Season 3 of Fargo driven by sibling rivalry
Season 3 of Calgary-shot Fargo is still driven by sibling rivalry — and hints at politics, writes Eric Volmers
Ewan McGregor found an unlikely inspiration when playing the dapper Emmit Stussy in Season 3 of Fargo.
Early on in episode 1, which airs on FX Canada on April 19, the “parking lot king of Minnesota” is holding court over a cocktail party at his mansion. He’s impeccably coiffed, sporting a white-jacketed tuxedo, flanked by his right-hand man and lawyer Sy Feltz (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) and telling an unlikely story about his early courtship of wife, Stella.
“I feel sometimes there’s moments that I’m channelling a bit of Trump here and there with Emmit,” says McGregor. “His thin skin and the way he reacts when the sh-t goes down; he doesn’t react very well. Which is why he’s got Sy, his right-hand man. He’s sort of his (Steve) Bannon. He’s better at dealing with stuff.”
The Scottish actor is chatting with journalists at the Calgary Film Centre, where Fargo’s third season is being shot among other spots in Alberta. The most intriguing twist this year is that McGregor is playing two roles, Emmit and Ray Stussy. On this particular morning he is not dressed as the well-heeled Emmit, but as younger and less-successful brother Ray, a mustachioed parole officer whose balding mullet and bulging pot belly requires a 90-minute makeover and extra padding for the actor.
A long-standing tension between the Stussys over an inherited stamp collection sets off this year’s descent into violence and mayhem in the frozen Midwest. While still teenagers, Emmit convinced Ray to swap inheritances left to them by their father. So Ray agreed to take dad’s boss corvette, while Emmit got the valuable stamp collection that helped him build his empire. Emmit’s life flourishes and Ray’s stalls, although his girlfriend Nikki Swango (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a beautiful and ambitiously scheming parolee, is one of the few bright spots in his life.
But McGregor’s reference to Emmit’s shared characteristics with America’s truth-challenged commander in chief is telling. Fans of creator Noah Hawley’s televised take on the Coen brothers classic 1996 dark comedy know he is not the sort of writer who would make blatant, on-the-nose allusions to America’s current political situation. But there may be an added resonance when viewed through the lens of the Trump era.
“There’s some very beautiful work by Noah where he’s slipped in here and there little comments about what’s going on politically at the moment,” McGregor says. “Not heavy-handedly. You wouldn’t necessarily notice. But there is that idea about what a fact is; the alternative-fact kind of idea.”
Long before those terms were being bandied about, Hawley was interested in exploring the elastic nature of truth as one of his major themes this season. The original Coen brothers’ 1996 film and every episode of Fargo so far has been prefaced with text indicating that we are about to see a “true story.”
“Which is a lie, of course,” says Hawley. “It’s not a true story. The movie wasn’t a true story, it was all made up. And just that phrase ‘true story’ is really interesting to me. A story is a story and the truth is the truth, I suppose. Or at least it used to be. So I started writing to that end without really knowing that it was going to end up being such a zeitgeist topic. Obviously, once I realized that there was nothing I could do but continue to explore both in the events that happen in the show and the way people talk about them. Obviously, it’s a timely conversation to have.”
As with the first two seasons, this year’s story does not include characters from the original film and if there’s direct overlap in characters or situations between the third season and the first two they have yet to be revealed. But as with past setting — 2006 for Season 1, 1979 for Season 2 — this year’s time period of 2010 was specifically chosen to highlight larger themes coursing beneath Season 3’s bloody tale of bad luck, sibling rivalry and murder.
Hawley said he was interested in exploring selfie culture, which was just emerging in 2010. It was also important that the action take place after the economic collapse of 2008, which helps Hawley explore questions of how far some will go for financial gain. This nicely dovetails into a broader hallmark of the Fargo universe, which is exploring how greed and ambition can alter a seemingly normal person’s moral compass.
There’s more, of course. There’s plenty of snow and ill-tempered weather and plenty of stoic midwesterners with Minnesota-nice accents to become bewildered by the evil that men and women are capable of.
The Stussy feud accidentally leads to murder, which brings Eden Valley, Minn. police chief Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon) onto the scene. The season also manages to wrap in competitive bridge, financial meltdowns, blackmail, dumb thieves and a shadowy British criminal with bad teeth and an ugly suit named V.M. Varga (played by David Thewlis.)
Varga seems to be this season’s representation of pure malevolence, a space occupied by Billy Bob Thornton’s manipulative hit man Lorne Malvo in Season 1 and Bokeem Woodbine’s talkative henchman Mike Milligan, among others, in Season 2.
“I’m thoroughly horrible,” Thewlis confirms. “I’ve got no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Really, he’s an out-and-out evil piece of sh-t.”
Thewlis is one of the more obvious connections to Coen brothers films this year, having starred in 1998’s The Big Lebowski. Stuhlbarg, meanwhile, had the lead in the Coens’ Oscar-nominated 2009 dark comedy A Serious Man. There will be obvious and not-so-obvious shout-outs to both, and to other Coen movies, peppered throughout the action in Season 3.
But, as always, the original Fargo looms large over the series.
When the first promos were released to social media featuring Coon’s Gloria Burgle driving her police car on a snow-covered rural road, commentators excitedly suggested she was playing this year’s Marge Gunderson, the pregnant police chief protagonist of the 1996 original that won Frances McDormand an Oscar. She isn’t.
Coon, who is an avid fan of the actress and original film, says the prospect of being compared to McDormand was terrifying. But other than the gender, Minnesota-nice accent and occupation, the two characters don’t really have all that much in common anyway.
“I very purposely didn’t watch the film again when I got this job because I didn’t want to have her in my mind, because I respect her so much,” Coon says. “And if you set out to do an impersonation of somebody, which is the invitation of something like Fargo, you’re going to fail. Gloria has to be entirely mine.”
Besides, Hawley’s conjuring of that distinct Coen brothers’ tone is never that obvious. While everything about the series — from the set design, to the character names, to the costumes and dialogue — is meticulously groomed to capture this elusive spirit, explaining how it’s done is no easy task.
“His writing is so ... Fargo,” says McGregor. “It’s not just the accent. It’s the rhythm of the speech, it’s the black humour, the violence. It’s interesting. I don’t know exactly what it is. But whatever it is he does, Noah does understand what makes something Fargo-y.”