When actress Allison Tolman arrived for a recent interview at the FX network’s Manhattan office, it wasn’t her welcoming smile, bright blue eyes or casually chic Monk and Lou black blazer that made the biggest impression.
It was her necklace with a thin, rectangular gold pendant — barely an inch wide and a quarter-inch high, engraved with the word “lucky.” Tolman wore that same trinket to her New York audition for “Fargo” last summer; five days later, she was offered the starring role of deputy sheriff Molly Solverson.
The significance isn’t lost on her.
“I feel like a very lucky girl,” says Tolman, whose only previous television work consisted of commercials, a one-day part as a nurse on an episode of “Prison Break” and a supporting character in the niche comedy “Sordid Lives” on the Logo network.
“At 32, I kind of thought I was past the point where I was gonna get a break that really changed my life overnight,” says Tolman, a Chicago resident since 2009. “It’s just a godsend.”
Tolman plays a quiet but eager 20-something cop tracking the carnage of a cold-blooded killer, played by Billy Bob Thornton. Tolman’s journey to “Fargo” — based on the 1996 Coen brothers film — was a long and winding one for the Texas native, whose parents reside in Houston.
After graduating from Waco’s Baylor University in 2004, Tolman dabbled in regional theater and sketch comedy in Dallas and, later, moved to Chicago where she paid her rent by selling theater subscriptions and managing clients for an IT company.
In Texas she landed her first of several commercials — a national Denny’s restaurant ad. “I played someone who wanted an omelette,” she says, laughing. “I was booked because I could make stupid faces, essentially.”
She also did two WalMart Christmas ads that could have been “big pay days,” but, unfortunately, never aired. “You get paid, but you don’t get any residuals. A good commercial can set you up for a while,” she says.
In Chicago, Tolman eventually juggled $11-an-hour temp jobs that allowed her to work in the morning and audition in the afternoon. Which is how she one day wound up in her agent’s office submitting a reel for the “Fargo” role.
When “Fargo” showrunner Noah Hawley offered her the part of Molly, Tolman was working part time at a photography studio.
“He said, ‘I want you to remember this moment for the rest of your life,’” she recalls, adding with a hearty laugh, “I was standing on the street outside the photo studio next to, like, a butcher shop with garbage trucks going by.”
Now Tolman, who has a longtime boyfriend, is adjusting to the sudden — and surreal — experience of working alongside actors like Thornton and Keith Carradine, who plays Molly’s father, a retired state police offer.
She recounts a night last fall in Calgary, Canada — where the series was filmed — when she heard a guitar strumming through the walls of the hotel where the cast was staying.
She remembers thinking, “Oh, someone’s noodling around on their guitar; that’s so cute. I wonder who’s the musician? He’s really good!” In the hallway the next day she ran into Carradine — who won an Academy Award for his top-40 hit “I’m Easy” from the 1975 film “Nashville” — and realized he was the phantom guitarist.
“He was like, ‘Am I keeping you awake?’” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘No, Oscar-winner Keith Carradine, you keep right on playing your guitar. It’s totally fine!’”
Tolman realizes the high-profile series with the star-studded cast is quickly moving her into the spotlight. She also understands the comparisons between Molly and Marge, the cop played by Frances McDormand in the original “Fargo.”
“It’s an iconic role associated with her. That would be intimidating for anybody, and certainly coming in from out of nowhere is very intimidating because, literally, no one has seen, really, what I can do,” Tolman says. “I hope that not only do I not disappoint, but that I can be on some sort of the same spectrum with this beloved role that people are so fond of.”
Tolman thinks she’s naturally well-suited for her incarnation because she reads as “very approachable [in a] Midwestern, blue-collar way.”
But she appreciates that Molly is a more understated character than she’s used to. “She’s very much the one whose strength in comedy comes from silence and stillness, which is really unusual for me coming from the sketch comedy world,” Tolman says.
Molly is also the first police officer she’s done. “I’ve played a lot of nurses, but never a cop before,” Tolman says, joking that it opens up possibilities. “A nurse with a gun is the goal in 2015, baby!”
In the meantime, Tolman knows that “Fargo” could bring her even more recognition when she’s out in public. She says she’s ready because she’s already encountered it, although on a much smaller scale.
Tolman recalls shooting a commercial in Chicago last year for a Midwestern energy company called Ameren. This past March, she attended a close friend’s wedding in St. Louis, where the ad regularly aired.
“When I got to the rehearsal dinner, everyone was like, ‘You’re the Ameren girl!’” she says, laughing. “I was, like, ‘I am, but just wait, ’cause things are gonna get real strange, real soon!’
“It was kind of fun to be recognized for that little commercial,” she adds. “But I’m holding onto normalcy for as long as I can before the show blows up.”