Jennifer Jason Leigh on Letting Fargo’s Ice Queen Melt

“She recognizes a lot of herself in Dot, and it takes her a while to see it. But once she sees it, she can’t get away from it.� Photo: Michelle Faye/FX

Spoilers follow for the fifth season of Fargo through the finale, “Bisquik.�

For much of Fargo’s fifth season, Lorraine Lyon is unimpressed. The CEO of the country’s biggest debt-collection agency can sweet-talk if she needs to but not for long. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the character, envisioned by series creator Noah Hawley, as if that level of politeness were something to be tolerated but not normalized. Lyon is not only used to domineering over everyone around her, she revels in it — which is exactly what drew Leigh to Lorraine.

“She takes over any room she walks into with an equal dose of utter contempt and disdain,� Leigh says. “She’s intimidating, which was very different than how I feel in my own skin. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to play someone quite different than myself.�

With her purring, haughty line deliveries, Leigh gives Lorraine the predatory ferociousness of her surname and the prickle of a porcupine in her brusque interactions with both her family members — her mysterious daughter-in-law, Dot (Juno Temple), and sensitive son, Wayne (David Rysdahl) — and her myriad rivals, such as Dot’s abusive former husband, Roy (Jon Hamm), and the overly curious Deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani). Lorraine is comfortable only with her longtime lawyer, Danish Graves (Dave Foley), who has her saved as every favorite in his cell phone and cackles alongside her whenever they outmaneuver another business adversary. When Lorraine’s cocoon of wealth begins to crack after Dot’s subterfuge, Wayne’s injuries, Roy’s threats, and Danish’s disappearance, Leigh centers the Queen of Debt’s humanizing concern.

By the end of this season of Fargo, Lorraine hasn’t changed her calculating professional practices; she remains a woman whose wealth is derived from other people’s misfortune. Nor has she abandoned using that money as a way to exert control over others, as seen in her last showdown with Roy, now behind bars, in the finale episode, “Bisquik,� where Lorraine reveals that she has paid off everyone in the prison to make the former sheriff’s life especially difficult. Her line “I fight my own battles, and you need to pay for what you’ve taken� is a grandly devious rejoinder to Roy’s earlier insistence that he owns Dot. Yet Leigh’s nuances, such as her softer facial expressions and more inviting body language, indicate Lorraine’s deepened relationships with other female characters, such as her granddaughter, Scotty (Sienna King); the new consigliere, Indira; and Dot, whom she at last accepts into the Lyon family in the finale. “She’s a really good judge of people, and she’s very rarely wrong,� Leigh says of Lorraine. “And that’s what happens to her as part of her arc: She does get it wrong with Dot.�

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Do you have a specific process for working your way into a character? If so, how did you apply it to Lorraine?
Every character is different. I do whatever research I can. I did talk to Noah a lot about the character of Lorraine. I read a couple books about debt and about America and capitalism, including Debtor Nation, by Louis Hyman. Noah thought I should look at William F. Buckley. I watched countless episodes of Firing Line, which I found really, really interesting, and then I based a lot of Lorraine’s vocal patterns and sound on Buckley as well.

Lorraine has kind of invented herself. We talked a lot about her childhood and where she comes from and how she’s moved away from that. She really is the smartest person in the room for much of her life, but she’s also scrappy. She recognizes a lot of herself in Dot, and it takes her a while to see it. But once she sees it, she can’t get away from it.

You mentioned the accent. I’m also curious about Lorraine’s physicality.
I really feel like I mimicked a lot of Buckley, the way he uses his hands. When you watch Firing Line, he always has something between his fingers. It’s usually a pencil or a pen. If he has any kind of nervous tic at all — he doesn’t seem nervous by any stretch of the imagination — his energy all goes into that pencil or pen. Lorraine always has something in her hands in almost every scene, something she’s fiddling with, almost like worrying it. That’s a better way to put it, rather than nervousness; it’s more of a worry stone. And the way she’ll lean into certain words and step back. There’s a curiosity to her. She’s curious about people but only in how she can kind of play with them — almost like a cat playing with a dead mouse by the time she’s done with people.

There are so many moments this season when Lorraine makes observations and judgments about people but often ends up being right on the money.
She’s a really good judge of people, and she’s very rarely wrong. That’s what happens to her as part of her arc: She does get it wrong with Dot. I really like her, and I like that when you first meet her, you’re not prepared to like her. She chips away at your defenses or your preconceived ideas about her as she goes because there’s a reason she is where she is, and it’s not just because she’s cold or calculating or ambitious.

