Juno Temple, action star? There’s something alchemical going on in the excellent fifth season of Fargo. Here is a veteran anthology series calmly serving up its best season yet and featuring an actor, Temple, whom you’ve certainly seen before but feel as though you’re noticing for the first time. The new Fargo (a standalone story, as it is every season) is suspenseful and expertly made, and Temple is a revelation in it: a Minnesota housewife with the soul of a Terminator. It’s easily the best performance on television right now.
“I’m not sure if I can take credit for why it’s working so well,” demurs Temple when I reach her over Zoom in London to talk about the season. Like the Fargos before, it exists in a Minnesota-North Dakota universe where folksy manners and brutality exist side by side. Temple pays admiring tribute to the rest of the cast, including Jon Hamm, who appears as a highly retrograde sheriff, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays Temple’s mother-in-law, a far-right Midwestern plutocrat with abundant hauteur and militia ties.
But the show would not work without Temple’s Dot Lyon at its centre – Dot, who seems to be the epitome of harmless domesticity but is in flight from some as-yet-unrevealed trauma (she was married to Hamm’s character, Roy Tillman); knows her way around an assault rifle; and can lay booby traps involving sledgehammers and exposed electrical wire and wield a hockey skate like a lethal weapon. “I’m not sure characters like Dot Lyon come along very often,” says Temple. “She’s such an extraordinary little creature.”
The mix is that distinctly Fargo blend of female mildness and spine that the Coen brothers made indelible with Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson in their classic film nearly 30 years ago. Stepping into that lineage (there have been standout performances by actors such as Kirsten Dunst and Carrie Coon in recent seasons) meant getting the accent right. In real life, Temple, 34, speaks like the English girl she is; she was raised in Somerset and attended Bedales School around about the same time as Cara and Poppy Delevingne and Lily Allen. And in Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso, in which Temple plays the PR consultant Keeley Jones, she sank herself deep in a Love Island-esque Essex vocal register. “The Fargo accent I never thought I would wrap my head around,” she says. She describes trying to master it with a dialect coach and overcoming scepticism from her two younger brothers along the way. (“I tested it out on them, and they were just quiet for a beat and then looked at me and said, ‘How long have you got until you actually start shooting?’”)
She got there – her Minnesota voice is prim and correct – but the performance is more uncanny than that. Her face can sparkle with politesse and go flat with menace. The first hour of the show, which was written and directed by Noah Hawley (Hawley is the showrunner and executive producer of the series; he wrote this fifth season and directed the first two episodes), is anchored by a riveting action sequence in which Temple has to fight for her life at an isolated gas station. With the stature of a coxswain at five foot two, Temple is an unlikely counterweight to two armed thugs.
“I haven’t done a lot of action before,” she admits. But she was determined to do all but the most dangerous stunts. “There was a beat where I had to run, and our fabulous camera operator, Mitch, who has worked on a bunch of Spielberg movies, told me I ran faster than Tom Cruise! I mean, what the fuck, right?” (Casting directors, take note.) She continues, “I definitely don’t need to set fire to anyone ever again” – referring to one sequence in which she wields a homemade flamethrower. “That was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever had to do.”
As the season reaches its halfway point, much of the backstory for Dot and why she’s capable of such feats is not yet clear. “It’s about being a survivalist,” Temple hints. “You hear these crazy stories of people that go into the woods and they encounter a grizzly bear and somehow they make themselves so big and they make themselves so loud that they make the grizzly bear run away. But if you then ask them, ‘What did you do?’ I’m not sure they could tell you. And I think that’s kind of what I thought about her. She’s not doing these things to then be able to retell a story. She’s doing those things to fucking survive.”
Temple, who is currently shooting Venom 3, knows her character’s secrets but is watching them unfold with everyone else – and taking delight in the way the season is catching on and shaking up expectations of what she can do. “I’ve definitely had some of my close friends reach out and say, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know that person.’” She laughs, grateful. “It was an amazing experience. I learned a lot, and I gave a lot.”