Chris Rock on starring in Fargo: "This is the best part I've ever had"

The Hollywood Reporter

Fargo creator Noah Hawley first pitched Rock on playing 1950s Kanas City wily mob boss Loy Cannon for Fargo Season 4 in summer 2018, after the comedian was coming off the success of his Netflix special Tamborine. "I just thought, 'He’s that guy,'" says Hawley. "Chris had started with nothing, a skinny kid with no permission to get up on that stage, and now he’s a sort of elder statesman — he’d hate me for saying that — someone who has built an empire for himself, and that’s who Loy is, too." Rock would often joke about taking gigs in desperation to pay for his alimony. Fargo was different. "This is the best part I’ve ever had," Rock tells The Hollywood Reporter profiler Lacey Rose. Rock has had a few decent roles, but he wasn't always ready for those parts. For Fargo, Rock was ready. At age 55, Rock has undergone a personal transformation, learning to swim for the first time and going to therapy seven hours a week -- while learning that he has nonverbal learning disorder, or NVLD. "I had this great combination of big ego and low self-esteem," Rock says of his rise to fame in the late 1990s. "And the ego gets you out onstage, but the low self-esteem is the thing that makes you practice so much because you don’t believe in yourself at all. You think you’re a total fucking fraud — and you don’t think anybody could love you for being you, so you have to be good at this thing." As Rose writes, "Fear, it turns out, was a great motivator. It drove Rock for decades: fear of failing; fear of letting people down; fear of not being rich and famous anymore. But it took a toll on his act, his relationships, his entire sense of self. Right up until he couldn’t take it anymore." Rock adds: "It just depletes you. I had to let it go. I was just dying, dude." Rock had less than two episodes of Fargo to film when the coronavirus shutdown occurred in March. The past six months have allowed Rock a reset, giving him time to work om himself. "What people don’t realize is that athletes get that time," he says, "and you can’t obtain greatness without the time to rest and work on yourself and your faults." ALSO: Chris Rock discusses Tamborine's relevance amid police brutality protests and failing to sell a Wendy Williams talk show to HBO ("That’s $100 million that I never made").