Jodie Foster and True Detective: Night Country creators on the show’s darkest season yet

After two disappointing seasons, HBO’s procedural roars back with True Detective: Night Country. Starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as two Alaskan cops seeking eight missing scientists, this nocturnal noir promises to revitalise the franchise. Total Film joins the cast and creator Issa López on set in deepest, darkest Iceland for some serious sleuthing.

What’s in the box? Jodie Foster, arms folded, dressed in the beiges and browns of the Alaska State Troopers, is staring intently at a series of cardboard containers scattered across the floor of a cramped office. Joining her is boxer-turned-actress Kali Reis (Catch the Fair One), her partner-in-crime-solving. "Let’s do this," mutters Reis’ Evangeline Navarro, as they don black gloves and begin sifting through folders of evidence. The true detective work is about to begin. 

It’s 1 March 2023 – day 87 of 112 – and Total Film has travelled to Reykjavik, Iceland, where the fourth season of HBO’s procedural anthology series True Detective has been filming since the previous September. Outside, daylight is in short supply, something the cast have had to adjust to. "It’s weird waking up at 10.30 in the morning, and it’s pitch black," says Reis. But it serves as the perfect backdrop: after seasons two (led by Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn) and three (Mahershala Ali, Stephen Dorff) critically underwhelmed, True Detective: Night Country is going dark. 

Enter Mexican filmmaker Issa López (2017’s Tigers Are Not Afraid), who took a call from HBO’s Francesca Orsi, asking her to figure out a way to recapture the spirit of the Emmy-winning first season, which launched in 2014 and starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as two Louisiana detectives. "What was it that in the first season had connected so powerfully? I gave it a lot of thought," muses López, when she joins TF off-set in an upstairs conference room in Reykjavik’s Fossa Studios. The answer? "Atmosphere."

What made S1 so evocative was the way a sweltering Louisiana became the backdrop for what López calls a "Gothic, strange, slightly Lovecraftian tale", with its supernatural-tinged, Robert W. Chambers-inspired tale of abuse and incest. "I thought that the only way to approach it was to do exactly the opposite," says López. "So where Louisiana is sweaty and hot, we could go freezing. But where was the place? What would be the place that would capture that spirit of an American corner forgotten by God where dark things fester?"

López hit upon setting the show in Alaska. "It was fantastic because of the long nights," she explains. "It was the perfect setting for noir. And it was a perfect setting for cosmic horror tinges.’ The story she devised begins at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station, near the small Alaskan town of Ennis, as eight scientists disappear without a trace. ‘There’s popcorn made in front of a movie that they’re watching. And there’s the notebooks that were left mid-sentences, sandwiches that were ready to be eaten. There’s a treadmill still running. And they just vanish into thin air," explains López. "Nobody understands what happens."

Silence of the lambs

While S2 featured Rachel McAdams’ Detective Ani Bezzerides, this is the first time two women are fronting the show. For Foster, whose Liz Danvers is called in to solve the case alongside Reis’ Navarro, it was a return to the arena of one of her greatest triumphs. Not since her Oscar-winning FBI rookie Clarice Starling, from 1991’s sensational The Silence of the Lambs, has she played a detective. So how close is Danvers? "A long way from Clarice," says Foster, cradling her coffee mug. "Clarice is all about the ethics and she’s quiet and reserved and always doing the right thing, and that is not Danvers. I kind of hope Clarice never got this cynical."

Certainly López isn’t afraid of comparisons to Clarice. "It’s just one of these characters," she says. "All the lines of that movie just live in my skull. We know the lines, we know the moments, we know the images. And there’s a direct line, I think… The Silence of the Lambs mothered [David Fincher’s serialkiller chiller] Se7en, and Se7en mothered True Detective. And this is the child of True Detective. So there’s a direct line. That’s why I went directly to the source. And we’re not shying away from it."

López believes fans will be shocked when they see her leading lady. "You’re going to see a Jodie Foster you haven’t seen because she always plays very successful, very powerful… I think it’s going to be a massive surprise." Put simply, Danvers is "not very pleasant", says Foster. "She’s self-involved and distracted at the same time. I think she’s very dismissive of emotions, emotional people, and doesn’t really understand how the world has changed. And she’s also blunt and tells it like it is, which I always like." Is she good at her job? "She’s a good cop. She has her dirty-cop side, and that’s a good thing and a bad thing in this show. That’s really the connection point with her and Navarro."

