Juno Temple, action star? There’s something alchemical going on in the excellent fifth season of Fargo, airing weekly on FX and streaming on Hulu. 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 center—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, England, 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 skepticism 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?’”)