early on, as well as drawing on the definition of “Minnesota nice”: “The opening starts with the definition of ‘Minnesota nice,’ and then goes directly to a school board brawl — we’re post-Minnesota nice,” Hawley laughs.
For him, the setting was an opportunity to explore “what it means, for a region that has its identity so rooted in this sort of decent passive aggression, when it turns into aggressive aggression. The people who still think that the social contract matters, you know, how do they prevail?”
While the aim was for something relatively contemporary, 2019 made sense to Hawley because it’s “as current as I could get without having to deal with COVID. And on some level, I felt like that year represented so much — everything from 2016 to 2021 — and all those issues are still very relevant and they still feel like today. So I think 2019 was a good way of saying, you know, it’s what we’re still grappling with.”
In addition, he adds, “I always think that in order to say this is a true story” — as every season of Fargo declares itself to be — “enough time has to have passed so that the first book could be written.”
Central to the political element of the story is Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lorraine Lyon, Dot’s mother-in-law and a powerful businesswoman. Leigh tells Consequence that playing such a right-wing figure proved “fascinating,” because of scenes like Lorraine and her family all holding heavy artillery while posing for a Christmas card. In real life, cards like this happen more often than you might think these days, but it still surprised her. “When I read that, I didn’t know that that was an actual photo. You just don’t think that that could happen. Only in America,” she says.
This is, of course, just the beginning of the season, with more twists yet to come. “As per usual with Fargo, whichever piece of Fargo we’re talking about, it never ceases to surprise you,” Temple says.
“Wherever you think you’re going, you’re not going there,” Leigh adds.
New episodes of Fargo premiere 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX, and stream the next day on Hulu.
Fargo Year 5 Creator and Cast on Episode 1’s Deliberate Coen Brothers Homage
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