Why Woody Harrelson will never make a True Detective sequel

“We gave everything we had in this first season…”

Marty Hart and Rust Cohle should never investigate together again.

Woody Harrelson will not reprise his role as the detective from True Detective.

Guest of the Today show to promote his film Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the actor was categorical:

“No chance I’ll make a sequel. Ever. Because it was perfect like that. If we did one again, it would tarnish the memory of the first season.”

Certainly the best reason.

Released in 2014 on HBO, the first season of True Detective remains an important marker of television crime fiction, with Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in the cult roles of Marty Hart and Rust Cohle. The two actors were also nominated for Emmy Awards for their performances, enhanced by the writing and direction of Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Fukunaga.

In recent months, however, rumors of a return have multiplied. Pizzolatto had confided on the Nothing Left Unsaid podcast that he had “in mind a new story centered on Rust and Marty”, while McConaughey said he was up for it on condition of having “a scenario as burning and original as the first”.

But Harrelson prefers to leave the work intact:

“We gave everything to this first season. It has its own beauty, its own balance. To go back on it would be to spoil it.”

That said, Marty Hart and Rust Cohle still reappeared on American TV at the beginning of the year, for an advert promoting Texas…