How ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Found Its Heart in the Journey of These Two Characters
True Detective: Night Country takes over our senses by making us afraid of the dark. But the heart of the show exists both in the case being solved and the lives of characters like Leah and Kayla and getting to see their day to day struggles.
Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) and Kayla (Anna Lambe) are two women who function in the world of Detective Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) as they try to solve murders in the town of Ennis, Alaska. They’re working in the time of year when darkness consumes those living in Ennis, and we get to experience the fear of what is lurking in the shadows.
Part of the fear of the show comes from that all-encompassing darkness. We spoke with LaBlanc and Lambe for their work in the series, bringing these two women to life who, for the most part, are trying to maintain a normal life outside of the people they love who are on the case.
I asked LaBlanc about existing in a world that is night more than not and how it was filming constantly in the dark. “It’s wild,” she said. “It like feels like Groundhog Day a little bit because even a lot of times we were doing night shoots, but the days were so short there, in the middle in December and January, that even when you’re doing a day shoot, it’s not a whole lot of sun going on where we were shooting. The days kind of start to leak into each other and you wake up in the morning and it’s still dark out and you go to bed and it looks the same as it did when you woke up. And so it’s all a little bit trippy and makes you feel a little strange. Which I think plays into the vibes.”
Kayla and her family life
Within the first moments of seeing Lambe as Kayla, we know a lot about her dynamic with her family. It establishes so much about her as a character and is imperative to understanding who she is and going on this journey with her. Lambe spent a lot of time with Issa López, the writer and director, to understand who Kayla is and her relationships.
“Yeah, it was really great. I had spent a lot of time with Issa, the director and Finn [Bennett] who plays Prior, to establish where we were at in our relationship and kind of what has led us to this point of this tension and this back and forth but it was really important that we made sure that the passion and the love and the intensity of the relationship was there so that we had something to move forward with throughout the season,” she said. “But inevitably there’s a lot of tension and the issue of Prior putting his job before his family is one that existed before we get introduced to Kayla and we see that dynamic playing out. It was a really interesting sort of world building kind of experience to go back and forth and collaborate with Issa and Finn on what we wanted from this marriage and how we wanted to end it. I’m really glad that that passion and intensity and love for one another transferred in the first episode because I adore Finn and he’s such an incredible scene partner and such an incredible collaborator. So it’s a huge compliment that it played out the way we intended.”
One of the things that works both within Kayla and Prior’s relationship and within the show as a whole is watching as Kayla shares stories of her people with their son. In the first episode, we watched as Prior discovered a drawing their son made of an Inuit legend and Kayla quickly explained its significance and why her mother told him about it. When speaking with Lambe, she explained how it is a real legend they are told as children.
“So in that photo it’s actually an Inuit legend,” Lambe said. “It’s the goddess of the sea and the story is quite gruesome. Her father cuts off her fingers, which become the fish and her hands, which become the seals and her arms, which become the whales. And you know, that’s a story that we grow up with as Inuit. And to see it on screen was really cool. And to see it with on a platform like True Detective was really incredible. But the reality of a lot of Inuit mythology and storytelling is, it’s quite dark and it can be quite gruesome, but that is kind of the reality of humanity and the cruelty of human beings at times is something that I found really interesting in this series and something that I love seeing played into in the horror genre. The supernatural elements sometimes can freak you out, but it’s human beings and what they can do that is sometimes even more terrifying. And so, for Inuit mythology, that’s sort of a big thing for us, having that and just kind of talking about it casually is just sort of, it was very normal for me and it was never something that I thought twice about when we were filming the scene.”
Bringing a different side to life
One of the reasons that both Kayla and Leah connect so much with the audience is that they are two people trying their best and they are not rooted in the tragedy or violence that is happening around Danvers’ and Navarro’s case. It is rare to see that with Indigenous women at the heart of a story, and both LaBlanc and Lambe were drawn to their characters for the normalcy they represent.
“I think a lot of times growing up as a native person and just being a native person, a lot of the times it feels like ‘Am I the only one holding this? Am I the only one that’s holding these stories and these histories?’ And that’s often felt very lonely,” LaBlanc said. “Again, the violence itself is like the sensational part and it is the headlines that we see and the statistics that we see, but you’re so right that the stories that we don’t see is the rest of us that are having to live our lives and try to hold all of the hard and painful pasts that we have to hold. And so I think there is something so beautiful about showing the full 360 impact of this on our communities.”
