The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman

by Neil Daniels

  Some fans may recall that Billy Bob Thornton had a small role in Love Actually all those years ago.

  ‘We’d never met on Love Actually but we got on instantly like a house on fire. As soon as we had our first line run it was apparent it was going to be a breeze,’ Freeman enthused to BBC News website’s Neil Smith. ‘It’s nice as well when you’re working with an actor who you like watching. I was enjoying his performance as Martin, even as I was horrified by it as Lester.’

  About their relationship on screen, Billy Bob Thornton explained to Nerd Repository’s Brent Hankins, ‘We didn’t really have to work on it. It just naturally happened. And Martin himself seems to be a very confident person, so I think he probably maybe had to downgrade his confidence a little bit. And me, by nature, I’m a very nervous, worrisome person, so I had to drop that a little. So, I think both of us had to definitely shed some of our real life stuff in order to play the characters.’

  Both Freeman and Thornton share a similar belief that they are actors rather than movie stars. It is fascinating to watch the drama unfold between Nygaard and Malvo. As soon as they meet in the local hospital Malvo becomes a constant presence in Nygaard’s life. Freeman did not get enough on-screen time with Thornton as he would have liked, as the characters’ relationship develops sporadically throughout the series.

  ‘All ten episodes are amazing,’ Freeman expressed to London Calling.com’s Anthony Pearce. ‘It’s one of the best-written projects I’ve ever done. I wasn’t interested in simply rehashing old territory. With Fargo, I feel we’re covering ground that hadn’t been covered in the film and stands on its own.’

  Freeman did not, much to his disappointment, get to work with fellow co-star Colin Hanks, son of Tom. ‘I really like him as a man, I’m very fond of him,’ Martin admitted to Nerd Repository’s Kyle Wilson. ‘And I’ve gotten to know him a little bit and he’s a straight up lovely bloke. Yeah, I just really like him. And I did immediately. I think he’s ever so good in the programme as well. I like his work a lot.’

  One thing that Freeman did master, though it’s somewhat odd, is his Minnesota accent. The actor has an acute musical ear and was able to pick up on the local dialect. He soon mastered the accent and stayed in voice all day on set.

  ‘I’m having Skype lessons and, well, pride comes before a fall but I think I’m doing okay,’ he said to Time Out London’s Nick Aveling. ‘It’s daunting. I don’t want to rip off Bill Macy’s accent, or rip off an accent that’s already passed into comedy, so I’ve been on YouTube to see how real Minnesotans sound. Trouble is, some accents lend themselves to comedy. They just fucking do.’

  Freeman takes on the role William H. Macy played in the original film. Ellen E. Jones of The Independent wrote of Freeman’s performance, ‘A Hampshire native, Freeman can’t quite pull off the “Aw, jeez” Upper Midwest accent, which was such a joy in the original movie, and his befuddled nice-guy mannerisms are the same ones John Watson has in Sherlock and Tim had in The Office. He is so innately likable, in other words, he can’t convey the snivelling self-interest which made William H. Macy’s character compelling in the original. Or so it initially seemed.’

  The British actor did not go back and watch the original film because he did not want it to interfere with his own vision for Nygaard.

  ‘…as soon as you try and differ yourself from someone, you’re becoming too conscious of that performance anyway,’ Freeman told Anne Bayley of TwoCentsTV.com. ‘So, no, I didn’t feel pressure in that way… he’s a brilliant actor and the world doesn’t need another actor doing a Bill Macy impression and I don’t need to be doing that and he doesn’t need it and all of that. So, I purely treated it as my performance of a different character, albeit with some comparison. There are some parallels, but I was too busy concentrating on what I was doing with Lester really.’

  Freeman was not immediately familiar with Mid-Western American culture so it was all a new experience for him. Middle America could have been Middle Earth for all he knew. He was trying to avoid a comic turn with his character and did not want to patronise Nygaard, which is what can happen when a character becomes endearing to the public.

  ‘Every time that somebody comes up to me like that, like, “Oh, little baby,”… I’m a grown man,’ Freeman said to Vulture’s Denise Martin. ‘But the truth of some of those Minnesota accents is that even some Minnesotans think that they’re kind of funny. So it’s a fine line of getting that and honouring those characters. Not being reverential to them or patronising them, but to also acknowledge that some of the things the characters say are funny in the way that some of the things that are classically English are kind of ridiculous.’

  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 a
nymore 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’.