True Detective Season Two’s Abigail Spencer Interviewed by Deadline

By Reuben Levine | May 20, 2015

Abigail Spencer has been in the news lately. The True Detective related news, anyway. Spencer recently did an interview with Garden & Gun in which she stated that the second season of True Detective may not be entirely different from the first in some respects. And now she’s taken the time to sit down with Deadline.

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The interview isn’t focused on True Detective, instead choosing to tackle all of her current projects. When asked directly about the second season of True Detective, Spencer was excited but predictably muzzled:

"“I can’t say anything about it! I mean, I could tell you how amazing I think it’s going to be.”"

But when Deadline went into how the first season of True Detective had some major issues with its female characters, Spencer was able to open up a bit more. Speaking about her own character and what we can see of Rachel McAdams in the trailer, it’s obvious that Spencer believes in True Detective.

"“I think that you can tell from the first trailers that have been released that Rachel McAdams’ character is not lacking on complexity or strength. I find women in general just amazingly complex and strong…and there are times when she’s going to be incredibly strong and yet incredibly fragile, incredibly broken…”"

Part of being a strong character is being able to be fragile and broken. “Strong female” does not directly translate to “badass.” Good, believable characters have to be just as fragile as normal people. Spencer went on to sing the praises of True Detective mastermind Nic Pizzolatto:

"So, I felt incredibly supported by Nic (Pizzolatto) and the material to do that and it’s really cool just to be a part of this moment with True Detective and with television in general…I’m getting a lot of opportunities to do really cool stuff, so I’m speaking to the generality I guess of where television is at, but particularly on True Detective there’s going to be some amazing performances from the women on the show for sure."

That’s just what we want to here. The first season of True Detective had some serious problems, and the poorly fleshed out female characters were one of them. Both Rachel McAdams and now Abigail Spencer have spoken about their strong characters, and hopefully that means we have nothing to worry about.

Next: Sky Atlantic will simulcast True Detective.

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