With filming well underway in Los Angeles, we’re learning more and more about True Detective season two with each day that passes. Just yesterday, we caught a glimpse of some of the newcomers that will take point in the sophomore run, including Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn, and it was the latter actor that revealed how the second season will differentiate itself from what has come before.
Speaking to Playboy, he touched upon pre-existing expectations, the prestige of series creator Nic Pizzolatto and season two’s innate tonal shift.
“[Creator] Nic Pizzolatto is such a great writer, and so much of this is driven by his stories,” Vaughn says. “I thought Woody and Matthew did an exceptional job with the first season. This one’s very different, though. It’s a totally different story, with its own characters. The thing that’s consistent is the richness of the characters and the quality of the material. That was Louisiana. This is a California-based story, and it was kind of birthed from here. A lot of it is set in Los Angeles.”
With California opening up a whole new can of worms for True Detective, Vaughn is set to play Frank Semyon, an entrepreneur who soon finds that the death of a business partner throws a spanner in the works of his duplicitous scheme. Alongside him are Farrell and McAdams as Ray Velcoro and Ani Bezzerides, respectively, with the latter character acting as the moral compass of the show who will have her astute morals tested throughout the course of the season.
Much digital ink has been spilled about the character changeover from Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, and how fans are already apprehensive about the procedural’s return simply because season one set the bar so high. But given the quality of the writing thus far, not to mention the excellent cinematography that brought the dark, occult-esque tale to life last year, season two has more than earned the benefit of the doubt.
The sophomore season of True Detective is expected to premiere sometime in the summer.
