How "Fargo" made an icy villain out of Dave Foley, the famously nice Kid in the Hall
Accidents happen all the time in the “Fargo” universe, but there is little happenstance in its design, including that the name of Dave Foley’s character, Danish Graves, is introduced before we see him. The moniker adds to the gravitas of the always besuited right-hand man to the most powerful woman in Minnesota, if not the country, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
When Lorraine's son Wayne (David Rysdahl) bails his wife Dot (Juno Temple) out of jail after a fateful community rumble, Wayne thinks he's comforting her by sharing, "Mom said she's putting Danish Graves on it, so . . ."
Without knowing who or what Danish Graves is — assassin? Scandinavian mortician? Both?— the party on the business end of whatever Lorraine is scheming, that is an ominous sentence. Danish, in name and in behavior, represents something grimmer than his boss. As the head of the largest debt collection agencies in the nation, Lorraine depends on remaining in the good graces of lawmakers and finance officials while she bleeds the peasants dry. Enforcing her will, mainly through threats, well-timed phone calls and paperwork, falls to him.
For all her fabulously entertaining displays of insensitivity, Lorraine will do anything it takes to protect her family. Achieving that requires using men like Danish “as, basically, her pit bull,” Foley told Salon during a conversation that took place during a late winter visit to the "Fargo" set earlier this year.
In Foley’s view, this is more of a dark calling for Danish than simply a job. “There's an ability to somehow excise humanity from the equation that is interesting, where there's no consideration of the people that are manipulating to achieve whatever they want to do,” he observed. “And there's a glee in it . . . a sense of accomplishment that comes out of just having the power over other people.”
Three episodes into the fifth season, we don’t know much about Danish. His eyepatch only adds to his mystery. When I spoke with Foley on the frigid, snowed-blanketed Calgary set back in March, we knew even less. Production had recently gotten underway, and there weren’t any episodes to share with the small group of participating reporters..
No matter, because we know plenty of figures like Danish – people who erase blunders and correct mistakes. Lorraine suspects one of those slip-ups may be Wayne's marriage to Dot, who Danish correctly suspects may not be who she says she is.
But Lorraine's politesse has limits, as a pair of Minnesota’s finest find when they pay a visit to her office to inquire about her daughter-in-law’s connection to a North Dakota crime. Lorraine can barely muster the bother to look at them. Eye contact is Danish’s job. “If North Dakota wants to question either Mrs. Lyon, Wayne or Dot, they’ll need to go through me,” he says.
Lorraine may have a viper’s tongue, but she leaves the poisonous biting to Mr. Graves, family violence included.
“Slap him,” Lorraine orders over the phone as Danish sits with Wayne in the second episode. “You heard me. My son needs a slap, and I’m not there to give it to him, so as my attorney, I authorize you to knock his f**king block off.”
Lorraine is deadly serious, but Danish’s compliance with that order has a comedic crackle that recalls the absurdist delight of Foley’s seminal work in “Kids in the Hall.” Or it may be that we can’t yet shake our association with Foley playing a lovable figure, which is why he's embracing "Fargo."
“Outside of sketches that we wrote for ‘Kids in the Hall,’ you mostly get hired to play yourself,” he said. “So this was a nice chance to play someone who isn't me, or like me in any way, and who isn't nice.”
This is as apt a place to confirm your worst suspicions regarding the “Kids in the Hall” revival in 2022: Foley told Salon that Prime Video declined to pick up a second season. (Given the restrictions agreed to as a condition of the set visit, we couldn’t say anything until now.) But that doesn’t mean the band has broken up. “The troupe is committed to doing some other ‘Kids in the Hall’ stuff down the road,” he said. “We’ve just been having internal discussions about what that's going to be.”
Playing a snake in “Fargo” only expands Foley’s options, making him part of the anthology’s tradition of casting familiar comics as serious men. The first season featured Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as ineffectual federal agents, and Bob Odenkirk as a hapless police chief.
Back then Hawley likened Key and Peele to the Shakespearean figures Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Now that critics have seen most of the current season – its third episode airs this week – we have some sense that Danish Graves is no less classic but remarkably less “classy.” His type alloys themselves to power and quietly takes care of the unseemly tasks that are beneath their employers. They assume many forms, Michael Cohen being one. The taciturn family lawyer Mark Hamill channels in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is another, although Danish is comparatively more polished, befitting his role as Lorraine’s delegate in most matters.
Watching “House of Usher” isn't a required prerequisite to fill in the blanks in Danish's curriculum vitae. Are you awake and aware right now? That's sufficient; not much has changed since 2019, which is when the fifth season takes place. Brutish numbskulls still have too much power and threaten to abuse it further if or when they’re given the chance.
Neither series creator Noah Hawley nor the “Fargo” producers would claim that this season expressly critiques the policies and culture that Donald Trump’s presidency begat. But Foley has no compunctions about describing Leigh’s Lorraine as a vastly more intelligent and worldly version of the twice-impeached “stable genius.”
Does that make Danish the Rudy Giuliani in this relationship? I ask.
“Sadly it does,” he sighs. “But again, they're smarter than Trump and Giuliani, and I think that makes them a little more fun to watch because there’s not just a naked ugliness to them.”
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Foley takes care to qualify his opinion by saying that Hawley’s writing is psychological as opposed to expressly political. “He deals more with what flaws in human character allow these things to happen more than the political structures behind it,” he said. “Every season of the show explores that. What is so broken about the human character that the events in these stories can happen? What is broken in people? And where is there something in people that isn't broken? What is there to consider redemptive about humanity?”
Foley’s satisfaction in playing a well-heeled scoundrel is palpable. But he cites the peril in cheering on Lorraine and Danish – especially the fixer, who he described as someone with a front row view of Lorraine exploiting the indebted and aspires to be as ruthless and powerful as she is. “Fargo” being what it is, he isn't quite up to the challenge.
“We live in this world of unguarded terribleness and unguarded cruelty,” he said. “People used to be embarrassed by being cruel, embarrassed about being corrupt and dishonest, and tried to act like they weren't. Suddenly, we're in a world where the more horrible you can be publicly, the more you're rewarded. All the curbs on terrible behavior are gone.”
He continued, “I think that's a little bit of what this season's about: people who just have no sense that they should be ashamed of themselves in any way at all and feel like there's some sort of higher moral imperative that comes from the fact that they get away with it.”
New episodes of "Fargo" air 10 p.m. Tuesdays on FX and stream the next day on Hulu.
