So what brought the actor the series? It was the script. “The whole first episode is what I based my decision on,” Freeman says. “For pretty much the entire ten episodes, I get to play the full depth of human experience.” Freeman says that’s an actor’s dream, something he couldn’t turn down. He describes showrunner/writer Noah Hawley’s scripts as full of surprises – and as an actor, it was worthwhile to not overprepare, to allow the character to be surprised from scene to scene: “Your understanding really evolves as you read. So by the end of episode ten, Lester is doing things that he wouldn’t do in episode one.”