Was there a certain prop that most helped you get into character?
I love the big “No� behind her desk. That’s just genius, right? That really made me laugh when I walked on set that day. They also did these magazine covers of me for Fortune as the “Queen of Debt,� and those really cracked me up too.

Photo: FX

I loved the painting, but I also loved your big fur coat.
The fur coat was a great idea that I used quite a lot. That was very, very helpful to me because it gives you a kind of bearing, a kind of protection. To be able to attack that aggressively in such a calm way, you have to feel pretty safe, and I think she does. It’s almost like her armor. I love that coat.

I was thinking of what Fargo tells us about Lorraine: She’s a billionaire, she calls herself a “zookeeper,� she poses her family with guns for their Christmas card. I was also reading how people have described her in reviews and recaps, where the terms Republican and feminist come up. I’m wondering if you used any of those descriptors to build Lorraine.
I think she’s too old to consider herself a feminist. I don’t mean that in any way; I just think she doesn’t like to put herself in those kinds of boxes. She thinks, I’m a woman, and I work. She believes in women’s rights, obviously, and she’s an old-school Republican, 100 percent. She’s not a Libertarian. She’s definitely about money. She would definitely want to pay lower taxes.

Her politics Noah and I did talk about. She is doing a Christmas card with guns, so it’s also about, Who is she appealing to? Who does she need? A lot of times with companies, you want politicians who are going to be on your side with the rules. There’s so much corruption involved. She wants people that she could pay off and are leaning to her side. Knowing where she stands is important, but her politics aren’t based on a worldview. They’re more based on her pocketbook and her business.

That lack of a worldview beyond herself really comes through in how Lorraine speaks. When she begins to presume that Dot married Wayne for the Lyon family’s money, she says, “She made promises to me, my son� — she puts herself first.
She’s first, and I don’t think that’s a mistake. It’s not like, “You didn’t mean to say that.� No, she did mean to say that. I love the way Noah writes so much because you really can just get in there.

In episode three this season, “The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions,� when Lorraine questions Deputy Olmstead about the function of the police among the wealthy, it felt like the clearest distillation of what she believes — that for someone of her wealth and class, the police don’t serve a purpose past keeping “the rabble from getting in.� What did you want to bring to that scene?
She spells it out very, very clearly, her point of view on this. She has her own security team. The police are more of a nuisance for her than helpful to her. Dot’s back home, but they haven’t pieced anything together. They’re just causing more difficulty for her, a lot of bureaucracy.

Prepping that scene — again, just because of how well it’s written — had to do more with the nuisance: how busy her day is, how much time they’re taking up. The realities which she spells out very clearly, she doesn’t need to say that, right? She’s so angry that these people have come in and dared to question her about nothing she has to do with and taken up this time. She’s so angry that it’s almost the most out of control she gets in the whole season. She didn’t have to do that, but she couldn’t stop; she wanted to. It’s a release for her. She’s angry, and she gets joy from putting people in what she sees as their place and educating them.

It was so uncomfortable to watch, but I also love that the police chief says nothing and just backs out of the room.
He’s completely intimidated by her. And she’s still put out by it!

You have a couple of very good verbal duels with Jon Hamm as Roy. Your final conversation in “Bisquik� shows us how Lorraine can play the long game, which is particularly cathartic because she also gets the final word after their earlier interaction in “The Tiger,� when Roy tries to intimidate her into giving up Dot. In that first showdown, you and Jon are doing great oppositional things: He’s gruff and commanding, you’re unimpressed. How did that scene come together?
He is so much fun to work with, let me start by saying. He can say any insane, crazy, fantastic dialogue and make it sound like he’s telling you just about something very concrete that’s happening in his life. He makes everything so real and in the moment and not fanciful at all, just facts. That’s also the way he plays Roy, which is so chilling. I just remember loving the experience of doing that with him. The scenes were so fraught. There’s a tremendous amount of tension. While we were shooting, you could feel it, almost see it, which makes it again so delicious to play. The idea of property, right? It’s so interesting that she says, “She’s my son’s property now.� It’s like, “You want to take this to the terms that you’re saying? Okay, we’ll do that.�

