Mahershala Ali's trinity: Three characters in True Detective
While the success of crime drama speaks for itself, few shows in the genre are as dark or dense as HBO's True Detective. With two complex chapters closed, the show's third instalment follows an Arkansas state police detective, Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), who is searching for two missing children.
"Nobody wants to experience any of [these] things, nobody wants to volunteer themselves for any of that but to be able to sort of step into a world where you believe like it's real and it's something that you can kind of be a fly on the wall and watch it all play out," Ali says.
"I think we're all really attracted to some elements of mystery, and trying to solve something and feeling like we're participating and are intelligent enough to try to figure this crime out along with people," he says. "So it asks you to participate in a way where some things are little bit more passive as you watch a show."
The show's first season starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as detectives pursuing a serial killer over two decades through the Louisiana bayou; the second season was set in Los Angeles and starred Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn.
The new season, into which creator Nic Pizzolatto has attempted to infuse some light, straddles three timelines: 1980, when Hays and partner Roland West (Stephen Dorff) are first assigned the missing children case; 1990, when new evidence surfaces; and 2015, when Hays is an older man working with a documentary maker delving into the case.
"I always say I work on feel, first of all I have to feel like I'm in the right space," Ali says, of taking on three iterations of the same man at different points in his life. "But then I have to give myself a couple of clues, a couple of things to sort of ground myself in to make sure that I was in the right era."
In 1980, Ali says, he "was coming in with the residue of the Vietnam War and thinking about people at a time when they weren't necessarily embraced at all. These guys were the first to come home and not be embraced by America, [or] by the world.
"People have always come back from being soldiers embraced as heroes," he says. "These guys were discarded, and what that must have done and must have been for them I think creates a person who is going perhaps [to] be a little bit isolated or reclusive. I needed to sort of wear that awareness."
And in 1990, Ali says, Hays has come out of a 10-year relationship, "so who we're meeting in 1990 is somebody who has been in love and now is no longer in love, but loves. And has a family and children and is in just a different place in his life in his career."
"So there are those tweaks, then there's so many things in terms of being old that you do with that, that you naturally just have to do. And I have the 30 year time gap to 20 years to play with, to capture that," he says.
The role, notably, forced Ali to scrutinise Nic Pizzolatto's scripts in unusual detail.
"You gotta make sure you're not screwing it up and that was challenging sometimes because Nic is a complicated writer," Ali says. "And there's things that you could miss or there's things you gotta figure out how you can make work, where it could be easy for another actor, but it might be hard for you to make those rhythms and the structure of his dialogue work for you.
"But he is an absolutely, just a brilliant writer. It was amazing working with him."
Ali describes Pizzolatto as a generous director. "Nic gave me a lot of space and I needed that, because there was a lot to take in and I had a lot of space to listen to whatever my instincts were saying," he says.
"If he felt like I was off in any way, I feel like I'm a fairly approachable person, then he would come and maybe give me a little help or point me in the right direction, or I could make a suggestion about something and that could potentially play out and affect things in a positive way as well.
"He was not at all on me, or in my ear," Ali adds. "We talked about character traits, character attributes. There are things that Nic kind of shared about the character that we found, that we I think mutually found sort of shifted and changed a little as the episodes played out.
"I remember early on, this is before we ever filmed anything, Nic saying something like, Wayne doesn't laugh really. You can take that as a blanket statement, like he never ever ever cracks a smile, never laughs, or you can interpret that and say, I essentially know what he means by that, and he that he is sort of slow to laugh."
Ali's passion for performance, he says stems from a deep love of people.
"And what I mean by that is I think I love individuals," he says. "I think I really respect and appreciate unique people, unique things and the more you talk to people you realise that everybody is unique. So any time that a character comes to me that has dimensions, I know that there's a unique person there in some way shape or form.
"Now, I may personally not want to repeat being a part of a certain set of circumstances or scenario, I don't want to play the same character twice either. I believe I have a respect and empathy for people as individuals, and I try to view these stories and this work in the same manner and want everybody to feel all these characters, I feel like their own unique spirits with something to say."
True Detective airs TO COME