Before Noah Hawley created his renowned television adaptation of the 1996 Coen brothers’ classic film Fargo, he spent most of his time writing novels. His first, A Conspiracy of Tall Men (1998), is about a professor of conspiracy theories who becomes embroiled in a mystery of his own when his wife dies in a plane bombing. As he plummets down one of the rabbit holes he has made a career of circling, the professor finally has good reason to be paranoid—only now he can’t get his usual enjoyment from it. This predicament is typical of Hawley’s work: respectable American life becomes a comic nightmare, and sanctioned pleasures turn perverse. But for Hawley, darkness need not mean doom. His magisterial command of plot—and of what makes it compulsive—is coupled with a remarkable gift for finding humor and goodness in stories of inexhaustible violence.

Born in New York City in 1967 to a family of writers, Hawley studied political science at Sarah Lawrence College and shortly thereafter began writing fiction while working as a paralegal, first in New York and later in San Francisco, where he also joined the Bay Area collective the Writers Grotto. On the heels of the publication of his debut novel, Hawley wrote and then sold his first screenplay, which would become the film Lies and Alibis. This occurred during an auspicious six-month period when he also had his novel optioned by Paramount, and successfully pitched an idea for another movie. In the decades since, Hawley has written five novels; cowritten and directed the feature film Lucy in the Sky (2019), which stars Natalie Portman as an astronaut suffering from PTSD in the aftermath of a space mission; and created numerous TV series, including five seasons of Fargo (2014–24), the Marvel Comics–inspired show Legion (2017–19), and, most recently, Alien: Earth (2025), a prequel to the 1979 Ridley Scott film. When interviewers emphasize the sheer breadth of his output, Hawley responds by sharing his professional motto: “What else can I get away with?” It’s exactly this boldness and sharp attunement to the world around him that have come to define Hawley’s high-wire acts.