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There’s a moment in the first episode of Fargo’s fifth season — during a high-intensity shootout at a rural gas station — where Juno Temple’s housewife character Dot locks eyes with Lamorne Morris’s state trooper Witt and forges a connection that will last for the rest of both of their lives. As Morris tells it, that’s a connection that happened in real life, too.
“I’m used to doing a lot of broader comedies,” says Morris, who starred in the beloved Fox sitcom New Girl. With Temple on the set of Fargo, he was struck by “the amount of eye contact that people make to check in, to make sure we’re still here — even though they called cut, to make sure that we’re still connected. For me, it was nothing but a learning experience.”
On Wednesday, Aug. 7, Temple, Morris and Fargo creator Noah Hawley joined me for the first-ever live edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast, discussing their Emmy-nominated work together on Fargo. When Dot and Witt meet in that gas station, she’s just escaped her captors, an inciting incident that Hawley lifted directly from the 1996 film by Joel and Ethan Coen — and something he didn’t feel prepared to do until he had a few seasons of his own Fargo behind him.
“I felt like after the first four installments, I was ready to engage with the movie,” Hawley said during our conversation at the London hotel in West Hollywood. “I’d earned the right to have a dialogue with the movie.”
That starts from the opening moments of the season — a definition of the term “Minnesota Nice,” which is currently having a bit of a moment — and continues to riff on other Coen Brothers films, including one final standoff directly inspired by No Country for Old Men.
Both Temple and Morris’ characters share DNA with the original Fargo heroine Marge Gunderson. Like Marge, Temple’s Dot is devoted to her sweet husband and their quiet life together, but reveals a steel spine, particularly when her ex-husband (Jon Hamm, also an Emmy nominee) tries to disrupt the life she’s worked to build. “Dot has this duality of being survivalist and a wildcat that can get herself out of situations,” Temple explains. “But at the same time, she’s a mother and a nurturer, truly.”
She points to the gas station scene — where Dot helps Witt tend to his injuries before fending off bad guys with a truly inventive use of ice bags — as a key moment to put that duality on display. “Peppering in the nurturer side of her when she is being more feral, or vice versa, was something we had a lot of fun with, and I think makes her a really, really interesting character to watch.”
Morris, meanwhile, wears the fuzzy police hat that Frances McDormand made iconic in the 1996 Fargo. As Witt, he carries on the Marge Gunderson tradition of a decent, competent officer of the law, even in the face of evil that nothing could have prepared him for. In that gas station scene, Morris says, Witt is “shocked and surprised that she is also resourceful, even more so than he is.”
That’s just the beginning of what we discussed about Fargo season five, getting into everything from the northern lights Temple got to see on set to Morris’ research with a former Navy SEAL.
Hear it all on this special live episode of Prestige Junkie — and if you haven’t already, now’s the time to subscribe to the podcast.