You’re making a real meal out of terms like fuck-off fee and baby. If the scene with the police is Lorraine at her angriest, this may be Lorraine at her most self-satisfied. She gets a real thrill out of embarrassing Roy.
She loves it. This big old cowboy sheriff, so macho and tough. She’ll let people make an utter fool out of themselves right in front of her, and she’ll take it in, take it in, and then she’ll tell you what a fool you’ve made out of yourself. When he puts her down and says she’s looking down on people all the time, that’s completely true and valid. That’s fine, she doesn’t need to be liked. And it’s really fun to play someone that doesn’t care if you like them, you don’t like them, you hate them. Your feelings about her, they don’t penetrate at all. She doesn’t have a board. Her company is privately owned. She doesn’t owe anyone anything. It’s just who can she pay off, and who can she buy out? That’s it.

We’ve talked a lot about Lorraine’s dialogue, so I want to ask about a scene in which you’re not saying anything: when you get Dot’s file and see pictures of what Roy has put her through. Were there actually photos for you to look at? Are you reacting to something in front of you?
Yes, there were pictures of Juno. They were — I mean, you saw them. I saw the same pictures you see as a viewer, and they’re so real. The makeup artists are brilliant, Juno’s brilliant. They were actually on set when they did the photos, but Juno wouldn’t let me see her. She really wanted it to be as real for me when I saw them as possible. They went to great, great effort to have those available for me, and I didn’t see them until we shot. I didn’t have to do anything except go in with the preparation that I didn’t know what was in the file, I didn’t really want to look in that file, but it’s there on the desk. I just had this fabulous phone call where I told that banker who’s reneged on the deal all those hilarious things. So she’s buoyed herself up and now she can look at the file because there’s a bit of curiosity about it, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. But then she looks at it, and it’s not intriguing, it’s not gossip. It’s horrifying. What she wants to do is destroy him after seeing that. That scene was very easy to play because I didn’t have to play it. It was just looking at the thing and the camera catching it. That’s it.

I feel like up until that moment, Lorraine treats her womanhood as a way to belittle the men who diminish and undermine her, as in the meeting with the bankers, and I thought her seeing Dot being put in the extreme of that position is what really rattled her. It forces Lorraine to see Dot in a different way and helps her to realize the similarities of what they’ve experienced from men. She’s not going to tolerate that.
Even if you think you would never tolerate it, we all have tolerated some of it to some extent, right? Roy is not so much of a buffoon now. And her feeling for Dot is surprising to her as well because she always saw Dot as someone who was beneath her son; she didn’t measure up. Lorraine didn’t trust her at all. And she was picking up on something because Dot has reinvented herself. She’s very off the target in terms of who Dot actually is and why, but she’s not wrong in that there’s something fishy there.

She now realizes Roy isn’t just some cowboy in a big hat who’s showing off. He’s capable of something more.
He’s monstrous, and he feels entitled to it. That’s nothing to him. That’s all in a day. It speaks also to debt and to women. Women didn’t even have credit cards until the ’70s; they couldn’t get credit cards in their own name, which I didn’t know until I read these books. But that’s shocking. There are still countries in the world where women are the property of men. When Roy speaks to that, he’s not talking about something so crazy or old-fashioned. It exists right now in other countries.

When I was watching the Roy story line, I remembered reading a few years ago about various pockets around the country where teenage girls were being married off. You’re absolutely correct that there are other countries in the world where this happens, but it also happens here to a certain degree, which is frightening and upsetting. And to your point about credit cards, there are ways this has been built into law.
That was part of our government, and it’s not that long ago.

That leads me to the final moment between Dot and Lorraine. They grow to respect each other, and Lorraine has called Dot her daughter.
Love each other, in a way.

When Dot comes home and she hugs you, it’s a very awkward hug from your perspective but then you give her a wink.
I’m sure we did it so many different ways. I don’t think I winked every time. Sometimes the hug was shorter, sometimes it was longer. Juno is so extraordinary to work with and just so warm, so loving always, and generous, and I love her, too. I think that was our last scene together, so there was a lot going into it. That is not only our characters coming to each other and being so glad to have one another but also two actresses that really love working together and knowing it’s our last day working together. Throughout the season, she’s always calling her “Mom,� and Lorraine is always saying, “I’m not your mom.� In this moment, that’s all gone. I think it does feel like “You’re the daughter I wish I had.