- Months after HBO confirmed True Detective season 5 will be set in Jamaica Bay, New York, reports indicate Nicolas Cage is in final negotiations for a leading role.
- Showrunner Issa Lopez – who took the reins from series creator Nic Pizzolatto – previously teased continuity with Night Country starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.
- We’ll update this article as more details surrounding True Detective season 5 come to light (e.g. release date, casting, plot details, etc.).
For an anthology crime drama like HBO’s The Detective, the setting is everything. And has almost been its own living-breathing character.
The first season placed us in the deliciously southern gothic Louisiana. The second dragged audiences to a very corrupt California. The third took the series deep into the Ozarks; before the latest season, subtitled Night Country, gave us yet another distinct world with the almost-supernatural Ennis, Alaska.
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So where will the horrors unfold in Issa Lopez’s True Detective season 5? According to HBO Head of Drama Series & Film, Francesca Orsi, it’ll be the southern partially-manmade estuary that is Jamaica Bay, New York (along the western tip of Long Island)… we can practically see it now.
“Issa has a lot to say, not unlike she did with Night Country. It’s a different milieu but just as powerful,” she told Deadline during an interview at The White Lotus season 3 premiere, adding that filming is slated to begin in the coming months, and tentatively earmarking 2027 as season 5’s release window.
“I’m really excited about it. We have a small writers room going with Issa; she’s excited. We just gave notes on the first two episodes, the entire season. Honestly, I can’t wait for this to go. It’s all about casting and getting this ready.”
At the time, Orsi noted that while nobody had been locked in, the fifth season would be spearheaded by three leads – two male and one female. Now, as per Variety, one of those male leads could be none other than Nicolas Cage, who has recently been experiencing something of his own McConaissance-style career revival after becoming debt-free.
This would also mark just the second lead television role Cage has accepted throughout his legendary career, after the live-action Spider-Man Noir series for MGM+ and Amazon Prime Video (currently slated to debut sometime in 2026). Though given story details are very much still under tight wraps, we have no idea what his role in True Detective season 5 actually entails.
On the subject of the story, last December, Issa Lopez hinted the forthcoming instalment features some “important connections” with everything that happens in Ennis, Alaska; as well as the characters in Night Country.
“It’s very important for me, and I worked a lot in Night Country about this, to create the feeling that this is the same universe,” she told The New York Post.
“That the events that happened in the first season, and the weird s**t that happens in the first season affects this sensation of, ‘There’s something bigger than us and darker than what we can imagine behind the scenes.’”
As some of you may recall, True Detective: Night Country established pretty explicit links to the franchise’s debut starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Beyond the recurring spiral motif that’s apparently “older than the ice” of Ennis (more on this later).
As it turns out, the ghostly “Travis” who led Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw) to the Tsalal Arctic Research Station scientists’ icy grave through the spirit realm is none other than Travis Cohle – estranged survivalist father of McConaughey’s Rust Cohle.
The elder Cohle, who has since died of leukaemia according to Rose, was briefly mentioned in season 1. Rust alluded to how his old man had relocated the entire family to Alaska when he was a child, and that he had “some pretty f***ing strange ideas.”
The nihilistic apple clearly didn’t fall too far from the metaphysical tree.
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Back to the matter of the spirals, some of you may also recall they appeared on the sacrifice victims of the child-abusing Tuttle death cult in True Detective season 1; Tuttle being the sinister presence behind all the evils we witnessed in Louisiana.
And who did we learn was partially funding the Tsalal Arctic Research Station through a shell company? As discovered by the young Officer Peter Prior (Finn Bennett): Tuttle United.
Perhaps we’ll get to see how far the Tuttle United conspiracy goes…
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