Here Are All the Ways John Hawkes Was Wrong About His Emmy-Nominated Role in ‘True Detective’

Talk to John Hawkes about “True Detective: Night Country” for any length of time and you’ll get a string of confessions.

• When showrunner Issa López offered him the role of police officer Hank Prior, he’d never seen a single episode from the first three seasons of the HBO limited series.

• He thought the character was too one-dimensional and not nuanced enough.

• When López said she wanted the character to play guitar in one scene, he didn’t think that was a good idea.

• And when she said that the instrumental song he’d reluctantly written also needed words for Hank to sing, he resisted for weeks, thinking it’d be too performative.

Hawkes admitted all of these misgivings with typically self-deprecating grins and then shrugged. “I’m glad she prevailed,” he said, “because she’s brilliant.”

López’s brilliance, along with Hawkes’ ability to slip into the skin of men who are often lonely, haunted and sometimes dangerous, turned Hank Prior into a rich and indelible character, the latest in a string of standout performances that includes the films “Winter’s Bone,” “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “The Sessions” and the television series “Deadwood” and “Eastbound & Down.” “True Detective” became the year’s most-nominated limited series at the Emmys, with two of its 19 nominations going to Hawkes himself — one for his supporting performance and one for writing “No Use,” the song his character sings in Episode 5.

For Hawkes, the path to playing Hank in Season 4 was always focused on one thing: making him more layered and less predictable. At first glance, Hank is a brutish career officer in a small Alaskan town, angry that the police chief job he thought was his went instead to outsider Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and ready to bend the rules for the benefit of the people in power.

“I wanted more complexity and less of a one-note male chauvinist pig kind of thing,” he told TheWrap. “I thought it would serve the story better to make him a slightly more elusive human being, more of a mystery in keeping with the vibe of the show.”

He had extensive conversations with López in pre-production, often tossing out ideas and finding that she would incorporate them into subsequent scripts. “I began to be careful about what I said, because I would bring up a possibility just to see if she would weigh in and she could just grab it and go, taking things in directions I hadn’t even considered,” he said with a laugh. “Maybe I opened a door and then she went through and furnished the room.”

Although he initially resisted the idea of Hank playing guitar and singing, which he does while alone in his room late in the series, that too became part of the quest for complexity. “It was kind of what I’d been fighting for, which is to make the character a more interesting human being than we would take him for when we meet him,” he shared. “I love characters acting out of character when I’m reading a novel or watching film or television. Those are always some of the most compelling parts to me, when a character does something that I don’t expect them to do and they don’t expect themselves to do.”

The idea of adding lyrics and turning the music into a real song didn’t come up until Hawkes, a musician himself, did a show on a Saturday night in Reykjavík, Iceland, where they shot most of the scenes that take place during the long Alaskan winter darkness. “No Use” captured some of the desolation felt by Hank, who’d been swindled and then abandoned by an Internet account he thought belonged to a Russian girlfriend-to-be, but it also captured the ominous mood of a show heading toward its shocking conclusion.

“It was really fun to write as that character,” he said. “It’s like you’re cowriting with a ghost. I would not have written the song that way without it being filtered through Hank.”

The character, he added, wasn’t always easy to inhabit: “Playing a person in that much pain for six months takes a piece of you.” But then he brought up a quote that was a favorite of children’s TV icon Fred Rogers — “There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story.”

“I feel like that’s why we cheer for characters we wouldn’t want to even speak to in real life,” Hawkes said. “One of the beautiful things about novels and films and television shows is that you’re privy to information that the world isn’t, and that helps you understand someone a little more and understand the reasons for them acting the way they do. That creates a kind of uncomfortable sympathy, I think, in a way which is really valuable to us.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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