Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are together again, and we’re pretty sure that this one will go better than than the 2008 film Surfer, Dude (pictured above). Or EDtv for that matter.
As Nellie Andreeva of Deadline Hollywood reported, the two Texans are set to star in True Detective, a multi-layered television noir that has been bought by HBO “straight to series,” meaning the producers didn’t have to shoot a pilot episode.
“We know what you’re thinking,” Rick Porter of Zap2it wrote. “Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson signing up for a TV series? Is it about marijuana?”
Well, no. This is definitely the Harrelson of Rampart, while McConaughey, who’s played an awful lot of lawyers (he’s currently cast as one in Bernie), will perhaps evoke the memory of his role as a sheriff in John Sayles’s Lone Star.
The eight-episode “event drama series project” (as Andreeva called it) was created by Nic Pizzolatto, a Louisiana native whose 2010 novel, Galveston, took place in part during Hurricane Ike. Pizzolatto most most recently wrote for AMC’s The Killing. The show’s director will be Cary Fukunaga (2011’s Jane Eyre).
As Andreeva further explicated:
[The show] centers on two detectives, Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Harrelson), whose lives collide and entwine during a seventeen-year hunt for a serial killer in Louisiana. The investigation of a bizarre murder in 1995 is framed and interlaced with testimony from the detectives in 2012, when the case has been reopened. The concept is for the 8-episode first season to resolve the mystery at hand, with subsequent seasons using same structure but new characters and story.
The relatively short season and renewable structure (similar to FX’s American Horror Story) would seem to be one reason why McConaughey and Harrelson are able to take time away from movies for the show.
Harrelson, of course, has done series television before, having started his career as Cheers‘s Woody; McConaughey has been a recent guest star on HBO’s comedy series Eastbound and Down.
Onscreen work aside, the two actors are definitely buds.
Harrelson confirmed as much to Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger of the Washington Post when they spotted him while covering the White House Correspondent’s Dinner this past weekend:
“Woody! Did you bring your bongos?” squealed one woman, encountering the actor at a W Hotel pre-party hosted by Google and the Hollywood Reporter.
“I think you’re confusing me with Matthew McConaughey,” Harrelson said gently. “It’s okay. We’re like brothers.”
