Jennifer Jason Leigh Breaks Down Her Wild ‘Fargo’ Ride

This post contains spoilers about episode nine of Fargo’s fifth season.

There are two people Jennifer Jason Leigh had in mind when it came to crafting her delectable, scenery-chewing matriarch in the new installment of Noah Hawley’s Fargo: William F. Buckley, the flamboyant conservative commentator, and her own mother, the late Emmy-nominated screenwriter Barbara Turner. “When I veered more toward Buckley, it could get a little more grand,” she tells Vanity Fair of her performance. “When I would veer toward my mother, I could bring it in.”

One can see a bit more of the latter, perhaps, in Leigh’s tender and commanding work in the series’s penultimate episode, “The Useless Hand,” which premiered Tuesday night. Up until this point, Leigh’s powerful Lorraine Lyon—with her exquisitely expensive wardrobe, haughty mid-Atlantic accent, and Cheshire cat grin—had been skeptically investigating the disappearance of her daughter-in-law, Dot (Juno Temple). But as the reality of Dot’s mysterious past and her abusive former partner, Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), become clear, Lorraine realizes she needs to take action to hold her family together. And so she does, making a few simple phone calls that set the stage for an epic clash between law enforcement and Tillman’s criminal-militia enterprise. The result feels like classic Fargo, and a culmination of the show’s bold statements on the state of the country.

Leigh is having the time of her life in this part, owning every room she walks into just as Lorraine does. But what’s most impressive about her turn is the way, in an episode like this, she subtly gives this larger-than-life figure some new dimension. It’s a trademark of the Oscar-nominated actor, who’s been known for taking on big, complicated roles, from the ’90s independent scene to her resurgence in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, and imbuing them with a tough, hard-earned humanity. In an exclusive breakdown with Vanity Fair, Leigh reveals what led her to this moment—both in Fargo, and her career.

Vanity Fair: Let’s jump right into episode nine, and how it advances Lorraine’s arc. There’s a real shift in terms of her relationship to Dot and her place in the story. You don’t know at the beginning of the show whether you’re meeting a villain.

Jennifer Jason Leigh: Nor did I know when I first read it, because I only read the first three episodes.

Did you talk it through after that, though?

In talking to [Hawley] at the beginning, he did tell me that she would have this tremendous arc, but when I first read, we were just given three episodes—you don’t know what her place is or where. The thing about Fargo is you can never trust your take on a character. They’re always going to end up surprising you in some profound way.