“My favorite moment in production is walking on set for the first time and thinking, This could go horribly. Because then you’re really risking something.”
Before Noah Hawley created his renowned television adaptation of the 1996 Coen brothers’ classic film Fargo, he spent most of his time writing novels. His first, A Conspiracy of Tall Men (1998), is about a professor of conspiracy theories who becomes embroiled in a mystery of his own when his wife dies in a plane bombing. As he plummets down one of the rabbit holes he has made a career of circling, the professor finally has good reason to be paranoid—only now he can’t get his usual enjoyment from it. This predicament is typical of Hawley’s work: respectable American life becomes a comic nightmare, and sanctioned pleasures turn perverse. But for Hawley, darkness need not mean doom. His magisterial command of plot—and of what makes it compulsive—is coupled with a remarkable gift for finding humor and goodness in stories of inexhaustible violence.
Born in New York City in 1967 to a family of writers, Hawley studied political science at Sarah Lawrence College and shortly thereafter began writing fiction while working as a paralegal, first in New York and later in San Francisco, where he also joined the Bay Area collective the Writers Grotto. On the heels of the publication of his debut novel, Hawley wrote and then sold his first screenplay, which would become the film Lies and Alibis. This occurred during an auspicious six-month period when he also had his novel optioned by Paramount, and successfully pitched an idea for another movie. In the decades since, Hawley has written five novels; cowritten and directed the feature film Lucy in the Sky (2019), which stars Natalie Portman as an astronaut suffering from PTSD in the aftermath of a space mission; and created numerous TV series, including five seasons of Fargo (2014–24), the Marvel Comics–inspired show Legion (2017–19), and, most recently, Alien: Earth (2025), a prequel to the 1979 Ridley Scott film. When interviewers emphasize the sheer breadth of his output, Hawley responds by sharing his professional motto: “What else can I get away with?” It’s exactly this boldness and sharp attunement to the world around him that have come to define Hawley’s high-wire acts.
For this issue, Hawley was interviewed by actor and musician Jason Schwartzman, who plays the impudent son of a powerful crime boss in Fargo’s fourth season. Schwartzman’s storied film and television career began when he landed his first role, at the age of seventeen, in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998), beginning a long-standing collaboration between the two. With the release of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, 2024 was an especially triumphant year for Schwartzman, who had roles in both, as well as the lead in Nathan Silver’s critically acclaimed film Between the Temples, in which Schwartzman plays a doubt-ridden cantor heartened by his friendship with his former elementary school music teacher. Contributing to his status as a veritable indie darling, Schwartzman once played drums and wrote songs in the successful alternative-rock band Phantom Planet, and later made music for his solo project, Coconut Records. Recently, in New York magazine, Schwartzman described some of his favorite things. The list includes magnets, laminators, fabric markers for covering up coffee stains, his wife’s candles, and Boggle, about which he writes, “How did they create this game? How did they know what letters to put on what square? How did they do that? It is amazing. It’s probably one of the most important things in my life.”
—The Editors
I. “IT’S WATER, WATER, WATER, SMALL TALK, SMALL TALK, AND THEN—CHARM THEM”
JASON SCHWARTZMAN: Let’s just talk. So, you’re here in LA for how long?
NOAH HAWLEY: Just until Friday. Although there’s a screening of [Robert Eggers’s] Nosferatu on Friday night. And I’m like, Do I stay? It’s the kind of thing that’s hard with the kids—to say, I’m gonna stay another night to see a movie that I could see later, but Eggers is gonna be there. I could do it, but when you’re in our business, you’re gone from home so much that it feels like it’s gotta be really worth it to ask that of them.
JS: I know, I totally agree. There’s a band called Fontaines D.C., a really great band from Ireland. I’ve been literally following them. I seem to always be missing them on tour wherever they’re going. And so when I was in Manchester recently for work, it turned out they were going to be playing in this area not far away called Wolverhampton. I thought, OK, I have to do it. Even though I’ll be wrapped, I’ve got to stay this one extra day. And then I just couldn’t. I was like, What am I gonna do, go to this concert and not be with my kids?
NH: This business, in this town especially, will always ask things of you, and you’ve got to learn where your boundaries are. I’ve just learned to be like, No, I’m good. If it can be convenient for me, we’ll do it. If not, it’s fine. I don’t need it.
JS: When you talk about not doing something and having your boundaries, I wonder if there are any types of things you wouldn’t do, more out of nervousness or fear. Like, you’ve gotten numerous awards, and you’ve had to go into these rooms that are full of all these people. I’m so fearful in those kinds of public situations, or I used to be, at least. Are your boundaries only family and time? Or are there things that hold you back from things you’re afraid of?
NH: No.
JS: Really?
NH: Long question, short answer.
JS: Exactly, yeah.
NH: Yeah, pretty much. We grow up as nervous young men with social anxieties, but I had a moment early in my career when I realized there’s a performance aspect to the job. I remember clearly one day thinking, Just go in and put yourself out there, even if you don’t feel it. And it’s easier the more I do it. A big part of this business is sales, right? A pitch is a very artificial thing. You walk into a room, make small talk, segue into the pitch. You do your pitch, and then maybe there will be a conversation about the pitch, and then you leave. It’s water, water, water, small talk, small talk, and then—charm them. It’s such a skill to be good at that, and you don’t want to deprive yourself of it. I always say you’ve got to be good enough to get into the room, you’ve got to be good in the room, and you’ve got to deliver when you leave the room. If you can do those three things right, you’ve got a career.
I remember we were in Chicago doing Fargo, season four. We had dinner: you, me, and [my wife], Kyle. You asked, “How do you do all the things you do?” And Kyle said, “He has no creative doubt.” I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it’s true. When I do something and I like it, I don’t have any doubt about it.
I will say what I’ve taken to doing when I go to these awards events: I have an agenda. I think, OK, here are the three people I want to talk to at this thing. Then, once I’ve talked to them, I can leave. So it’s not just some amorphous thing you’re going to. It’s like, I want to talk to this person, I want to talk to their boss and maybe schmooze with someone else, and then let’s just get out of there. Because a lot of those things, you’re like, I’m going, but what’s the point? Why am I doing it?
JS: When you’re talking about your agenda, are those people you want to talk to?
NH: Yes, those are people I want to talk to. It’s such a funny business. There are some parties that you go to just to be seen in the same room as certain people. So they go, Oh, right, you earned your way into this room. The goal is always, as an entrepreneur—which is what I am—to be able to do what I’m doing more: I want to make more TV, write another book. You’ve got to be a good businessperson. I’m not romantic about Hollywood; it’s all just people. I’ve never been invited to the White House, but I imagine that would be something I’d have a few nerves about.