With the third season of Fargo, the Coen brothers spin-off, comes a new threat: VM Varga, a verbose and baleful businessman with bad teeth, an eating disorder and a capacity for raining unimaginable misery on to his enemies. The Blackpool-born actor David Thewlis plays him with an English accent and an air of chippy entitlement. “Varga has no scruples,” he says, drinking iced water in a London members’ club. “He doesn’t care. He is absolutely and irredeemably predatory.”
Thewlis read Economics for Dummies to grasp the business side of his character, but it was rolling news that really did the trick. “You’ve got four days off, but you can’t go outside because you’re in Calgary and it’s minus 30. So you just watch CNN.” A sly smile flickers on his lips. “You could describe his political and economic philosophy as Trumpian.”
The 54-year-old actor has only recently washed the character out of his hair — shaved him out, to be more precise, with Varga’s scraggly locks replaced by an inch of fuzz. Where Varga looks anaemic and exasperated, Thewlis is tall, ruddy- cheeked and relaxed in blue jeans, black blazer and black T-shirt. He has come hotfoot from his new home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, where he has moved with his wife, a French artist, to be closer to Gracie, his 11-year-old daughter with his former partner, Anna Friel.
But Varga’s malevolence lingers on: his corroded dentures are right there in Thewlis’s satchel, ready for the dialogue looping he is doing after our conversation. I ask if I can see them but he demurs. “No! It’ll spoil it for you if they’re just sat there on the table.” Thewlis tends toward the circumspect when discussing the show. He recentlymade the mistake of referring publicly to episode three, only to receive a terse note from FX, which produces the show. “It said, ‘Never talk about episode three.’ I thought, ‘Fucking hell!’”
Thewlis has done television before, from playing a Trotskyite musician in Only Fools and Horses and a cocky pimp in Prime Suspect 3 (“Was it good? Don’t think I ever saw it”) to the lead in a recent BBC adaptation of An Inspector Calls. Just nothing like this. Nothing so paranoid. Mystery surrounded Fargo from the get-go. Thewlis committed to it on the strength of a handful of episodes and an assurance from the creator, Noah Hawley, that Varga was no mere guest spot. “Sometimes they tell you, ‘Oh, your character will develop’ and it never does.”
But there is plenty he likes about Fargo, not least the abundance of references to other Coen brothers movies. “Even I don’t spot them all, and I was in The Big Lebowski.” He had a cameo in that stoned screwball comedy as Knox Harrington, a Liverpudlian video artist with a pencil moustache and an abrasive cackle. He grabbed the hair clippers in the makeup wagon and improvised the look himself on set. “Joel and Ethan saw me and went: ‘Fuck!’ Well, they wanted strange.”
Along with everyone else, the Coens had admired Thewlis’s performance as Johnny, the acerbic prophet of doom in Mike Leigh’s 1993 film Naked, in which he stalked the streets of London in an undertaker’s greatcoat. Despite all of the parts Thewlis has played since, it is still a surprise to find him fresh-faced and softly spoken, rather than ranting, wild-eyed and whiskery like Johnny.
Word is that he went through hell making Naked. “It’s a myth. I had a great time.” But he did compare what Leigh put him through, which included taking him to look at a corpse in a morgue, to what Francis Ford Coppola did to Martin Sheen during Apocalypse Now? “That doesn’t mean it was bad,” he says cheerfully. “I did have one panic attack where I thought, ‘This is it.’ It was a crazy time. It overtakes you. But I felt so alive. My brain was on fire.”
He won a stack of awards, including the best actor prize at Cannes, and says working with Leigh so early in his career spoiled him “a little bit” for other directors. The picture opened doors for him internationally. “But not necessarily doors you’d want opened.” Having been paid £15,000 for Leigh’s film, he was suddenly banking 20 times that amount for “pieces of nonsense” such as the medieval fantasy Dragonheart and the calamitous remake of The Island of Dr Moreau.
“I made some bad decisions. I was probably wrongly advised about what I should do to make myself bankable.” When he did have a stab at something arty, it came out mangled: he played the poet Paul Verlaine opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud in Total Eclipse. DiCaprio kept his American accent and the director asked Thewlis to compromise with a mid-Atlantic one. “If anything, Leo should’ve come to me. He should have got a bit closer to the coast of Europe, anyway.”
Water under the bridge. Thewlis has now achieved that coveted mix of commercial clout and artistic integrity which almost eluded him. Proof of the former lies in his recurring role as Professor Lupin in the Harry Potter series, as well as in blockbusters such as War Horse and the forthcoming film Wonder Woman. For the prestige, well, take your pick: he starred opposite Thandie Newton in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged, played Duncan in the recent Macbeth with Michael Fassbender and supplied the voice for the alienated hero of Charlie Kaufman’s animated oddity Anomalisa.
And Fargo, which brings him full circle, since he shares most of his scenes with Ewan McGregor, who rose to prominence in the early 90s in that same new wave of British actors. “It definitely felt like we were part of something,” Thewlis reflects. McGregor arranged a screening of T2 Trainspotting for the cast and crew of Fargo at a local cinema in Calgary. “It was very moving. I sat at the back on my own with my popcorn. I won’t say I was in tears at the end, but I had to take a few deep breaths. I was a young actor in my 20s, going out in Soho, having a wild time. I didn’t know Ewan, but I used to see him around. It was so strange after all these years to be sitting there watching it with him and thinking of how much time had gone by.”
- Fargo returns in the UK on 31 May on Channel 4 at 10pm, and continues in the US on Wednesdays at 10pm on FX.
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