Orange Is the New Black star Uzo Aduba has joined the cast of FX’s Fargo which will be headed by famed comedian Chris Rock for its fourth season outing. The Emmy winner’s role on the FX anthology is her second at the cabler; she’s also in the cast for the limited series Mrs. America. Aduba will play a character named Zelmare Roulette in the fourth season of the anthology despite very little details being released about her role.
Aduba made her breakout on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren— the series just finished up its seventh and last season run on the streamer in July. In addition to her two Emmys, the actress won two individual SAG Awards for the role and shared another three with her OITNB cast mate for best ensemble. In the star-studded Mrs. America, Aduba will play Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm who led the ground-breaking movement aimed at ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment and will be featured alongside Cate Blanchett who is set to play conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.
Fargo‘s fourth season is set in 1950’s Kansas City and will follow two great migrations —the influx of Southern Europeans to the U.S. and the plight of African-Americans leaving the Jim Crow South. With the country changing at a fast pace due to different cultures mingling, two Kansas City crime syndicates (one Italian, the other African-American) have struck a deal with each other to help ensure the peace which involved switching their two sons for the other.
Rock will play Loy Cannon, the head of one of the families, while Ben Whishaw — whose character, Rabbi Milligan, suggests a connection to season two of the show, where Bokeem Woodbine played Kansas City mob enforcer Mike Milligan — Jack Huston, Jason Schwartzman, Jessie Buckley, Salvatore Esposito, musician Andrew Bird, Jeremie Harris, Gaetano Bruno, Anji White, Francesco Acquaroli E’myri Crutchfield and Amber Midthunder all round out the rest of season four’s cast.
Creatively and thematically, each season of the anthology series has focused on new sets of characters in different periods of time. Seasons one and three covered contemporary settings, with some characters crossing over between the two, while the series’ second season was set in the late 1970s. It partly followed the story of a younger version of police officer Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) who was played by Keith Carradine in the freshman season. For the fourth go, series’ creator, Hawley, clearly plans on digging further into the Midwest’ svarious histories and characters.
“More and more as I think about telling stories in this vein and what the original film is about, these are really American stories and stories about the American landscape, and the things that people do for money,” he says. “I feel like I have a very interesting and exciting direction to go in. I’m trying to find the time to get it down on paper.”