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.