Nearly 35 years after her Oscar-winning turn as FBI trainee Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster is back to her crime-solving ways in True Detective: Night Country.
Premiering Jan. 14, the long-awaited fourth season of HBO’s acclaimed anthology series opens in Ennis, Alaska, as the remote fictional town is plunged into polar night, a period of prolonged winter darkness that occurs annually north of the Arctic Circle. As Ennis police chief Liz Danvers, Foster stars opposite Kali Reis’ state trooper Evangeline Navarro—a duo with a complicated history who come together to investigate the mysterious disappearance of eight scientists working at the nearby Tsalal Arctic Research Station. Naturally, a web of dark secrets soon begins to unravel.
Following a near-universally beloved first season starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as a seemingly mismatched pair of homicide detectives in pursuit of a serial killer responsible for a string of sadistic, ritualistic murders in the Louisiana bayou, the show’s second and third entries failed to reach the heights of their predecessor. But ahead of its debut, True Detective Season 4, which Foster also produced, has been drawing high praise from critics.
“[Showrunner Issa] López’s gorgeously realized story grounds its hardboiled mystery in multidimensional characters, believably immerses viewers in a unique community, and makes a strong case for the continuation of the franchise,” wrote TIME TV critic Judy Berman. “In contrast to the gold-hued desert heat and white machismo that defined True Detective’s iconic first season, Night Country is cold, blue, female, attuned to the perspectives of Native women. Where True Detective could be heady to the point of pretension, Night Country is humanistic.”
Foster is also fresh off a scene-stealing performance in Nyad, a 2023 biopic about history-making long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) in which Foster plays Nyad’s coach and best friend Bonnie Stoll.
TIME spoke with Foster about her relationship to true crime, the satisfaction of a supporting role, and the hard-won rise of female directors.
TIME: Your performance as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs paved the way for a new generation of on-screen female detectives. How has that role evolved in pop culture?
Foster: I didn’t realize I was doing anything special at the time. I just wanted to go on the hero’s journey. And the classic hero’s journey was reserved for men. Silence of the Lambs was revolutionary in that it posited that the hero’s journey could be a female journey. It’s been wonderful over the last 30 years to see different voices come into the picture—women protagonists and antiheroes that are complex and complicated and messy.
How did it feel to once again take up the mantle of lead detective in a crime drama 30+ years after Silence of the Lambs became a defining film in your career?
It feels great to be back in this horror, eerie, crime puzzle-solving genre. [Silence] was truly a wonderful movie. It’s like the great-grandmother to True Detective Season 4 in some ways. Silence inspired Seven which inspired True Detective Season 1 which inspired True Detective Season 4. So it’s a little chain of events. And I feel like I have a direct emotional connection to telling that kind of story.
True Detective has traditionally been a show with a lot of masculine energy and characters. This season flips that dynamic. How does that switch add new dimensions to the series?
These are more complicated humans and we need more complicated humans for our culture to grow and evolve. The first season [of True Detective] was extraordinary. But when you look back on it, you’re like, “Wow, that’s a lot of masculinity.” It was a lot of questions about masculine identity and masculine suffering. That’s a valuable story to tell. But we were interested in telling a story about the feminine world. So it’s a different path. We look at misogyny through different eyes, instead of through the eyes of the misogynist.
True Detective: Night Country was shot in Iceland to double for Alaska. What was it like filming in those extreme winter weather conditions?
