‘True Detective’: Jodie Foster & Kali Reis on Their Unique Relationship in ‘Night Country’ (VIDEO)  

HBO’s True Detective anthology returned last night with a suitably creepy opener filled with Alaskan bleakness, the dawn of the region’s eternal darkness period, and, of course, a chilling head-scratcher of a case.

It also brought with it the franchise’s first female-led season and we are into it! Opening with the unexplained disappearance of the team working at a research station (and later found in the freakiest of human pileups), we soon meet Oscar winner Jodie Foster’s fascinatingly no-b.s. police chief Liz Danvers, who winds up working with her bristly ex-partner-turned state trooper, Evangeline Navarro (former pro boxer and total revelation Kali Reis).

“How about her?!” agreed Foster when we recently spoke to the pair. “She is [amazing].”

HBO

The same could be said for the Silence of the Lambs icon, who was as cheery during our talk as her Danvers is caustic on-screen. In fact, it was wild to see someone who’s garnered a lifetime of acclaim be so excited about sharing the screen with such a newcomer.

“It’s really the vision of [showrunner] Issa Lopez that just drew me aboard and then she showed me some tapes of this one over here,” she says, good-naturedly pointing to her co-star. “At first, she just showed me her picture and I was like ‘Yes!’ And then I got some extraordinary tapes of Kali acting and I was blown away by how fierce and driven and connected she is…the rest is history.”

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Driven she was. “When I first read what this was going to be and I was so intrigued by the story, I was like ‘OK, I want this part.’ I could so see this being me,” Reis recalls. “Once I learned that I got this, I was like  ‘Oh my god…oh my god.'” Thankfully, the daunting realization that she’d be going up against Foster was quickly quelled by their first meeting. “This was an opportunity of a lifetime and what better way to be in the beginning of my career than to be with a legend and somebody I look up to…and then to find out that she’s cool as hell!”

Watch the full video above for more from the stars.

True Detective: Night Country, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO and Max