PASADENA — The third installment of FX’s “Fargo” went into production in Calgary last week, which means new details about this latest season, set to premiere in April, are starting to trickle out.

As previously announced, the cast is lead by Ewan McGregor, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Carrie Coon, David Thewlis, Michael Stulhbarg and Jim Gaffigan. The new “true” crime” tale centers of brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy (both played by McGregor) whose sibling rivalry sets off a chain of events that starts with petty theft but soon involves murder and mobsters.

Much of the main cast appeared on a panel at the Television Critics Association press tour Thursday to tease the new season, which is again created by Noah Hawley and inspired by the 1996 Coen Brothers movie. Here’s what we know so far.

It will be the most modern “Fargo” yet. The new season is set in 2010, four years later than the time period of Season 1. “Noah is enjoying that technology in many ways is supposed to unite; and, in fact, perhaps that’s not what happens at all,” said executive producer Warren Littlefield. “Carrie has a scene where she’s going to be on a plane, and she notices everyone around her has their heads down and their face in their phone, and no one is communicating. No one is talking, and I think, from her perspective, that seems rather strange. So Noah is going to have a lot of fun, I think, commenting on and embracing the world as it is almost today.”

It will tie into a previous season. Just like Season 2 featured a character from the first season, Lou Solverson (played first by Keith Carradine, then Patrick Wilson), Season 3 also exists in the same “Fargo” universe. “We like the idea that, as you saw in Year Two, there’s this wonderful book that might say ‘True Crimes of the Midwest,’ and that imagine that the Coens’ movie might be a chapter, and each season of ‘Fargo’ is a chapter from that book,” Littlefield said. “We will have a ‘kiss in’ to Season 1 that we think is appropriate because we’re doing a different film each year, but, yes, they’re related geographically. There are thematic touches. And as you’ve seen, we make some character kisses as well.”

It’s a smaller story. While the casts of the first two seasons of “Fargo” were sprawling, Season 3 is keeping it to about 11 main and recurring characters. “The important thing about Year Three is there’s more intimacy,” Littlefield said. “We’re a smaller cast in Year Three. That allows us to go deeper with each and every one of these characters. And Noah’s very focused on not repeating himself. Year Two was a large war. So we live within these characters, but as I said, there will be a kiss with the past.”

McGregor will speak with an accent. A Fargo accent, that is. The Scottish actor not only had to master the Minnesota dialect, but create two slightly different versions to play the Stussy brothers, Emmit, the Parking Lot King of Minnesota, and Ray, a parole officer. “It’s the hardest accent I’ve ever done. And I did Dutch once in something. I thought that was quite hard, but this is worse,” he said. “And also because it’s very familiar, it’s an accent that everybody we know from the movie and from Season 1 and 2, so our audience’s ear is attuned to it.”

The character names are the best yet. Take Nikki Swango (Winstead), Ray’s girlfriend, a recent parolee with a penchant for competitive bridge. “She’s incredibly smart and savvy and has the capacity to be conniving, as a cat maybe would imply. But I think she has a heart, you know, if I can say that without giving away too much,” Winstead said. “One of the things that Noah said … was that he likes all the characters to be able to feel like they could be a villain at any given moment or a hero at any given moment. And I think Nikki very much falls in between those two categories.”

Coon is playing the female cop role. Like the Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) in the movie and Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) in the first season, Season 3 again has female top cop chasing the case, with Coon as Gloria Burgle, the chief of the local police department and a newly divorced mother. “She really represents a kind of small town aesthetic, a sense of community that she feels has been eroded by forces outside of herself,” Coon said. “And her personal life is also falling apart. That’s the thing that distinguishes her from characters in previous seasons that had this female sheriff idea. Her personal life is eroding, and she’s trying to hang on to who she is inside of that happening in a microcosm and also in the macrocosm in the world that she’s policing.”

There’s a ‘Machiavellian’ loner capitalist… Thewlis’ character, V.M. Vargas, is the one that informs Emmit that the Parking Lot King of Minnesota is now partnered with his shady employer. “He’s a very mysterious character. He’s a guy from out of town who is very possibly ill mannered and lacking in virtue, to sat the least,” Thewlis said. “He’s a very Machiavellian-type character, very unscrupulous.”

…And a jealously-inducing partner. Stuhlbarg is playing Sy Feltz, Emmit’s right hand man and consigliere. “He is described as being a partner of Emmit Stussy in Emmit’s business. And he has a relationship with both brothers. He knows them both,” Stuhlbarg said. “But he’s been working with Emmit for many years, and they are very close — almost perhaps in some ways more brotherly than he and his other brother. He finds himself in and out of their relationship in some interesting ways.”