Juno Temple Had No Time to Grieve ‘Ted Lasso’ Before Starting ‘Fargo’: ‘It Was Kind of a Blessing’

There’s not much in common between Minnesota housewife Dorothy “Dot” Lyon and British model turned marketing executive Keeley Jones, but Juno Temple has a theory about the two women. And she should know, since she played Dot in “Fargo” and Keeley in “Ted Lasso” and earned Emmy nominations for both.

“I think that Dot and Keeley would probably be quite great friends,” the London-born actress said. “They’re both strong little women and they’ve got a lot of surprise elements.”

You could say the same for Temple herself, a former child actress and daughter of director Julien Temple who worked for almost 15 years before receiving the Rising Star Award from BAFTA in 2013. Temple has loaded up on the kudos in the past four years: three Emmy nominations for “Ted Lasso”and one for “Fargo,” four SAG Award noms and one ensemble win for “Ted Lasso”and a Critics Choice Award nomination for “The Offer.”

Where she was once best known for gritty indies like “Killer Joe” and “Kaboom” and for Martin Scorsese’s TV series “Vinyl,” she hit the mainstream with her captivating comedic flair as Keeley and then her deceptively steely pluck in “Fargo,” slipping in her turn in “The Offer” as a producer’s assistant on “The Godfather” between seasons of “Lasso.”

And if you think the jump from 2023’s final season as Keeley to 2024’s transformation into Dot might have caused a case of creative whiplash, you’d be right. “I did them back to back,” she said with a grin. “I wrapped ‘Ted Lasso’ (in London) on a Friday and I had Saturday and Sunday to pack. I traveled on Sunday afternoon and evening, landed in Calgary on Monday and was supposed to do a camera test on Wednesday. But I got quite sick, so I ended up being on camera on Friday. It was pretty crazy.”

She laughed. “But weirdly, I would say it was kind of a blessing because when I finished the third season of ‘Ted Lasso,’ I didn’t have time to grieve Keeley. There was this urgency to fill Dot’s shoes that meant that Keeley got a ‘See you later’ rather than a full, ‘Oh my God, is this the end?’”

The two characters had already been coexisting for a while in Temple’s home, where she would try out Dot’s Minnesota accent (very difficult to learn, but essential) in between Keeley’s Essex speech (an East London variant derived from Cockney) and her own West London one.

“When you first start a Minnesota accent prep, you genuinely question if you are ever going to be able to do it,” she said. “But that accent is a huge part of the ‘Fargo’ comedy element. You have to understand that the story is so dark that a lot of the humor has to come from the Minnesota-nice accent, the genuine niceness that people react to things with.”

For Dot, the accent is also deceptive. In the early episodes, she seems like a fairly normal housewife who happens to have some curiously developed survival skills. She’s one fierce mother, you could say — and it’s not until later that we learn the history of abuse that gave her those survival skills.

Temple herself didn’t know her character’s full backstory either when she met with creator Noah Hawley and agreed to star in Season 5 of a series that she’d felt had been “a decade of acting class” through its seasons with the likes of Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Ewan McGregor, Carrie Coon, Chris Rock and Jessie Buckley.

“I was sent the first three episodes, and then I had long conversations with Noah about where the storyline was going to potentially go,” she said. For her, those conversations were necessary: “A huge joy of that performance for me was making sure that the beginning episodes, where you don’t know so much about her, once you get to the end, they make a lot of sense.

“Playing a woman that has survived what she survived and is coming out on the other side with this enormous heart but this feral ability to survive situations and get out of situations — that was really interesting to weave into the beginning of the show. And as an actor, that was like a treasure chest — to work on the beats where when she’s in survival mode and she’s this amazing sloppy ninja warrior and also a nurturer.”

She laughed at the idea of becoming an action hero of sorts. “None of it was ‘John Wick’-style, which was good,” she said. “But I can be pretty scrappy, so I felt like I couldn’t lose.”

During shooting, she said, she filled her scripts with annotations of all the different states Dot goes through. “It was crazy, with my color coding of different beats — when this guard is down and this is up, things like that. It felt almost like a mathematical performance.”

But playing a woman who’d been through years of trauma also took its toll. “I’m not a Method actress, but you can’t help but let a character get under your skin when you live with them,” she said. “There were days when I got home and felt really fragile, but at the same time, I knew that I could talk about that to the people I was working with. I didn’t have to always be stoic, you know?”

“Fargo” goes deep into the darkness in its final few episodes, replete with killings, torture, maiming and sequences in which Dot is kidnapped, chained and beaten by her vicious ex-husband. But it also finds a startling grace note at the end of its last episode, in which Dot meets an ageless character who has been implacably stalking her for most of the series. (Think Javier Bardem’s relentless assassin in the Coen brothers’ ‘No Country for Old Men’ if he’d had centuries to hone his killing skills.)

The climactic showdown is gentle, involving a family dinner and what she calls a “forgiveness biscuit.”

“We were all truly blown away by the simple, quiet, profoundly beautiful way of ending it,” she said. “The brilliance of ‘Fargo’ is when you think somebody is completely unforgivable, they end up being the most human element of that storyline. Being part of that was thrilling and quite humbling.”

Of course, the one-two punch of “Ted Lasso” and “Fargo,” with “The Offer” thrown in as well, sets the bar very high for an actress who just turned 35. She’s got a role in the MCU’s upcoming “Venom: The Last Dance,” in which she plays a scientist tracking Tom Hardy’s title character, as well as a part in Gore Verbinski’s sci-fi film “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” alongside Sam Rockwell and Haley Lu Richardson and another in Doug Liman’s “Everest,” about the first man to climb the world’s highest mountain.

“What am I looking for?” she asked. “I’m looking for people that want to be creative together and are up for a challenge. There’s a whole new array of opportunities that I’m learning about, getting to play these more grown-up women. It’s exciting and also terrifying. I was lucky to have these characters that never cease to surprise you come into my life, and I want to keep playing complex females.

“As I’ve gotten older, it’s a matter of really just allowing yourself to be complete and present in the moment to react to these incredible people that are giving you things. It’s really, really powerful.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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