Billy Bob Thornton Played One Of His Best TV Roles Ever As If He 'Weren't Human'

Chris Large/FX

Noah Hawley shows are never quite what they're presented as being. Just as "Alien: Earth" (his aesthetically pleasing if narratively wobbly "Alien" TV show) merges the anti-corporation messaging of director Ridley Scott's "Alien" with the existential musings on AI from Scott's other classic sci-fi movie, "Blade Runner," Hawley's "Fargo" isn't strictly a small screen adaptation of the Coen Brothers' Oscar-winning 1996 crime dramedy of the same name. In point of fact, the show draws thematically from multiple Coen works, with its fourth season (which focuses on a crime family war in 1950s Missouri), in particular, mining as much from the pair's 1990 Prohibition era gangster flick "Miller's Crossing" as anything else.

Billy Bob Thornton's insidious hitman Lorne Malvo from "Fargo" season 1 similarly has more in common with Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh in the Coens' "No Country for Old Men" film adaptation than any of the villains from the movie version of "Fargo" ... and not just in terms of the pair's unbecoming hairdos, either. Malvo, like Chigurh, is an enigmatic, devilish figure who seems to have an almost preternatural ability to encourage folks to become their worst selves with just a few words, as we see when he crosses paths with Martin Freeman's browbeaten Minnesotan insurance salesman, Lester Nygaard. It's not easy to create a riddle of an antagonist like that, either, as the Coens discovered when they set about preserving the mysterious nature of Bardem's chilling "No Country for Old Men" killer.

Thornton, for his part, had his own way to approach Malvo, and it worked like gangbusters. "I played that character as if I weren't human, because there's all this mention of him being part of the animal character and like a wolf and all that kind of stuff," he told PeopleTV in 2019.

FX

Anton Chigurh may've originally sprung from the mind of author Cormac McCarthy, but he fits into a greater trend in the Coens' work. Going back to Randall Cobb's "apocalyptic" biker bounty hunter Leonard Smalls in the Coens' 1987 crime comedy "Raising Arizona," and continuing on to the likes of John Goodman's "cyclopean" Ku Klux Klan menace Daniel "Big Dan" Teague from their 2000 "Odyssey" re-imagining "O'Brother, Where Art Thou?", the siblings have peppered their films with antagonists who feel practically supernatural at first. Inevitably, though, it turns out they're not, and there's nothing about them that human nature can't explain. Even Chigurh is a disturbingly realistic psychopath.

Lorne Malvo's no different in "Fargo," as much as he initially comes across like a devil who used to sit on Lester's shoulder before he hopped off and started roaming the Earth. Billy Bob Thornton only further plays up the evildoer's beguiling nature with his performance, as he constantly keeps you wondering what's really going on behind Malvo's unassuming facade. (It certainly helps that his smile never fully reaches his eyes.)

As with the baddies in the Coens' "Fargo" and their other films, Malvo is eventually forced to face some form of justice. However, that didn't actually impact the way Thornton played the character since he "didn't know" how Malvo's story ended until late into filming. "I had this idea that maybe it turns out that Lorne wasn't real, that actually he was supernatural. I'm glad that I thought that. I'm glad I didn't know how it was going to end," he explained to PeopleTV. Considering Malvo himself doesn't acknowledge he's a mortal man until he has to, it's no wonder Thornton's so terrific in the role.