True Detective stars weigh in on season 4's most shocking death and how it changed from the script
Feb. 12, 2024John Hawkes and Finn Bennett talk that extreme scene
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Warning: massive spoilers for True Detective: Night Country episode 5 ahead!
“The whole thing is a bit of a blur,” Bennett toldVariety. “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).
“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.”
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Lauren Milici is a Senior Entertainment Writer for GamesRadar+ currently based in the Midwest. She previously reported on breaking news for The Independent’s Indy100 and created TV and film listicles for Ranker. Her work has been published in Fandom, Nerdist, Paste Magazine, Vulture, PopSugar, Fangoria, and more.
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