When it came to Fargo‘s fifth chapter, no character was more perplexing than Sam Spruell‘s sin-eater Ole Munch, who donned a kilt and did other people’s dirty work for a price. And when they couldn’t pay up? He sought satisfaction through more biblical means.
First hired by Jon Hamm‘s Roy Tillman to kidnap his runaway wife Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Juno Temple), Ole Munch quickly becomes a foe to the rogue sheriff and his son Gator (Joe Keery), when they refuse to properly pay him for his efforts after Dot attacked him, left his cohort dead, and put him out. When Gator accidentally kills the old woman he’d taken up residence with, Ole Munch takes the boy’s eyes out with a hot poker. Proving to be ruthless, it is ultimately Dot’s kindness that sets him on a new path after years of loneliness and the weight of the sins he’d been forced to carry.
Below, Spruell opens up about taking on the other-worldly role, discusses his approach to a character with minimal dialogue, and weighs in on whether he’d like to see Ole Munch return in possible future chapters of Noah Hawley‘s FX anthology series.
Frank W Ockenfels III/FX
How was Ole Munch presented to you as a character, and how did you build on that interpretation for the screen?
Sam Spruell: There was a description in the script that was pretty vivid, but it was really when I spoke to Noah, that he gave me the full rundown. He began maybe in Wales, lived in Scandinavia, came over from Scandinavia to America. He’s 500 years old. He’s been in America for 200 years. He hasn’t spoken for 100 years. So I knew that he was a supernatural, thematic character in a way. I guess with this crazy breed, this kind of untouchable breed, something that I had never contemplated before, these parameters of a human being I then had to do just that, make him a human being, make him a proper person rather than something that was kind of emblematic of [a human being]. I had to really make him a person. That was quite a task.
I began with the bits of information that he’d given me and that helped me start to create a voice and then there’s his costume in these boots and this kilt and you get a sense of timelessness anyway. There are all these things added to a character in makeup and in hair that allow you to think less about what he represents and concentrate more on who he is as a person, who he is inside, and I think eventually we got there.
Was it challenging to portray a character without much dialogue? How did that impact your approach?
I didn’t really think about it like that. I just thought that when he did speak, every word felt really important. And thoughts were really coming up from the depths of time and historical experience. So, I didn’t think of it as few words. I just thought of it as when he speaks everything is vital and, there’s no throwaway. He speaks in monoliths. And so that’s really how I went about it, and the fact that he hadn’t spoken for 100 years, in my head, created a kind of struggle for him to form sentences and when he did finally get round to shaping something and delivering it, it had been thought about and carved out of rock. So I linked how he spoke and how he thought up together. It’s quite hard to explain the process that went into a performance, but that’s the best I can say.
Michelle Faye/FX
Were there any characters from pop culture or past seasons that influenced your performance at all?
Oh, yes. That’s quite interesting. I suppose looks wise, with his hair, I wanted a kind of counterculture haircut. So, something that felt a bit alien almost. So I took in pictures of mods of mod hairstyles from the ’60s. Paul Weller would be a good example and it seemed to have a kind of historical edge to it as well, something kind of weirdly from the 1500s or whatever; it was something that he could have maybe cut himself. So certainly, if you’re talking about pop culture, it was the mods and Paul Weller.
I showed these pictures to Noah [Hawley] and he was like, “Great, now I’m excited.” So it’s funny how you take something, you offer it up, and sometimes it just hits, in this case, the showrunner. I thought quite deeply about the psychology of it rather than anyone in particular. I thought about how he’d never been shown any kindness, how he’d never been shown any love or compassion, how he had been forced into that sin-eating. I really thought about what he was trapped in and how that shaped him as a person rather than anyone in particular.
You talk about the psychology of Ole Munch—how do you carry that weight in your performance?
You think about how being trapped in sin affects someone, how that really isolates someone and kind of turns them in on themselves, and that folds darkness into darkness. [He’s kind of a] black hole of a character where there’s such little light allowed into their psyches. And I just tried to carry the effects of that. It was quite a lonely and depressing role to play in the long, cold winter of Calgary. It’s not always kind of a happy place when you’re acting, but the satisfaction in doing something with truth is trying to find accuracy with your character as well. And the satisfaction of that makes up for all the loneliness and sadness of playing those particular characters.
(Credit: FX)
By the end of the season, he’s welcomed into the Lyon home, and at first, as viewers, it’s terrifying to see him there, but then he seems like the skittish one as they show him hospitality. What was going through Munch’s mind at that moment?
He comes from his own code and they have their own and their code is based on love and forgiveness, something that no one through all his 500 years on the planet has ever shown him. And so I think when someone does reach out, when someone does offer an alternative, it’s unbelievably frightening. I think we all have our versions of that. And Ole Munch is experiencing an extreme version of what I just described, a kind of alternate way of life that has never been on his horizon. And his horizon is so low, there is a kind of whole world of compassion above it which he’s never accessed.
So, yeah, the force in that scene happens so incrementally that they don’t try and hug him because if they did, he would probably have to kill them. Physical touch would be just so extreme for him. He would see it as a threat, but I think these small gestures of cooking together and being part of a family, that is not a threat to him. All these things challenge his code and, finishing with the biscuit, he accepts their compassion and it’s a possible break in the cycle of his life which has not been a happy one up to now.
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Considering Munch sort of transcends time, that means he could exist in various eras of the Fargo universe. If Noah were to ask you back, would you be interested in exploring the character in a different chapter of the anthology?
I would do that in a heartbeat, I think, because it’s quite interesting if it was a kind of origin story. I’m sure throughout his life you could pitch him anywhere in history and find some kind of story for him wherever you set it. But also, it could be quite interesting to see him adopt a different code and move into a different way of life in the future. So I feel like whether you do a prequel or a sequel to Ole Munch in Fargo, you can find effective stories either way. But also, maybe those kind of characters, you play them once. And there’s something about the group of characters that I got to play with—Juno Temple, Joe Keery, David Rysdahl, Jon Hamm, they were very special actors. So it really was incredible to play with them and it is a kind of alchemy of a group of actors that makes something special. So maybe I’ll leave Ole Munch to rest.
FX’s Fargo, Year 5, Streaming now, Hulu
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