Making of True Detective: Night Country: Jodie Foster Talks Series

Much — arguably, too much — is often said about place as character in literature, film and television. And while a valid case could be made that the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, was the real lead of True Detective: Night Country, those who made the HBO series credit an even bigger entity with moving to the top of the proverbial call sheet: the temperature.

“I watched that thermometer go from 4 degrees, to 1, to 0, all the way down to minus-18,” says Kali Reis, who plays Trooper Evangeline Navarro, of one the more grueling shoot days for the six-part mystery. “It was the first and only time that I got stern with [creator and showrunner] Issa López. I had this balaclava on, and she was like, ‘You can’t wear that, we need to see your face.’ I looked at her and said, ‘It’s episode five, everybody knows what I look like by now and I’m freezing. No.’”

The balaclava stayed. Reis, López, and star and executive producer Jodie Foster all laugh now when recalling some of the taxing moments of the six-month shoot — not least of all because the Iceland location was chosen for its reputation for approximating an Arctic Circle Alaska aesthetic with the benefit of more hospitable weather. But timing is everything. The Icelandic crew and extras frequently informed their visiting collaborators that they were experiencing record lows. López, a native of Mexico City, was particularly out of her element. The filmmaker, who wrote and directed every episode of the eerie update to Nic Pizzolato’s crime anthology, had visited Alaska on research trips. But those were in warmer months. Iceland presented myriad unforeseen challenges. “One night, the monitor had a delay of a couple of frames,” says López. “Nobody could figure out what was happening until we realized that the crystal fluid inside the monitor was freezing. Meanwhile, I was wearing eight layers and getting dehydrated because I didn’t want to go to the bathroom.”

Ultimately, that deep chill provided an invaluable service. Night Country, which eclipsed the previous three True Detective iterations with 12.7 million viewers tuning in to every episode, takes place at the northernmost outpost of civilization. As Ennis and its inhabitants are plunged into the long, sunless night of winter and hammered by snowfall, the frozen bodies of seven scientists are found out on the ice — and new clues emerge about the years-old unsolved murder of an Indigenous woman. They’re hardly ideal circumstances for solving multiple homicides. But they’re perfect for creating a mood, one fueled by a chilled cast and icy blue hues that soak almost every frame.

“Filming in Alaska was never happening,” says Foster, who plays Ennis Police Chief Liz Danvers — a character as broody as her environs, but with a darkly funny edge. “These Arctic Circle towns don’t even have roads in. Taking small planes or giant icebreaker boats wasn’t possible, so we brought Alaska to Iceland. We hired Indigenous actors — Alaskan Indigenous actors but also First Nations Canadians and Greenland Native people.”

Temperature, people, and tundra all ended up being easy asks of Iceland. Still, there were plenty of elements in Night Country that had to be fabricated, including a surprising one: Just 100 miles south of the real Arctic Circle, outside the northern port town of Akureyi where the bulk of the exteriors were filmed, even plummeting mercury proved no guarantee of a wintry tableau. “There obviously had to be snow in this show, but that was a big unknown,” says visual effects supervisor Barney Curnow. “Iceland is notoriously unreliable in terms of its winters.”