The vastness of marquee television out there these days means there are more places than ever for giant ensemble casts to accumulate, and few series have that aspect tied up quite as tightly as FX's anthology drama Fargo. Set in 2010, Season 3 will be led by Ewan McGregor in the actor's first big U.S. TV role, and it so happens there's another U.K. thespian who will make his big small screen splash on this side of the pond, as Harry Potter vet David Thewlis has signed on for a role as a regular. We're already assuming violent things will be involved.
David Thewlis will play V.M. Vargas, a dedicated capitalist who teams up with the folks who employ Ewan McGregor's Emmit Stussy, known as the Parking Lot King of Minnesota. The enigmatic Vargas usually keeps to himself, but this deal will apparently be important enough to get sociable for, and it'll also be quite the opposite of totally legal, according to EW. It's a role that sounds like it's got ties to real life - this is a "true story," after all - but I'm not sure how entrepreneur Victor Vargas would logically enter this story. (Aliens?)
Speaking of the story, McGregor's self-made real estate success Emmit is only one of that actor's roles, as he'll also be playing his own brother Ray, whose best days are long behind him. Ray is a parole officer working beneath the Eden Valley Police Chief, played by The Leftovers standout Carrie Coon, who is newly divorced and having trouble understanding how communication works in this tech-friendly world. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, of 10 Cloverfield Lane fame, will play a parolee named Nikki whose craftiness and strategic mind shows up both in her bridge games and the life that turned her into a parolee.
I cannot wait to see David Thewlis enter this world, as the actor has been a part of all kinds of interesting fictional worlds in his career, such as Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem. For another link to Fargo writer/directors Ethan and Joel Coen, Thewlis appeared in The Big Lebowski as Knox "Maude's Friend with the Cleft Asshole" Harringon.
Though he lent his voice to a 2014 episode of family Guy, Thewlis hasn't popped up on American TV and is far more recognizable for his film roles like Harry Potter's Remus Lupin and, if you're a cinematic masochist, Edward Douglas in 1996's super-troubled The Island of Dr. Moreau. In recent years, he has been seen alongside Tom Hardy in Legend, with Michael Fassbender in Macbeth and he was the lead in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's stop-motion dramedy Anomalisa. He'll soon be seen by a slew of people in Wonder Woman.
Fans have been missing out on new Fargo for exactly one year and five days at this point, and Season 3 sadly doesn't have a date set when it'll return to FX, but we know it's happening in 2017. (An obvious, but still worthy, consolation.) In the meantime, check out what is definitely on the way to your TV screens with our midseason premiere schedule.
