Joke to Juno Temple that she has to do an entire interview in the voice of Dot Lyon—the fiercely competent housewife she plays in the electric fifth season of Fargo—and she will not miss a beat. “Okay,” the actor says on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen below), elongating the “O” like a proper Minnesotan. “I had this great cheat sheet for a collection of words that would get you back into the accent. One that will stay with me probably forever was ‘Barb’s large apartment.’”
The accent, of course, is only part of what makes Dot one of this TV season’s most compelling characters. The central character in this installment of Noah Hawley’s anthology is a seemingly normal suburban mom with a dark secret: She’s actually on the run from imperious North Dakota sheriff Roy Tillman, a sadist with a god complex who forcibly wed Dot (then called Nadine) when she was just a teenager.
Dot managed to escape Roy 10 years before the events of the series, drawing on survival skills she learned during her hardscrabble, ultrareligious upbringing—skills she has to break out again when her new family is targeted by a variety of foes. She’s fast, she’s scrappy, she can make a weapon out of anything—oh, and she can whip up a mean pile of pancakes too. “Bisquick did a Fargo limited-edition powder,” Temple marvels. “And they had a recipe for ‘Dot’s Biscuits’ on the back. I was like, Oh my god, that’s really cool.”
Read or listen on for Temple’s take on entering the Fargo universe, acting opposite heavyweights like Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jon Hamm, and her interpretation of season five’s enigmatic ending.
Vanity Fair: There was a period where Fargo and Ted Lasso were overlapping, and you had to switch back and forth between Dot and Keeley on a dime. How was that experience?
Juno Temple: It was funny. My fiancé was like, “There’s a lot of people here”: the birth of Dot, Keeley, Juno. And I remember that my brothers, I invited them to come over and have dinner and tested out the accent on them. And they just looked at me: “Uh, how long have you got before you start?” This is the moment of panic. But yeah, I think it’s really interesting when you have characters slightly crossing over in your life.
Ted Lasso and Fargo are very different shows—but Fargo actually feels more in line with the dark and complex things that you had been doing with your career before Ted Lasso. Did doing the show feel like a return to that sort of material for you?
I didn’t think about it like that at that time. But now that you say that, I guess that makes sense. For me, it was more—I’d seen the movie, I’d seen all the previous installments of Fargo, and I just felt, wow, I’ve been asked to join something pretty historically fantastic.
There were a lot of nerves involved, and obviously unbelievable excitement. But also, she’s so complex—this duality of being a mother and a nurturer as well as a survivor and a feral fighter. So that’s a newer avenue in my life. And I’m loving it. Sienna [King], who played our daughter, Scotty, she was a real droplet of sunshine and beaming light. The same with David [Rysdahl], who played Wayne—who I think is so extraordinary in Fargo. I think he’s kind of the unsung hero in it, actually. We really created a safe space with the three of us.
We’ve talked a little bit about your accent work. What other sort of prep did you do when you were getting ready for this role? If I put you in an empty Walmart, could you make a flamethrower?
I mean, I feel like I could now, but it wasn’t something that we necessarily rehearsed. Dot, she wasn’t a slick fighter. She’s sloppy. She’s messy. She’s quick. She’s making it up on the go. And when I was reading these things, and then we got into the space and they were setting up the rigging, I was like, this is extraordinary—Noah coming up with all these really funny, but also kind of amazing ideas to create your own security system at home.
She’s very inventive.
Truly. It doesn’t quite work out, Dot’s home security line.
VF spoke to Jennifer Jason Leigh during the season, and she said that for her character, her two lodestars were her mother and William F. Buckley. Did you have anybody in mind for Dot in the same way?