‘Fargo’ Spoilers: Mary Elizabeth Winstead On Whether There’s More Bridge Tournaments For Nikki, Ray

The ongoing investigation of Maurice Lefay’s (Scoot McNairy) murder will seemingly end Nikki Swango (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Ray Stussy’s (Ewan McGregor) dreams of becoming Bridge champions in Season 3 of “Fargo.”

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Winstead implied that viewers may not see the couple join a Bridge tournament again anytime soon. “Bridge kind of takes a backseat once you throw an air conditioner on someone’s head,” Winstead said when asked if fans are going to see Nikki and Ray play the card game again later in the season. “Things have to move forward, so Bridge starts to become a little bit in the rear view of it all. But it says so much about them as a couple and about [Nikki] as a person, so I think Bridge is always going to be a big theme of their lives and of the story.”

Winstead also told the news outlet that she tried to learn how to play Bridge before filming the series. “I had hopes to myself when I first got the script. I got the script in September and we shot in January … so I convinced myself I was gonna learn Bridge,” the actress said. “I was gonna be a Bridge expert. That I was really focused on. And I took a couple of lessons and it became clear, almost instantly, that I was never ever going to learn Bridge.”

READ: Ewan McGregor talks playing two roles in Season 3 of “Fargo”

In a separate interview with Yahoo TV, Winstead called Bridge “the most complicated game” she’s ever heard of. “It is so beyond my mental level,” the “Mercy Street” alum admitted. “It really taught me a lot about how smart Nikki is because I don’t know how long it would take me to actually learn that game. Probably years to master it. Well, no, I’d never master it, but to even begin to really properly play it, I think it would take me years to figure it out.”

Winstead said that she and McGregor went to a couple of private lessons to learn the game, but when they realized that that they weren’t going to actually know how to play it, they just decided to watch a tournament instead.

“[It] was very eye-opening,” Winstead told Time of her experience watching an actual Bridge tournament for the first time. “I mean, I will never understand this game. But when we went and watched people play, then we could go okay, yeah, that’s right, we’re actors. We can pretend we know what we’re doing.”

“In the tournament, it was interesting because everyone knew each other,” Winstead told the Los Angeles Times of her observations. “Teams have been teams for years and years. There was drama. It was like very friendly … but it was also a little bit cutthroat. You could tell that there was drama between teams. This person screwed this person over. They took it really really seriously. So it’s interesting to see at certain level ho cutthroat it could get.”

In Season 3, episode 4, Nikki and Ray seemingly lost their potential Bridge sponsorship with Burt Lurdsman after Ray ditched their meeting following his termination from his job as a parole officer. But in order to fund their own Bridge tournaments, the couple come up with an ingenious way to get money from Ray’s brother Emmit (also played by McGregor) in Season 3, episode 5.

“Fargo” Season 3, episode 5, titled “The House of Special Purpose,” airs on Wednesday, May 17 at 10 p.m. EDT on FX.