The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (22 page)

He would have preferred to have spent time in the Mid-West pre-filming just to hang out in bars and coffee shops and speak to people to get a general gist of their way of life. Unfortunately, time did not permit him the opportunity. What Freeman did
not want to do with the character was turn him into a caricature or a comedy figure of fun. Nor did he want to mock the Mid-Western way of life.

‘I listened to a lot of Minnesotans, put it that way,’ he said to
Nerd Repository
’s Kyle Wilson. ‘That’s why I didn’t really go back and watch the initial film with
Fargo
, love it as I do, because I wanted to, for my research accent-wise, I wanted it to be actual Minnesotans and not actors playing Minnesotans. Any more than I would expect an actor who wants to play a Minnesotan to study me. They shouldn’t study me, they should study a Minnesotan.’

Freeman was hoping that playing such a role would dispel the notion that he is only able to play nice men. By accepting the part, he was challenging people’s perceptions of him as well as challenging himself and his own body of work.

‘I’m under no illusion about what I appear like,’ he told
The Observer
’s Andrew Anthony. ‘I just know there’s more to me than that as a person, and there’s certainly more to me than that as an actor. That’s where the frustration comes. My plan was always to be an actor. It wasn’t to be a nice guy. I became famous in Britain playing a nice decent guy and that casts a long shadow.’

Lester Nygaard does not start off as a bad guy; he’s a normal, very average middle-of-the-road man whose bad-guy persona develops as the story progresses, much like
Breaking Bad
’s Walter White.

‘When I read the script I thought, ooh, that’s quite Walter White-ish. But where Lester Nygaard starts off with you sympathising with him, and everything he does is
understandable, Richard just starts off going: I am a cunt, and here’s why I’m a cunt…,’ Freeman said to the
Daily Telegraph
’s Craig McLean. ‘He’s revelling in it. Whereas Lester would never consider himself a tosser. Like most people don’t.’

The frustration and the pent-up anger that is in Lester Nygaard is inside everyone. Everyone has moments where they want to throw something out of the window or hit someone in a split second. But there is a barrier between thinking about something and actually carrying out the proposed act. For Nygaard, that barrier breaks down when he kills his own wife. His thoughts and actions become one. He regrets it but, throughout the series, he also feels liberated by it and cannot stop himself from doing awful things. Nygaard’s world is shaken after murdering his wife and he doesn’t know how to react because he has never acted on emotions before. He then spends his time thinking about how the outside world will react to her murder and so he thinks of how he can get away with it and convince people that he is sad that his wife was murdered, because, of course, the killer, in the eyes of the locals, remains at large. He tries to act upset because the locals think such a devastated husband could not have killed his wife. It takes him time to work on that persona of his, which is ultimately all fake. He becomes more of a man as the series progresses but only in the sense that he makes up his own mind and governs his own life based on his own thoughts and feelings rather than the feelings of others: people that bullied him into doing things and those who called him weak for not fending for himself. However, Nygaard soon learns that he cannot control his life anymore as his actions spiral out of control.

‘I think Lester is pretty universal. There are Lesters everywhere in every race and walk of life and country,’ Freeman explained to
Nerd Repository
’s Kyle Wilson. ‘There are people who are sort of downtrodden and people who are under-confident and all that, so that was more a case of tapping into that in myself really.’

People don’t think of Martin as the type who plays a murderer so the challenge made a refreshing change from his comedic and dramatic roles of the past. The change in Lester’s character was, in part, an attraction that Freeman found alluring.

‘I just loved it. I’ve said to my agents for ages in a kind of lighthearted way that I think I need to play a serial killer, a fucking rapist, drug dealer, whatever,’ he admitted to
TVGuide
’s Hanh Nguyen. ‘Partly because people don’t see me like that and partly because I want to flex those muscles again. Before
The Office
, I was a young actor in London who casting agents saw as kind of edgy. I would be going up for those parts that were a bit violent or a bit scuzzy.’

