Ah, Geez - Freeman For FARGO Redux?

Warm up the prowler and prepare for some pancakes - The Hollywood Reporter is, um, reporting that Martin Freeman is "tapped" to star in the FX Television reboot of Joel and Ethan Coen's 1996 film Fargo.

Previously, THR had let us know that Billy Bob Thornton (no stranger to Coen's universe with the underrated The Man Who Wasn't There) was set to play "Lorne Malvo, the rootless, manipulative man who meets the small-town insurance salesman and sets him on a path of destruction."

Freeman is set to play Lester Nygaard, the character that was played by William H. Macy in the original flick.

The show's going to be Exec Produced by the Brothers Coen, while the show runner will be Noah Hawley who has done some television project such as My Generation which I have to admit I've never heard of.

Still, I think the story might lend itself well to some digging into the character in an Elmore Leonard kind of way - we're already getting to see with Boardwalk Empire what a TV version of Miller's Crossing would be like, and that show's a goddamn masterpiece (so's the film, natch).

So, colour me moderately excited and cautiously optimistic that they can pull things off. Casting Freeman as a neurotic nebbish isn't a bad sign at all...