He’s the star of big-spectacle The Hobbit, Sherlock and Fargo. How’s he done it?
The Office’s everyman has become a beloved global star with an army of fans thanks to leading roles in Sherlock and The Hobbit. Now he’s got murder in mind with TV’S adaptation of Fargo. Martin Freeman talks schmucks, sleuths and Bilbo’s last stand...
Ikinda thought, ‘Do we need that?’, and then I read the first episode and thought, ‘Yeah, I need that, because it’s a really good script, and if the rest of them are that strong, I want in on it’.” Martin Freeman’s thoughts on the 10-part TV series Fargo were likely shared by many around the world. Turning the Coen brothers’ beloved, double Oscar-winning 1996 movie into a miniseries was a risk, sure to attract accusations of creative bankruptcy and coughs of “cash-in”. But here’s the thing: FX Productions’ flagship show, currently screening Sunday nights on Channel 4 in what industry insiders refer to as the ‘ Homeland slot’, is not a straight remake; it instead offers new characters and curveball plot lines. In fact, it earns its Fargo title not through slavish imitation but its freezing Minnesota setting (though it was filmed in Calgary, Canada), its specific dialect (“Ja, you betcha”) and recognisable blend of bleakness, pathos and midnight-black humour.
“I loved the tone of it, which is the common ground between the film and this, otherwise it needn’t be Fargo at all,” says Freeman, sprawled out on a sofa at the Covent Garden Hotel in a striped t-shirt and trainers. The creases of his face communicate a bemused befuddlement common to so many of his characters, but nothing could be further from the truth. Freeman has a sharp mind and engaged attitude, his hands gesticulating tirelessly and his crumpled visage rearranging itself into one demonstrative expression after the next. “I don’t think I’d have done it if it was a remake because I don’t want to do something that is directly comparable to somebody else’s very good performance,” he explains. “I didn’t think of William H. Macy ever. It’s not the
same character. There are parallels, but frankly there are parallels in every single part ever written. I just played Lester.”
Freeman is Lester Nygaard, a salesman and a schmuck. Hen-pecked by his wife, rubbish at his job and still bullied by the guy who tormented him in high school, this bumbling, emasculated, good-hearted nobody can only watch agog as his life takes a sharp left turn after a chance meeting with Lorne Malvo (a mesmerising and malevolent Billy Bob Thornton). In a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train, Malvo acts upon Lester’s throwaway comment about how he wishes retribution on his oppressor, and events spiral viciously out of control from there.
“And that’s only by the end of the first episode!” he laughs, hands flapping excitedly. “Lester’s darkness incrementally grows and spreads out. By episodes five and six, you’re reading them and going, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe…’”
As played by Freeman, Lester retains a strong likeability even when doing the nastiest of things. It’s a warmth that the 42-year-old actor brings to all of his characters, though he struggles to say if he consciously infuses them with it or if it just flows, naturally, from him.
“I guess…” he begins, then halts and screws up his face. “Well, I run the risk of sounding big-headed if I say I’m just naturally likeable! I don’t know. I don’t try to be likeable. But what I do with every character is not judge them, and I do try to give them their humanity. I want to play people, not baddies or goodies. If you’re playing Hitler, you have to play him as a likeable, relatable person. He didn’t get up in the morning and think, ‘Ooh, I’m going to be a right cunt today.’ The scary thing is that Hitler was a person, with feelings and love and loss.”
Freeman’s ethos, safe to say, is shared by Thornton, an actor who’s no stranger to playing rednecks and psychos but who always digs deep to find layers. Malvo, though terrifying, has a code of conduct and charisma to burn, and the scenes between Thornton and Freeman are both electrifying and oddly touching.
“I’d met Billy once before we started filming, just to say hello, and the next thing I knew we were on set doing a line reading together,” says Freeman, wincing as he recalls the minus-20 temperatures. “It immediately worked. We had chemistry, luckily.” But wasn’t it hard to maintain eye contact and not let his gaze wander northwards to Thornton’s lopsided basin haircut, a cross between Lloyd Christmas in and Anton Chigurh in
“I was so relieved when I found out that was a character choice!” he grins. “Because I didn’t know Billy and Hollywood’s a strange place. I thought, ‘Maybe that’s just him and we’re not supposed to comment on it’. It unsettling, but that was more about acting opposite Billy’s presence which is so, well, present.”
All this talk of chemistry between two leads in a TV show naturally brings Sherlock and Watson to mind in the BBC’s modern-day take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories. Freeman had already tasted telly immortality playing put-upon Tim Canterbury opposite Ricky Gervais’ David Brent in The Office (2001-2003), but he had to read for the part of Watson as the showrunners sought the right fit for Benedict Cumberbatch as the iconic supersleuth.
