MYSTERY MEN
Harrelson and Mc Conaughey are on the case in ‘True Detective’
PASADENA Calif. — Michelle Monaghan, who plays the female lead caught between the characters played by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey on HBO’s new series “True Detective,” is talking to a crowd of TV writers about the dark, intense show.
By coincidence, she is again sitting between Harrelson and McConaughey,
She is explaining why she likes the show so much.
“... And I got to play with Matthew, who is equally as talented as Woody here,” Monaghan is saying.
McConaughey draws himself up in his chair and cuts her off. In a rising voice rich with mock indignation, he says, “Equal?”
Monaghan joins the general laughter, then adds, “You see the dynamic here.”
That’s another joke. Harrelson and McConaughey have been buddies for two decades, and any rivalry between them is doubtless framed in the form of a long-running gag.
That doesn’t stop them from playing very edgy rivals in “True Detective,” an eight-part closed-end murder mystery that slides into HBO’s coveted 9 p.m. Sunday slot this week.
Harrelson plays Martin Hart and McConaughey plays Rust Cohle, a pair of Louisiana detectives who have been put together as partners, but don’t really like each other.
The show starts in 1995 with a disturbing occult murder. It moves forward to 2002, when Cohle resigns from the police force. It makes another jump to 2012, when we see them separately and somewhat reluctantly recounting that 1995 case.
At this point, they haven’t spoken in a decade.
In between it gets much uglier than that, with Monaghan sometimes caught in the middle as Martin’s wife Maggie.
Playing this didn’t affect the long-term off-screen friendship between the two stars, Harrelson says. “Didn’t change our relationship,” says Harrelson. “Not at all.”
It did, however, he said, have a marked impact on how they worked together for the course of this particular project — as opposed to other projects that have brought them together over the years.
“It was very different,” says Harrelson. “Matthew is one of the most awesome, gregarious guys I know. But for this one, he stayed in character. He was an island.
“We were still on the same frequency, but it wasn’t the same as when you’re finishing each other’s sentences.”
Oh heck, Harrelson jokes, “I didn’t speak to him the whole time.”
“When Woody and I get going on comedy, playing off each other, we can take it into the ether,” McConaughey says. “But that’s when we’re doing comedy. It was very different here.
“This was not about two guys coming together. This is the first time we’ve played a relationship between our characters where there was opposition.”
One of the slightly unusual elements of “True Detective” is that Harrelson steps outside his frequent position. Here he plays a character who, comparatively speaking, is normal.
Martin is a blue-collar guy with a wife and family, a cop who has a life outside the precinct.
“I kinda liked playing the normal guy,” Harrelson admits. “It was weird.”
With a couple of little twists, however, that casting situation could have been reversed.
Harrelson admits he initially had his eye on the Cohle role, while McConaughey first looked at Hart.
“I liked the Cohle part,” says Harrelson. “But by then Matthew already had it — and he nailed it. I can’t imagine anyone doing it better.”
“I originally read Martin’s part,” says McConaughey. “But I realized that I was really drawn
to
Cohle. Every time he opens his mouth, fire comes out. It was unlike anything I’d done before. I couldn’t wait to play it.”
That attitude continued into production, he says, particularly when it came to the several long, tortured monologues Cohle delivers in his 2012 incarnation.
“One day we were doing 29 pages,” says McConaughey, which is a lot. “We started shooting and they wanted to go home after 14.
“I said no, I’m building up a little sweat here, let’s keep going. So we went on. I’ll tell you, the wine tasted great that night.”
One of the other things that appealed to McConaughey is that “True Detective” has an ending.
“It’s like a 450-page film that’s finite,” he says. They wrapped up shooting a year ago and he has already moved on to a number of other projects.
“I’m happy to talk about it,” he says. “But I don’t spend a lot of time right now looking in the rearview mirror.”
Nic Pizzolatto, who created and wrote the show, also says the Hart/Cohle particular story won’t go on. “It’s contained,” he says. “It’s over.”
But the “True Detective” brand, that’s another story.
“We could tell a whole range of new stories,” Pizzolatto says, assuming of course that HBO wants them. “We could have a story about a smalltown murder, or a murder with an international conspiracy. We could have a story with no murder.
“We could do Faulkner’s ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ That’s written as a mystery.”
Pizzolatto originally conceived “True Detective” as a novel in which two cops would talk separately.
But when he started hearing Cohle’s voice, he says, very early in the process, “I realized this could make a good TV show, because of the visual element.”
The time jump enabled him to lay out the full psychological journey he envisioned, because it showed the long-term impact of the case on both men.
Neither Harrelson nor McConaughey says it created any problem to play the same character 17 years apart.
For the older Marty, says Harrelson, Harrelson “I just took off my wig.”
McConaughey jokes back, “I just put my wig on.”
Seriously, though, says McConaughey, playing both the younger and older Cohle is what enabled him to make sense of the character.
“In 1995, he’s a cop who needs a case to keep him from jumping off the rails,” McConaughey says. “By 2012, every day is a day of penance in the indentured servitude we call life.”
Time to reach up into the ether and find some of that there comedy.