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Noah Hawley had his sights set on being a rock star.
In fact, the man who went on to create Fargo, Legion and FX‘s upcoming Alien, started his career as a singer-songwriter with a band in his native New York City. Eventually, he tired of van-life and moved on, ultimately settling into a career behind the screen, first as a writer and, in time, as a director as well. Still, Hawley’s Hollywood office — which, technically, is in Austin, Texas — has vestiges of that rock star past, including an electric guitar and drum set, mixed in with the novels he’s written and trophies he’s earned.
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With Fargo set to return for its fifth season on FX Nov. 21, the married dad of two opened up about his process as well as as his carefully curated work space.
Hawley has lined his office shelves with books that he’s written (six in total) and read, along with a slew of awards, including a PGA win and two Edgar awards (one for Fargo, the other for his novel Before the Fall). Below a projector is also an illustration, which Hawley reveals is a proof from his mother Louise Armstrong’s first book, A Child’s Guide to Freud. He describes the latter as “the Oedipal complex as a children’s story,” before adding: “It was published in 1964 and her author photo has her smoking with a six inch cigarette holder — on the back of a children’s book.”
“I have a big roll of brown butcher paper on the wall and I use it often, tearing off a sheet and using it to map out a story idea — sometimes geographically by location, sometimes by character or groups of characters,” Hawley tells THR. “I find it really helps orient me about the different elements of a story and how they connect and collide.”
A memento that Hawley keeps from Fargo season four. The “Death Hat,” as he refers to it, is signed by every actor whose character died that year. “And there were a lot of them,” Hawley jokes of the 1950s Kansas City-set season. “Our costume designer, JR, gave it me after wrap and it was a great surprise.”
“My children both went to a Montessori school and one thing I always loved was how their classrooms were set up, with each distinctive subject having its own specific area,” says Hawley, whose kids are now 11 and 16. (At that age, his son and daughter typically stay put in Austin, where they’re both in school, while Hawley traverses the world filming.) “I jump around so much from show to show, films, books, music, that I’ve tried to design my space in a similar way.”
Included in the mix of trophies lining Hawley’s office is a 2014 Golden Globe that he took home for Fargo‘s first season. “It was very meaningful to me that the Golden Globe we won was handed to me by Jeremy Renner, who had starred in my first show The Unusuals,” he says, referring to the ABC crime drama that ran for a single season in 2009. “So much had happened for both of us in the six years since. I appreciated the kismet of it.”
Hawley considers Austin, Texas, home, and has for some 15 years. “The first year of Fargo, [the family was] all living in Canada, and then some time in L.A and New York. But once your kids reach a certain age, you got to live where they go to school and that’s been here,” he says via Zoom. “And look, I always say I want to tell stories for everybody, and it helps not to be in a coastal bubble if you want to do that. Austin is its own bubble, but I do like the remove. And then when I want to go and be part of the industry, I get on a plane or it comes to me.”
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