Warning: massive spoilers for True Detective: Night Country episode 5 ahead!
True Detective: Night Country stars John Hawkes and Finn Bennett have weighed in on episode 5's shocking death scene, the difficulties around filming it, and how it deviated from the script.
"The whole thing is a bit of a blur," Bennett told Variety. "It was a bit of a fever dream, just because there was so much weight on that day. The bones of that scene were there. Everything that happened happens, but it did need work. We spent the day [rehearsing] in Issa [López's] apartment ... Obviously, in that moment Peter decides blood is not thicker than water. The scene just became so much more subtle and nuanced than it originally was."
At the end of True Detective: Night Country episode 5, Peter (Bennett) shoots and kills his father, Hank (Hawkes) in order to save the life of Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster). The tense scene shocked viewers, who seem to have an overall mixed reaction to the new season thus far (probably because they keep comparing it to season 1).
The fourth season follows Detectives Liz Danvers (Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) who are tasked with solving the mystery of six men who, while operating the Tsalal Artice Research Station in Ennis, Alaska, simply vanish without a trace. Issa López, helmer of the 2017 crime fantasy-horror Tigers Are Not Afraid, serves as showrunner, writer, and director.
"I think Finn will back me up here – but when we first read the scene, it was quite different from what we ended up shooting," Hawkes told Variety in the same interview. "We got together as a group – Jodie and Finn and I, and Kali and Issa López – and we spent a day really working on that scene, and trying to figure out how to make it sing. It was [originally] subtler. That was the hardest scene, I think, for all of us to really try to figure out how to do ... That was something we worked toward, and wasn’t very clearly written."
True Detective: Night Country episode 6 airs on February 18. For more, check out our list of the best new TV shows in 2024 and beyond.
