After nabbing three Emmys, including one for best miniseries, back in August, Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley put awards season behind him and started working on the second season of his FX anthology — one that will revisit at least one character from the first season, albeit 35 years eaarlier.

“It’s interesting because we’ve been so focused on making the next year of the show that this second half of awards season really snuck up on me,” Hawley told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday morning, shortly after his series received four nominations. “To now live with these shows more than the hour a week they’re on, sometimes obsessively, it keeps things alive. It’s also a whole other component of what it means to make movies and television these days. To some extent, you want to control the information that gets out. Not in the J.J. Abrams mystery-box way, but I don’t want to spoil the viewers that don’t want to know, because there are a lot of those as well.”

Fargo’s Globes nominations (and SAG nomination and AFI award) come just as the pieces are falling into place for the sophomore run. Hawley, who already detailed that the series would visit the 1979 Sioux Falls incident involving a young Lou Solverson (originally played by Keith Carradine), found two key castmembers just this week. Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons will play married couple Peggy and Ed Blomquist.

“There are still some big roles we haven’t filled yet,” said Hawley. “You always hope that five Golden Globe nominations will help you do that. It’s a bigger cast this time. It’s more ambitious, but right at the heart of it is this married couple. Kirsten’s name came up very quickly. And, for me, there was no one else other than Jesse. I don’t write with actors in mind, but as soon as I started thinking about it … that combination tells a story. That’s critical in casting.”

One of the bigger yet-to-be-cast roles is the young Carradine. And Hawley, who’s already in Alberta prepping for filming in mid-January, concedes that the original seed for Lou Solverson’s story was a bit of an accident.

“It was really just a story to give him a point of reference,” he explained. “The more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘That’s fun. Let’s tease that.’ It’s not like I’m sitting around now thinking about what I’m going to do after this one. I’m just thrilled that another story came to me that I thought was as good.”

Season three, of course, seems like even more of an inevitability as Fargo rakes in more nominations. And for any idea of how Hawley envisions them being strung together, his description of connectivity between the film and the series is a good place to start.

“I always had this image in my head of some old, leather-bound book with hand-drawn illustrations that was published in the 50s,” he said. “It’s like The History of True Crime in the Midwest. The movie was a chapter from it, and our first year was a chapter from it.”

Fargo returns to FX in the fall of 2015.

Michael O’Connell; hollywoodreporter.com