MOB MOB
NEW DRAMA Fargo Sunday, C4 HD, 10pm
HE’S BEST KNOWN for playing James Bond’s quartermaster Q, politician Jeremy Thorpe’s timid lover Norman Scott and as the voice of everybody’s favourite bear, Paddington. But Ben Whishaw is showing an altogether darker side in his role as a mobster in the latest series of Fargo.
The acclaimed anthology, inspired by the 1996 Coen brothers film of the same name, has already showcased British talents such as Martin Freeman, Ewan Mcgregor and David Thewlis.
As the show returns for a fourth run set in 1950s Kansas City, Whishaw lines up in a cast with Chris Rock and Jessie Buckley.
Fargo’s latest self-contained story centres on the tensions between a crime syndicate made up of black migrants from the Southern states, led by Loy Cannon (Rock), and the Kansas City Sardinian Mafia, led by Don Donatello Fadda and hot-headed son Josto (Jason Schwartzman).
To keep the peace, Loy agrees to adhere to send his youngest son, Satchel, to work for the Faddas, and in return takes in his opposite number’s youngest son, Zero.
Whishaw plays an Irishamerican member of the Fadda family called Rabbi, who assures Loy that his son is in safe hands. But when an accident befalls Don Donatello, and he is admitted to the hospital where nurse Oraetta
(Buckley) works, the uneasy truce between the gangs comes under threat.
INTRIGUING CHARACTER
Whishaw, 40, says that playing someone caught in the crossfire between powerful factions was an appealing prospect.
‘Rabbi is an Irish immigrant, but he was raised partly by a Jewish family and then adopted finally by an Italian family,’ he explains. ‘So really, he fits in nowhere and belongs nowhere. He has seen and
BEN WHISHAW AND CHRIS ROCK are rival gangsters in the latest series of drama anthology Fargo
suffered and committed great violence. But he is one of the very few characters in the show who is capable of acting humanely.’
With French, German and Russian ancestors on his father’s side of the family, Whishaw says Rabbi’s complex backstory struck a chord.
‘My grandad was an immigrant and he lived most of his life in the south of England after the war, with the word “alien” on his paperwork,’ he reveals. ‘I thought about him a lot during the making of the show.’