After a five-year hiatus, “True Detective” returned for a fourth season, a season that turned out to be one of its most critically acclaimed and most watched ever. With Emmy Award voting right around the corner, “True Detective: Night Country” stars Jodie Foster, Kali Reis, John Hawkes, Isabella Star LaBlanc, executive producer Mari Jo Winkler-Ioffreda, and series creator Issa Lopez reunited for a screening and Q&A at the Television Academy to revisit the latest installment of the HBO anthology series. Foster, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs” over 30 years ago, hasn’t played a detective of any kind since. And, as she told the audience that was intentional.
READ MORE: Issa Lopez teases ‘True Detective’ Season 5 Might Return To Alaska
“Yeah. Well, I never wanted to do it again after ‘Silence of the Lambs,'” Foster says as the audience laughs. “I just don’t want to go into that arena again. But this was just such a beautiful script and I’m a different person. And there’s something really interesting about going back at this age and looking at the idea of investigation and how those investigators are very true to the first season of ‘True Detective.’ How the investigators’ psyches are a reflection of the kind of rock that they’re looking at, their damaged people. So yeah, it’s fun going back into the thriller horror world, and I’m drawn to it, obviously. So yeah, made me happy.”
Lopez, who was inspired by the “madness” of the pandemic, says it took her a long while in her career to be open to “the space of creation.” As she notes, “What’s the point otherwise of surrounding yourself with people that hopefully are much more talented than you, which is I think, the smart way to do it.”
In fact, the Mexican director and screenwriter initially saw Foster’s character, Alaska Police Force Chief Liz Danvers, as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She thought it was quite fun. And then she met Foster who was like, “It’s not fun.” Lopez recalls, “She was like, ‘Read the script, loved it,’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s going to say yes!’ [She was like,] ‘I love the script. I love the world. I don’t know if I can play this character.’ And I was like, ‘F**k.'”
Foster explained to Lopez that she was a lot more interested in the character that was left after coming out the other side of such pain and trauma.
“What I realized at the end of our conversation of her initial lunch is what she was saying is that she wanted her to be an asshole,” Lopez says. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I love that.’ So we went into that, and then I wrote Navarro initially as a Latina. It happens with a lot of Latin women. They join the Marines and then joined the police force. But the more I understood Alaska, this is a place where the more you go on the West, actually to the entire state, the percentage of the native population is higher and higher and higher, and [the town in the series] was as north as you can go.”
That led Lopez to change Reis’ character to a local who was partially of Dominican Republic and Iñupiaq ancestry, “But the most important aspect of her culturally is that she was taken away from her native culture and she’s disconnected from it. And all of that came from understanding the place. And then the question was, who’s going to play that? And this woman, [Kali Reis], the moment I saw her photograph, just her photograph, I was like…!”
A former professional boxer who has spent the last few years exploring her acting abilities, Reis appreciated that Navarro is a stubborn, layered, beautiful, vulnerable” and interesting character.
“It’s one of those characters that even when you watch it again, there’s something else that you find out about her,” Reis says. “And I love what Issa had constructed with her. She was so delicate in making sure I knew everything that she could create and then handed me over to, okay, she’s yours now. And it wasn’t me really creating the role. It was meeting her where she was and Alright, we’re going to work together with this thing. And it was when she allowed me to actually dive into that. And it wasn’t like a delicate process. It was getting warped into another world.”
While Reis is both native and Indigenous, she says it does not mean she’s a spokeswoman for the Indigenous experience. She felt it was important to sit down and have conversations with the Alaskan Iñupiat community and learn their stories. It helped that the series had recruited Iñupiat producers to consult on the show.
“I really got close to them,” Reis says. “Tell me stories. Tell me stories about your family. How do you want to be viewed on screen? And what is the story that I can convey through your experience in this character? So that was really part of my, just diving into Navarro. And then of course I have the Marine part of it. I’m not an ex-Marine, I’m not any military, but I do have friends. I want to know what those types of memories are. What are the triggers, what are the good times, what the music you listen to. I made playlists or I had listening to certain music. Yes, the Spice Girls was on it.”
Many have asked Lopez why she would select Alaska as the location for a new “True Detective” series. She replies that much like Louisiana in the first season, the 49th state “is one of the corners of the United States that we overlook and we don’t understand deeply enough.”
“In the Bayou, there is a different language that is spoken and in Alaska, [it’s] the language of survival because the weather will take you and the long nights will suck your soul,” Lopez says. “And you have to be careful. We were warned amply about the exposure to the long dark, and I thought that the madness that can happen under such extreme conditions is fascinating. On top of that, Alaska per capita is the state of the United States with the biggest number of disappearances and also is the state of the United States with the largest murder index per capita, which is also really, really broke ground for what I wanted to do.”
A veteran producer and unit production manager of projects such as “Y The Last Man” and “Stillwater,” Winkler-Ioffreda can speak the long, dark days and nights the crew experienced shooting Icelandf or Alaska.
“We shot 58 nights, 43 of them were consecutive. So for two months, for really two months in January, February, our work hours were four o’clock in the afternoon till two o’clock in the morning,” Winkler-Ioffreda reveals. “So, we were on a completely different cycle. But there was something amazing about it that you could sort of get up, go to the pool, and the gym, make some phone calls home, have a little lunch, and then head to set. And then it was just game on. And the thing about the cold is it was a lot less cold than Alaska would’ve been in the Arctic at minus 22. But the thing that was really unique about it was the wind. The wind was beyond. And there were nights when the Icelanders were very in tune with the weather. They know every minute of every day of what’s going to happen.”
Winkler-Ioffreda continues, “And our supervising location manager Thor, yes, his name was Thor, would come to us and go, ‘We’re going to have to wrap at 11 o’clock today because the wind is coming.’ And we’d be standing around at 10 45, 11. We’d be like, ‘What is he talking about? There’s no wind.’ And literally to the minute, it would be like everybody’s screaming at each other, get out, ‘Get in the van! Get in, pop in!’ I mean, it was insanity.”
The assembled talent didn’t want to talk too much about the show’s finale because there were members of the audience who hadn’t watched all six episodes (very few members), but Foster clearly loves how some of the show’s storylines were explained and some were not. There was reasoning for why things occurred and then something otherworldly may or may not have been involved. That was “magical” to her.
“Some of it is our job to figure out and maybe not even tell the audience and allow the audience to have their feelings about it,” Foster says. “I mean, our characters always have their perspective and where they come from. I think it’s pretty clear that Danvers believes in the logical world and believes that there’s a scientific explanation for everything. And Navarro is instinctual and more in tune with the spiritual side of things. But they’re mirrors to each other. And when you get to episode six, hopefully someday you’ll get to episode six, there’s a big question mark there. Which one is it? And I guess our answer is it can be both. It doesn’t have to be either one. There’s so much unknown about this world.”
“True Detective: Night Country” is available to stream on MAX