We know Noah Hawley is one of the most clever writers in Hollywood but he also might be one of the busiest.
In his immediate future is the final season of “Legion” (premiering Monday at 10 p.m. on FX) and the fourth season of “Fargo.” Hawley’s also a novelist (“Before the Fall”) with another book on the back burner. If that’s not enough, he’s adapting Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” for an FX series and making his feature film directing debut (“Lucy in the Sky”). There’s also a Marvel movie (“Doctor Doom”) on the horizon.
So it’s no surprise that he’s more relieved than sad about “Legion” ending after three seasons. “I have both feelings, but given the volume of things I’m working on, it’s a relief when something ends,” says Hawley, 51.
The trippy superhero show, which is set in the X-Men world, stars Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) as David Haller, a troubled man with immense powers and psychological ailments. Although the first two seasons portrayed him as a protagonist, the final stretch has revealed that he’s actually the antagonist. The other characters have to stop him from destroying the world.
Hawley says that was always the plan.
“When we meet David [in Season 1], we feel empathy for that person because they’ve suffered. He meets a woman and they fall in love and we think, ‘We want that for him, he’s suffered so much, he should have that.’ Only over time do we realize that he is not as reliable a narrator or a person as we thought, and in fact in order to preserve his fragile sense of self, he has to keep this love story alive at all costs.
“Suddenly we realize this guy is a bad boyfriend and that inward focus that he has is actually narcissism in a dangerous way — in that his ego is so fragile that he can’t handle any version of him that is negative.”
Of course, a seemingly tortured man turning out to have a darker side is part of the zeitgeist — consider abuses of power among Hollywood celebrities in the #MeToo era.
Hawley was not intentionally trying to tap into that but rather, “It’s a case where the story that I was telling and the times that we’re in collided,” he says. “We’re in a moment in which we both have an increased call for male accountability and a rejection [by those men] of accountability going on. That makes that conversation even more important — about what it means to be responsible and what an abuse of power is.
“I think it’s important to have it in a show like this, which speaks so much to young people, and young men specifically, to incorporate into their entertainment — the fantasy of what it would be like to be powerful.”
After “Legion” Hawley’s moving onto Season 4 of “Fargo,” which will be set in 1950s Kansas City, Mo., starring Chris Rock.
“We’ll start filming in October. I have 5 or 6 scripts written and we’re in the middle of casting,” says Hawley. “[It will be] a challenge of mounting our biggest production yet, and the terrifying responsibility of trying to top ourselves and make something that’s timeless, if I can.”