Freeman was once in the running to play the villain in Peter Jackson’s 2007 adaptation of the best-selling Alice Sebold novel,
The Lovely Bones.
His
Sherlock
co-star Benedict Cumberbatch has recently carved out a career as a successful villain, with roles as Kahn in
Star Trek
and Smaug in
The Hobbit
. Freeman has always wanted to play more roles and, though he is not a villain as such in
Fargo
, there is something worrying and sinister about his character: a hapless, sad, everyday middleclass American who gets trodden on by everyone in his life until he meets Billy Bob Thornton’s character.

‘Yes, if there is any plan ever it’s to play as much as possible,’
he said on the idea of playing darker roles to
GQ
’s Oliver Franklin. ‘Not to big myself up too much, I think I play a lot within a second, do you know what I mean? You’re not saying I am, but if I was someone who was playing one thing all the time, that would be something else. But I think I’m quite capable of bringing out colour and shade in any character.’

The freezing-cold temperatures of Calgary certainly helped Freeman develop his character. And, of course, he missed his family enormously. Calgary was the coldest place Martin had ever been to in his life, with temperatures dropping as low as twelve degrees below freezing. The UK may have a reputation for being cold and dreary but it is Hawaii compared to Calgary. Even on mild days it was considerably colder than London. It was a bit of a culture shock for Freeman. His surroundings helped him focus on the script and to learn more about his character, to develop Nygaard’s mannerisms, but all the hard work was really down to Noah Hawley, who had the character developed to a T.

‘It’s very apparent by the end of the first episode that this is not all that meets the eye,’ he said to Daniel Fienberg of
Hitfix
. ‘So I thought, “Well, geez, if that happens at the end of the first episode, what the hell is Episode Ten gonna be?” So that was the thing that gave me confidence that I would be fully engaged and fully interested in what I was doing. And I have been! Every script I’ve read has just been better and better and better. It’s been fantastic.’

He was shocked at the breakneck speed at which each episode episode was made – he was not used to that sort of fast-paced environment. It was a good experience for him
and any ideas that he had, had to be brought to the forefront straight away, before the cameras were set up for the next shot.

Though everyone came from different backgrounds, he found them all to be professional and very easy to work with. The cast turned up on time, read their lines and got on with the job at hand without ego or fuss. There was much mutual respect and no frivolous off-screen performances or anything equally immature. It was all very professional. Everyone involved knew they were making something rather superlative.

There is a dark humour to
Fargo
and with a background in both comedy and drama, Freeman knew exactly how to approach his character. He knew there can be comedy in anything serious, so long as it is handled wisely.

‘
The Sopranos
sometimes really makes me laugh and that’s not a comedy,’ he said to
Nerd Repository
’s Kyle Wilson. ‘And sometimes I’m almost crying at the pathos of Laurel and Hardy, which is not a drama. So, I believe in both of those things being there and I don’t think it’s a big deal by both things being there. So, when Lester has moments of comedy as there are in the show, yes, I think, you know, without blowing my own trumpet, I think I can do it. And I think I’m not bad at it, so, yeah, all of that I think it doesn’t hurt. I think it all helps stir the pot somehow, yeah.’

The series won the cast and crew rave reviews.

‘Of course,
Fargo
also functions as a crime thriller but there was a narrative drive amid the madness,’ wrote the
Daily Telegraph
’s Ben Lawrence of the first episode. ‘The scene in which Nygaard battered his crowing wife to death with a hammer and was confronted by Thurman, who then gets it in
the back from Malvo, was grimly compelling. But the mood was lightened by Freeman’s performance. His air of nervy bewilderment recalled his sitcom roles, as if Tim from
The Office
had stumbled into the house of Atreus.’

Entertainment Weekly
’s Karen Valby wrote, ‘Poor, angry, pent-up Lester, henpecked by everyone – Freeman brings a taut energy to the character. (After committing an evil act in the pilot, Lester frantically calls Lorne’s motel room for guidance. “Yeah, it’s me, you got to help me, I’ve done something bad,” he squawks into the phone. “Leroy Motor Inn?” the front-desk receptionist says. Lester: “Oh, hi, room 23, please.”) Freeman’s Lester is the perfect bumbling counterpart to Thornton’s graceful Lorne, whose look and demeanour seem a direct descendant of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh.’

