It’s Feb. 25, 2020.
That’s the unique context for the following time capsule of a pre-season chat.
In return, the Italian mobsters surrender one of their sons to Loy.
Elizabeth Morris/FX
That’s the initial setup, and then things get veryFargo-ian complicated from there.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Before season 4, you were giving off the vibe you might be done withFargo.
How close did you come to not doing this season?
NOAH HAWLEY: I feel no pressure when I end one to do another one.
The land grabs mr chill.
So, yeah, no.
I’m sure the timetable is not their favorite.
It’s like 18 months, two years, three years between these things.
Was this always going to be aFargostory?
It’s different enough from the others that I could imagine it starting out as something else.
It was always going to be aFargostory.
The origins of any story become a bit hazy because there’s so much work that comes afterward.
So he tricked his brother into trading and he became a success and his brother became a failure.
I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea.
That feels likeFargoto me.”
This one was a similar kind of thing.
That takes a story about immigration and assimilation and turns it into something much more personal.
Fargois not just a place, it’s a throw in of story where truth is stranger than fiction.
How did Chris Rock come to mind?
I spoke to him the other day andhis casting was a surprise even to him.
For me casting is instinctual on some level.
I thought of the story and I thought of him.
Literally, through his command of language and the stage he built a career for himself.
And then, he’s aged, the way we’ve all aged, and has had some setbacks.
If you watched his last [stand-up comedy] special, you know he’s learned some hard lessons.
He just filled the right space for me.
Luckily it wasn’t a hard conversation.
They got really excited about it.
There wasn’t a script for six more months.
I’ve never done it that way before.
There’s always been a script first.
Obviously there are a lot of stories in this season that aren’t my story.
He had to go in through the “colored” door.
I thought it said a lot about his hubris.
And Chris said to me, “I’ve seen that scene in every historical drama.”
I’ve never seen that.
That ended up being a more powerful statement.
You realize, “Oh, they were discriminated against too.”
The Italians didn’t have it so hot either.
The interesting dynamic is, is that [both families are] underdogs.
Neither of these groups was embraced or accepted by white America at that time.
The practice of has having your enemy raise your son.
But did you find any instances of that in more modern times?
WithFargoit doesn’t have to be true, it just has to seem true.
But so there was something about that that was believable.
If you were trying to keep an uneasy peace, certainly that hostage scenario is definitely a deterrent.
But it also raises very interesting issues when you talk about the morality of it.
Chris Rock is on some level the hero of this story, but he did trade his youngest son.
Part of him has to be okay with the worst-case scenario, right?
In exchange for power or money.
We’re so trained to watch these crime stories and root for the criminal, for The Godfather.
We have to remind [viewers] these people are not your friends.
And how much can both sides push it before those children become endangered?
So it adds that level of randomness to things that brings a sort of truthiness to it.
They engaged the first year, and only on the first script.
and had some fun playing with that scene, which of course I put in the script.
But that was it for them.
And that’s about the extent of it.
I lovedThe Ballad of Buster Scruggs.I thinkI watched it three times.
It was one of those things I didn’t even know I wanted it until I saw it.
It’s entirely theirs.
I assume your answer about doing a fifth season is the same open-ended answer as always?
I currently don’t have anything.
No itch for something generated by this one.
But I also look at how Vince Gilligan madeEl Camino.
Now that we’re in the streaming universe, maybe there’s aFargostory that’s just two hours.
So I feel like that opens up possibilities.
You’re also writing aStar Trekmovie.
How did we get from where we are now to where they are then?
And what happens if that utopian reality is challenged?
There are times of challenge and war when we have to prove our values all over again.
It needs to be saved.