An ex-Marine, Navarro sounds like the perfect foil for Danvers. "She’s very tough, very bold, she says what she thinks… she makes quick decisions. She’s very fierce. She has a bit of a temper. But she is also such a protector," says Reis, her own tattoos on her neck, chest and arms (which have been incorporated into the character) peeking out from her uniform. "She doesn’t need anybody else’s help to solve problems. She just goes into it without thinking. She will run towards danger when people are looking the other way." She stops for a second, then smiles. "In layman’s terms, she takes no shit!"

This being True Detective, there’s a sprawling cast that includes Christopher Eccleston as Ted Corsaro, a regional chief of police and political animal, and Fiona Shaw as Rose Aguineau, dubbed a "survivalist with a past full of secrets". Then there’s British newcomer Finn Bennett (Surge) as the fundamentally decent young cop Peter Prior, Anna Lambe as his nurse wife Kaylee and John Hawkes as his father, Hank. "I think that’s a tough relationship," Bennett comments, of Peter’s volatile pairing with his father. "It was tough to work around and get our head around. But John was really up for tackling it… I think we’ve made it work."

The blond-haired Bennett, who describes his rookie character as Danvers’ "protégé", brings the innocence. "I think because Danvers and Navarro are quite dark characters with troubled pasts, it’s easier maybe to bring a kind of light into it." But how has it been going up against Foster? "I was really nervous when I knew I was going to be working with Jodie," he gulps. "It’s a big challenge to try to hold your own as a younger actor against a legend like that. But as soon as we got cooking in rehearsals, it was really easy." Watching her and Hawkes in particular was a masterclass. "I’ve learned not everything needs to be big on screen."

Authentic storytelling

Outside of her core cast, López was keen to cast as authentically as possible, with numerous Inuit character roles to fill – specifically those from the Iñupiat tribe, indigenous Alaskans whose terrain spans from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the US-Canadian border.

With actors both professional and non-professional arriving from Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Denmark, it impressed Reis, who herself has Cape Verdean ancestry and identifies as being of Native American descent. "To meet all these indigenous people… has been amazing," says Reis. "It’s amazing to see us all come together and tell this story."

As Foster outlines, this season of True Detective embraces a social conscience, albeit subtly, one "that intertwines with the character’s journey, and the horror and the thriller. I mean, it’s just so unusual. We get a real deep dive into the erased and forgotten lives of indigenous women. And they are central. And when they’re not central, the show makes a point, especially at the end, of reminding you how invisible they were to you, in the beginning of the show."

During the writing phase, López spent months researching Alaskan life, soaking up details such as the way some towns are dry and others are wet, when it comes to alcohol. "One of the things I did is I wrote every episode listening to Radio Kotzebue, and listening to local radio," she adds. "I mean, if there’s one upside to the horror of the invasion of social media in our lives… it’s the fact that you can truly jump into someone’s life. So the amount of hours of YouTube videos that I watched from people of the region… the winter is boring, so they make a lot of videos of their daily lives."

While the production spent a few weeks filming in Alaska, it was more straightforward to mount the bulk of the shoot in Iceland, a country set up for hosting major Hollywood productions (including recent Netflix thriller Heart of Stone). "As much as we would have liked to be true to the elements of the story, the part of Alaska where we needed to shoot this – which is above the Arctic Circle where the night expands into months – doesn’t have the infrastructure," says López. "It’s a big production. And Alaska, in the months that we were going to be shooting there, you reach temperatures of minus 36 Celsius. It gets beyond human endurance… to the point that cameras don’t work."

Back on set, Foster and Reis are doing take after take, sifting through those cardboard boxes. "Sometimes you read a script and you think, 'Oh, well, that should be done in five minutes. That’s gonna take no time.' But actually, it’s quite a complicated sequence," says Foster. So do they find anything bad in there? "In the boxes? First of all, I can’t tell you or I’d have to shoot you!" she laughs. But as mundane as it might look, it’s a crucial scene in this epic and involving jigsaw. "There is a moment where they have to figure it all out and put all the pieces together… They stand in the middle and they are a part of this landscape," she comments. Time to take another peek inside…

True Detective: Night Country is available on Sky Atlantic and NOW from January 15. 

In the US, you can watch it on HBO from January 14. For more, check out our guide to all of the upcoming TV shows on the way.