Recent years have seen waves of actors and actresses making the jump from the big screen to TV for big roles, more often than not for one-season stints. Brit thesp Ewan McGregor started his career on the U.K. miniseries Lipstick on Your Collar and The Scarlet and the Black, and though he’d chosen to avoid extended turns on television in the many years since, that’s all changing now that he has been added to the cast of Fargo for its upcoming third season. If there’s a “greatest casting director in the universe” award, the judges should just hover around Fargo every year.
Expect something a little less ordinary from Ewan McGregor’s venture to the north for Fargo, since he won’t just have one leading role, but two of them. He will star as brothers Ray and Emmit Stussy, and you might be even more shocked to discover that they aren’t even twins. But they are definitely at the heart of the dark and quaint tale audiences will watch unfold next year. Details about Season 3 have been largely non-existent beyond a possible timeline and the predictable possible return of former characters, but McGregor’s casting unveiled some new details.
Older brother Emmit Stussy makes his living in Minnesota as the Parking Lot King, having worked hard for his place in the real estate game, and he considers himself an “American success story,” according to EW. On the flip side of the gene pool is Ray, a parole officer who is neither as happy nor as handsome as his brother. Things never got better for Ray once he hit adulthood, and he carries a lot of resentment for Emmit for all of these misfortunes. Something tells me the rift between these guys will grow wide enough to swallow the entire state, as dictated by the snowballing narrative norm of Fargo creator Noah Hawley.
Last year, McGregor appeared as himself in a pair of episodes of HBO’s Doll & Em, and he also starred in the network’s pilot of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections some years back, but that project fell through. He recently starred on the big screen as both Jesus and Satan in Last Days in the Desert, and will be seen next year both in the live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and the long-awaited sequel to Trainspotting. I’m extremely pleased that he’ll be joining the TV universe for at least one season, and hopefully the experience will convince him to take on more in the future.
We’re still a ways from getting a first look at Ewan McGregor in either of his two roles on Fargo, as the show isn’t set to go into production until later this year. Season 3 will debut in 2017 on FX. Stay tuned for even more incredible casting additions in the weeks to come.
