Jodie Foster and Kali Reis braved extreme weather for the new drama.
True Detective: Night Country takes the HBO crime drama to its most extreme locale to date, unravelling a group disappearance and a seemingly connected murder at a far northern point in Alaska.
Local police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and state trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) are tasked with getting to the bottom of both cases, facing resistance from those around them and the dangerous mid-winter climate.
The six-part season comes not long after A Murder at the End of the World on Disney Plus, which also explored a chilling case of foul play in a remote, Arctic location – clearly, that kind of isolation is resonating with writers at the moment.
But fans of True Detective may be interested to learn that Night Country was not filmed in Alaska, despite that state being the setting of the story by showrunner Issa López.
Read on for details on which country served as its screen double and the difficulties that came with filming.
Where is True Detective: Night Country filmed?
True Detective: Night Country was filmed in Iceland. The production shot scenes in the capital city of Reykjavík, as well as the northern towns of Akureyri and Dalvík.
López said that while she wanted to be “true” to the location of the story, it would have been impossible to shoot something on the scale of Night Country in such a desolate region of the US state.
“The part of Alaska where we needed to shoot this – which is above the Arctic Circle, where the night expands into months – doesn’t have the infrastructure,” she told Total Film.
“You reach temperatures of minus 36 degrees Celsius. It gets beyond human endurance… to the point that cameras don’t work.”
That’s what led the crew to look further afield for their ideal spot – but don’t go thinking that they got off scot-free.
On the contrary, Kali Reis recalled to USA Today how one pivotal outdoor scene saw the temperature drop to minus 15 degrees Celsius, with her light SWAT vest hardly providing the cover to withstand such cold.
Both Reis and co-star Foster added it was difficult to prevent their voices from croaking up while breathing in such freezing air during filming.
The Silence of the Lambs star told IcelandAir: “There were huge challenges, as you can imagine. First of all, we were working at night, trying to light at nighttime and in the snow. But we kind of had the gods on our side.
“When we needed all the snow, we got the snow, and when we needed it to be calm, we got the calm.”
While a key element of the moody drama series is the lack of daylight that Ennis sees – giving the town an eerie quality that plays tricks on the mind – the Icelandic locations were not actually in this state of constant darkness.
Foster added: “You get that little bit of sunlight between 11am and 3pm, and even though the sun doesn’t really get up very high on the horizon, you still get the ambient light, so it’s not like there’s no daylight.”
Is Ennis, Alaska, a real place?
No, Ennis is a fictional town created as the setting of True Detective: Night Country.
Vanity Fair notes that the Irish word means “from the island”, which it speculates could be a reference to Jules Verne’s 1897 novel involving a mysterious place thought to be populated by an Indigenous population who are hostile to explorers.
The publication questions whether this could be a deliberate connection, reflecting the tension between some Indigenous and white characters in Night Country, such as a group of environmental campaigners and the owners of a polluting mine.
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True Detective: Night Country premiered on Sky Atlantic and NOW on Monday 15th January 2024. New episodes weekly. Find Sky deals here.
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