Herald building gets cameo in Fargo season finale
Wednesday’s season finale of the Alberta-shot dark comedy crime series Fargo will take the audience inside the Calgary Herald.
Not that anyone is likely to recognize it.
Scouting locations for the thirdseason finale of the FX series Fargo brought Robert Hilton to the Calgary Herald building above the Deerfoot Trail-Memorial Drive intersection in early April. At the time, the veteran Calgary-based film and TV location manager didn’t have a specific plan for the 35-year-old building, but it was on his radar because he had a hunch it would contain a lot of open space.
“We didn’t know if we would find anything,” says Hilton. “It may have turned out to be a complete failure. But once we got it, we thought, ‘This is good, this is really good. Let’s get the director and the director of photography down here immediately.’ We took photos, but we set up a site visit without showing the photos. We got them there as quick as we could.”
What was all the excitement about? It seems the production was in need of locations for two very different backdrops in the series. One was an Internal Revenue Service office that is the domain of nebbish tax auditor Larue Dollard, a rather minor character (at least so far) played by Hamish Linklater. The other was the customs area of an airport that will reportedly factor into the season’s climax. The Herald building was able to provide both. The former was shot in offices on the Herald’s third floor near a large board room; the latter in a drab, tunnel-like hallway on the ground floor not far from where the presses used to run. (The Herald is now printed at another location.)
“It worked out perfect for us,” Hilton said.
Most of what was shot in the Herald building will air Wednesday in the 10th and final episode of Fargo’s third season, Somebody to Love. Those who watched last Wednesday’s outing will have already caught a glimpse of Dollard’s office, which appeared in the final scene. Hilton, who hadn’t seen the finale at the time of this interview, reckons the Herald will likely get 10 minutes or so of screen time in Wednesday’s episode.
Not bad given that the shoot only lasted two days in late April. Prior to that, there were two days of prep to transform the offices and one day to turn the hallway into parts of an airport. By comparison, the downtown Calgary office building that subs in for the head offices of Ewan McGregor’s “Parking Lot King of Minnesota” Emmit Stussy took two months to transform.
The third season of Fargo focuses on the sibling rivalry between Emmit and his less-successful younger brother Ray (also played by McGregor.) So far this season, the feud has led to a number of gruesome deaths. It has also involved a creepy British businessman named Varga (played by David Thewlis) and an intuitive chief of police named Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon).
This season, Fargo has also filmed in the village of Beiseker, parts of Bragg Creek and Calgary neighbourhoods such as Inglewood, Marda Loop and downtown. The production also used the sound stages at the Calgary Film Centre.
The two-day Herald shoot involved 300 cast and crew, including Thewlis, Coon and Linklater. It was a closed set, off-limits to the prying eyes of journalists and others who work in the building.
This isn’t the first time the Herald building has been used as a location. In 2006, director Rod Lurie used the Herald in a more standard way, having it play the newsroom of the Denver Post in the movie Resurrecting the Champ.
The season finale of Fargo airs Wednesday on FX Canada.