Writing in
USA Today
, Robert Bianco said, ‘Oh, and in Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman, it has a pair of stars whose brilliantly written and played dynamic gives the warped relationship between Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in
True Detective
a run for its money.’

He continued to say, ‘And through it all, there’s the riveting performances of Thornton and Freeman. Wait for the way Thornton can shift from a sly smile to a venomous gaze, or the way Freeman mixes Lester’s frustration, fear and regret with flashes of relief.’

Freeman is not a careerist as such, though he now joins fellow Brits Andrew Lincoln and Jonny Lee Miller, who are currently starring in successful American TV shows and have become near-enough household names stateside. However, what has always turned Martin away from American TV is
the lengthy multiple-season contracts that the actors have to sign. He does not seem to play the actor’s game and there is something very British about Martin Freeman.
Fargo
appealed to him because, like
True Detective
, it is an anthology series so Freeman only had to sign up for one season.

‘I’m an actor, I want to play good parts and it’s a good part,’ he said to
Hitfix
’s Daniel Fienberg. ‘There are a couple of fantastic scenes with Lorne Malvo, Billy Bob’s character, that really keep me in the story and the potential for where this character might go and what his story might be. I felt like I had very little choice [he laughs], given that it was also finite. It wasn’t going on for six years. It was ten episodes, several months. That was pretty cool for me.’

The difficult aspect of a TV series that writers face is the conclusion. There is nothing more devastating for a committed viewer and loyal fan to watch countless hours of a TV series only to witness an anticlimax, as evidence by
True Blood
, the HBO vampire series. Some series run out of steam so that you no longer care about the characters or the story, in which case a disappointing end does not feel like a cheat, but you only see it if you’ve stuck with it, and not chosen to watch something else.

Fargo
season one is just about the right amount of episodes, with some wonderful, albeit dark, characters and some intriguing plot twists that keep you hooked. But what of the ending? Naturally – as with any revered series (and even the ending of highly-lauded
True Detective
was met with negative criticism, as was
Breaking Bad
from some quarters of its fan base, though the writers of any series cannot please everyone) –
Fargo
did not impress everyone but it managed to both surprise
and satisfy. Thankfully, fans did not feel cheated, as they did with
Lost
or
Dexter
– this latter brilliant serial-killer drama delivered possibly the most unsatisfactory and embarrassing finale in modern American television.

In Michael Hogan’s rave review of the episode titled ‘Morton’s Fork’ in the
Daily Telegraph
, he praised the final episode: ‘All the storylines were satisfactorily tied up, so even after ten weeks of death and darkness, we still got that rarest of things in modern drama: a happy ending. And a moral one.’

What makes
Fargo
such a compelling story is not only the outstanding writing but the two lead characters – Lester Nygaard and Lorne Malvo, both of whom are rather likeable despite the many misgivings we have about them and their repugnant acts of evil.

‘He never stops being human, you know?’ Freeman expressed to
Hitfix
’s Daniel Fienberg. ‘But in a funny way, neither does Billy Bob’s character. He is always human, too. That’s the beauty of good writing and good casting. Even someone as truly dark as Lorne Malvo is still very attractive and you want to spend time with him, because he’s a fun character.’

Fargo
stands as one of the finest TV dramas of the decade, along with such masterful creations as
Breaking Bad
and
Hannibal. Fargo
was another impeccable piece of television writing that possibly exceeds
Sherlock
, with numerous twists and turns in the plot as the first series reaches a nail-biting conclusion.

Freeman began 2015 with the BBC broadcast of the highly-acclaimed TV film
The Eichmann Show
, as part of the BBC’s Holocaust memorial season. The film portrays the story of the
blacklisted television director Leo Hurwitz (played by Aussie actor Anthony LaPaglia) and the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was apprehended in Argentina in 1960 and, as the chief architect of the Holocaust, went to trial in Israel the following year. The footage of the trial was shown on TV in thirty-seven countries. Freeman stars as producer Milton Fruchtman who spearheaded the project. The film delicately intercuts real-life archive footage with dramatized scenes. TV pundits praised the film with
The Observer
’s Euan Ferguson calling it a ‘phenomenal retelling’.