“Your clues are in the script; he wasn’t written like Nigel Bruce [ who played Watson as an affable bumbler in the 1939-’46 series of films, opposite Basil Rathbone’s Holmes],” Freeman says. Indeed, as reimagined by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, Watson is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, so Freeman immediately envisaged him as someone who is “strong and silent and [ has] nothing unnecessary about him – no fat, no extras, no vocal flourishes, no physical flourishes. He’s a man’s man. He has weight because of his experience in life and death.”
As for that first reading with “Ben”, he recalls the chemistry as being instant and instinctive. “We sat down in a room to read a couple of scenes together, and it was immediate. Rhythms, the way we listened to each other… Chemistry either happens or it doesn’t.” The bond was also there behind the camera. “You know, I’m not a big ‘hanger out’ with co-stars, just because we have our own shit to do, but we do get on,” he shrugs. “But the really important bit is that we get on onscreen, because people aren’t paying their license fees to know that me and Ben are going on holiday together.”
With three series of Sherlock totalling nine episodes behind them – series three, which aired in January this year, was the UK’s most watched drama series since 2001 – Freeman confesses to being surprised by the extent of the fans’ passion and the critics’ acclaim. But he knew it was special from the off.
“I knew I loved it and I did think it was unlike any telly I’d made – or that this country had made, to be honest,” he says. “I like the show very much. I’m extremely proud of it, and I love watching it when it’s on.” He smiles sheepishly. “Not that I’m constantly watching it, but when the series comes on I look forward to it. I think and I hope it’s something we’ll return to whenever we’re able. It would have to be the same team, definitely. I’ve actually heard a very, very good idea from Mark and Steven, a very, very good idea that I love, and I’m hoping at some point it’ll come to fruition. We’re just not sure when.”
Next up for the actor is a spot of Shakespeare in London’s West End, playing the title role in
Richard III (interestingly, Cumberbatch will also be playing the murderous monarch in a BBC2 production). It’s a part that will test his
aforementioned desire to always find the humanity, never judge. “He’s pretty much a shit from the off but that doesn’t mean you have to be one note,” he says. “It can’t be, ‘He was a baddie at the beginning and a baddie at the end, and in the middle he was also a baddie’.”
Still, despite his upcoming stint on stage and the current stasis of Sherlock, there will not be a Martin Freeman-shaped hole on our screens in the imminent future. For out in December, of course, is the final part of The Hobbit, with Freeman again shouldering the immense action and spectacle as diminutive hero Bilbo Baggins. At the time of writing, there is speculation that the third installment could change its title from
There And Back Again to Into The Fire, with the new moniker registered by parent company New Line. But whatever the title, Freeman’s confident the film will deliver, and he’s here to assure any fans worrying that Tolkien’s slim volume won’t spread over a third movie.
“We obviously all signed up for two films [ Freeman was officially announced as Bilbo in October 2010], but I tend to trust Pete’s decision, because he’s the man in charge and he’s done it before and he knows the world better than anybody does,” he says. “We still have the Battle of the Five Armies, the death of Smaug…” He pauses, laughs. “Yes, Smaug gets it! That’s not giving too much away – I’m glad it’s an old book!”
As to the details, he can’t say too much. And we’re not even talking confidentiality agreements here, just pragmatics. “You have to understand,” he explains, “I know very little about the Battle of Five Armies because there weren’t really 53,000 people doing it, and it’s no secret that a lot of this stuff is fantastic use of CGI. I mean, Bilbo has had his journey, literally, all through the battle bit, and through the seeing off of Smaug, but lots of stuff goes on that I, as Martin, have no idea of. But I do know it’ll be good because Pete’s one of the best choreographers of war I’ve ever seen. What I love about him is there’s always human cost. It’s not just gung-ho slicing of swords; he always cuts to someone terrified.”
Though he’d already appeared in well-travelled movies like Love Actually, The
Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and, in roles of varying sizes, all three parts of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy, playing Bilbo has presented Freeman to a lot of people not previously familiar with his work. An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation Of Smaug took a combined total of almost $2bn worldwide, so it’s little surprise that he’s now receiving many more scripts, and “a different level of scripts” – a snowball that can only get bigger as Fargo’s zero-hero Lester beams into living rooms all across Middle America. Just don’t expect him to pop-up in Ant-Man…
“Edgar’s an extremely talented director, especially visually, and he’s also a very funny writer, a gag person,” he says. “We do occasionally speak, but I’ve not heard from him about Ant-Man! I don’t think he’s got me in any plans.” Freeman looks, naturally, bemused and befuddled. “I’m not offended by it!” TF Fargo is currently showing on Channel 4. The Hobbit:
There And Back Again opens on 12 December.