FX's 'Legion' Showrunner Noah Hawley on His "Invented" X-Men World
Legion is set to premiere on FX on February 8, and it has startlingly few connections to the film franchise it owes its life to. Noah Hawley is on as writer and showrunner, earning the role immensely due to his pulling off a TV adaptation of Fargo to such rousing success that some might even consider it a better interpretation of the darkly comedic world created by the Coens.
In an interview with Variety, Hawley said that "when I took on 'Fargo,' I thought, 'Well, this is just a terrible idea. Four people will watch it and they'll hate watch it. But that allowed me to just go for it and take the risks."
Hawley is far less interested in tying things to X-Men than the marketing is. “With the X-Men comics, there are a lot of alt universes, so that has allowed me some leeway,” Hawley says. “And obviously it’s a sort of origin story for David, but none of the other characters that I’ve surrounded him with are from the comics. It’s sort of an invented world.”
"If you have a character whose experience of reality is unusual, that’s the show,” Hawley says of his character and his concept. "You shouldn’t look at him from the subjective, normal point of view. But that brings you to a place that’s surreal, which is not something that television does. It might take dramatic risks and tell you antihero stories, but it’s very rare that it does something surreal.”
“We’re used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device,” Hawley says. “Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there’s really only one note that you get, and that’s clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They’ll sacrifice the joke. They’ll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.”
You can read the entire, fascinating article at Variety.