Lambe praised Lopez first for her writing of strong women despite not being an Indigenous woman herself. “I feel like even though Issa’s not an Indigenous woman, how intentional she was in writing strong Indigenous women characters and I think there’s often this perception that Indigenous women, for whatever reason, are just inherently vulnerable. There’s something about us that makes us easy targets. And when we look at the big picture, we understand it’s a societal issue and it needs to be an entire society response to protect Indigenous women and to make sure that they have the resources so that they don’t lose their lives at the hands of colonial violence. So to have that representation of strong Indigenous women characters, strong women characters who lead this story, who push this story and who are fighting for their community and for their loved ones is really beautiful. And I think it in terms of representation sets a new precedent for how Indigenous women are represented in film and television going forward.”
The horror and twists of Night Country
With a show like True Detective: Night Country, we’re seeing a horror story mixed into the fabric of the detective story that Danvers and Navarro are in. When I spoke with LaBlanc and Lambe about those horror elements and seeing them come to life, they were both very excited to talk about how they get to exist separate from them in the show. “Well it’s awesome because, and I won’t speak for Anna, but for me it’s like so much of the scariness is not my job,” LaBlanc said. “And not to say I didn’t care about it, but so much of the scariness is built into the world and it’s Issa and it’s artistic and it’s Florian on cinematography and then sound later on. And so I was having a great time on set and it was fun and it felt lighthearted a lot of the time and it was just lovely good vibes all around. And then, now watching it, I’m like, ‘How did they do that?’ It actually feels scarier because I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know this was going on. I didn’t know it was scary. No one told me.’ So it does feel like magic in the way that Issa can build. She can really prey on our fears and she’s just done a masterful job orchestrating it.”
Lambe loved watching it all come together as well, saying, “It was so incredible to watch everything come together and all the influences of past horror films and the genre of horror, Issa being somebody who is so prolific in that genre. And it’s one of my favorite genres to watch. To be part of something that is so scary, I knew it was gonna be scary. I didn’t know it was gonna be this scary is such a fun experience and to kind of see how everyone’s characters interact with the sort of supernatural elements of this story is so cool. And it’s something that, as you’re filming it, you can’t imagine how it’s gonna come together and you try, but everything that this show became has, I don’t wanna say exceeded my expectations because it makes it sound like I had low expectations, but it just blows my mind how absolutely incredible it is.”
The perk of setting it in Alaska is great coats
When you set a property in a very cold place, the outerwear is of importance, and boy does Night Country have some great coats in it. But what makes it unique is the fact that every character in the show has a unique look to them that feels very true to who they are. So of course I asked both LaBlanc and Lambe about the choices of their characters and whether or not they had a say in how they dressed to stay warm.
“I got to do a little shopping trip in the wardrobe closet,” LaBlanc said. “Which was maybe one of the best days of my life. It was so much fun. It was when I first got to Iceland and Alex, who is our costume designer, she kind of just took me through and the vibe we had for Leah was that she’s a thrifter, that she’s at the Goodwill after school every day. So just such an eclectic mix of colors and patterns and textures and it was so fun. And I wish I had taken all of Leah’s coats home because there was the red one she wears, I don’t know if it ever shows up on camera, but on the pockets of that coat is a little beaver. It’s like a little beaver like motif and it’s so freaking cute. And then she has another jacket that she wears that has like a lighthouse on it. Just everything was cute and it was awesome.”
For Lambe, a lot of her wardrobe came down to bringing her own jewelry into Kayla’s wardrobe. “I remember going in for fittings and seeing sort of the inspiration for the wardrobe of all the different characters and it was so funny looking at the wall because I was like, ‘Well I recognize this person, this person, this person, this person,’ because it was a bunch of Inuit used as inspiration and it was really nice to talk with wardrobe and kind of go back and forth on like, ‘Wes, maybe this is something that I would personally wear.’ A really fun kind of day. And I got to bring my own earring collection and we kind of looked through and figured out what might work and what might not. So it was a fun experience.”
True Detective: Night Country is currently airing on Max and you don’t want to miss it!
(featured image: Max)
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