There's no "Fargo" without at least one doggedly earnest detective. In Season 5 of Noah Hawley's anthology series, Lamorne Morris ("New Girl") and Richa Moorjani ("Never Have I Ever") step into those perfectly-laced shoes as Witt Farr and Indira Olmstead, a couple of Midwestern deputies at the center of a twisty kidnapping case. Wide Open Country sat down with both stars to talk about their good-guy roles, what's at stake this season and why Hawley is a director unlike any other.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
"She's a totally fresh new interpretation of this character," Moorjani says of Indira Olmstead, a Minnesota deputy with all the salt-of-the-earth goodness of Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson — but with one key difference:
"One of the first questions I asked Noah was, 'What makes Indira different from Molly Solverson or Margie and the other female cops we've seen?' I hadn't read all the scripts yet. He told me, 'She's the first woman of color to play this type of character in "Fargo".' Because of that, there's just an understanding and an awareness—maybe a lack of naïveté—that comes with her background and upbringing that the other characters didn't have."
It's an important point in a season set amidst the escalating political tensions of 2019. In the central kidnapping plot, you have Jon Hamm's "Constitutional" Sheriff Roy Tillman, whose religious fundamentalism is comically misogynistic in the first two episodes. In her effort to elude him, Juno Temple's Dot constructs elaborate alternative facts that leave Deputies Olmstead and Farr spinning. In "Fargo" Season 5, the truth is not necessarily the truth and, as Roy Tillman says, what's legal isn't always what's right.
That ideological conflict could turn into a "large-scale threat," teases Morris. (In Episode 3, we saw a local militia preparing to stage another "1776.") "For someone like [Witt], who has a military background, is extremely dogged and earnest and truthful... He will get to the bottom of things."
Michelle Faye/FX
Both Morris and Moorjani have high praise for writer-creator Noah Hawley, who also directed the first two bang-up episodes of Season 5. They describe the Emmy winner as a "genius," a "masterful storyteller" and a uniquely soft-spoken director.
"It was intimidating to start, I'll say, because [Noah Hawley is] a man of few words," says Morris. "But after a conversation with him, he said, 'If you're doing something wrong, I'll let you know. If you don't hear anything from me, that means you're right in the pocket.'"
Moorjani recalls a similar exchange. "Working with him as a director is very unlike working with anybody else. I just had to trust that he knew exactly what he wanted, because he, unlike some other directors, doesn't really say much, which was actually kind of frustrating to some of us. We were like, 'Did he like it? Were we horrible? Did we give him what he wanted?' That made me kind of insecure. But when he finished directing our block, I expressed that to him and he said, 'If there was anything I didn't like, I would have told you.' That assuaged all my insecurities."
Hawley is an auteur and a great adapter of story. "Fargo" the series is the rare work of adaptation that truly adds to its source material. His next project is an "Alien" TV series at FX starring Timothy Olyphant. It's easy to think of Hawley as a screenwriter first and foremost, but Morris says that, on set, he's more akin to a conductor.
"The beautiful part about watching him work is it's almost like an orchestra for him. I'm watching him deal with actors, but he's also truly directing the camera and the way the camera is moving, emotionally. The way the lighting is set, emotionally. A masterful storyteller not just on the page. He's also putting it together for the audience to really feel like they're there."
Like most of "Fargo," there is the snowy desolation of North Dakota and Minnesota. It's beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The series was filmed in Calgary in the dead of winter, which Morris calls perhaps "the most brutal" shoot he's ever been on.
"We cuddled up often," he jokes. "It's hard to act when your bones are shivering and you can't open your mouth. When you gotta walk backwards because of the wind."
It's a wasteland of sorts where perfectly nice people find out exactly what they're capable of when evil rears its ugly head — in the form of a gladiatorial school board meeting or, you know, a nihilistic sin-eater. But that's what the doggedly earnest detectives are for, right?
New episodes of "Fargo" premiere Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on FX and stream the following day on Hulu.
