HBO’s True Detective franchise has always prided itself on bringing in big-name talent to flesh out its various highly flawed crime solvers, with a frankly ludicrous number of current and future Oscar nominees and winners cycling through its anthology show seasons. Now the series is reportedly in pursuit of one of the biggest oddball movie stars of them all, as Variety reports that Nicolas Cage is in talks to star in a fifth season of the series.
Said season rests in the hands of Issa López, who previously showran the series through its fourth installment, Night Country (taking over for that other Hollywood Nic, Pizzolatto). Those episodes starred Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as its crimesolvers, investigating disappearances in a remote town in Alaska; the new season will reportedly mix things up a bit, instead zooming over to New York’s Jamaica Bay.
Cage has reportedly been circling the part for a good long while, without ever actually sealing the deal. The actor is a relative rarity, these days, in being a big-name movie star who has not dipped a toe into television for a miniseries here or there; until he signed on to star in Prime Video’s Spider-Noir series, set to come out some time next year, he’d never really been lured onto the small screen at all. That being said, he feels like a pretty natural fit for True Detective, which is usually as much about exploring its characters’ fucked-up moralities as it is actual criminal investigation; it’s not hard to imagine the guy who brought us Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans fitting in with the show’s roster of oddball cops.
