Ben Whishaw as Rabbi Milligan.
By Matthias Clamer/FX.There are a number of speeches this season about what it means to exist on the margins of America, and the stories Americans tell themselves—the false mythologies we embrace. That seems fairly relevant right now, as we head into an election and face a lot of social unrest.
On some level, it’s a long-overdue conversation that we’re finally having. On another level, we’ve been having this conversation for hundreds of years about race and immigration in America. So there’s no time this show could have come out where it wouldn’t have felt timely. It just feels acutely timely now. I remember sitting down with Chris Rock early on and talking about one of the things that I always felt about the Coen brothers’ humor was the sort of Kafkaesque quality to it.
There’s something, the irony of it. When you remove humor from irony, it becomes violence. I’ll give you an example that’s relevant to this season. When you create a country which talks about equality and justice, and then doesn’t offer equality and justice to everyone, but still says that it does, what you have is irony without humor.
What’s an example of that?
If you’re told that in order to live in America, you have to be an American—but you can’t be an American if you’re an immigrant, or you’re Black, or whatever the description is from whoever is deciding what is an American—now you’ve created a house with no doors, and you’re telling people to get inside. And that is the setup to a joke with no punch line. You know what I mean? It’s where the joke is on you.
You have that as your foundation, and you’ve layered all of these colorful figures in around it. You have Jessie Buckley’s predatory nurse, you have Timothy Olyphant’s folksy U.S. marshal. Jack Huston’s character, the obsessive-compulsive local cop. Do you recall how each came to be?
You start to think, on a very basic level, what do I need? And I had decided very early on that I didn’t want this all-good cop, because if you’re talking about outsiders to the American experience, that’s not most people’s experience of law enforcement. But then I thought, Well, somebody has to serve that role [of protagonist], and on some level, that role feels also tied into a kind of detective quality. And I had this Rear Window thought about Ethelrida, about this girl living across the street from this nurse, who I had the sense was going to play a pivotal role in the larger story.