What do you do if you’re Colin Hanks and you’re in Calgary shooting Fargo and you really want to see the season finale of True Detective but you don’t have HBO?
That’s one of many things we discussed with the newly minted Emmy nominee when he dropped by The Times recently to talk about the celebrated FX mini-series. Hanks won a supporting actor nod for his nuanced turn as Gus Grimly, the Duluth deputy that began the season as a rather hapless character (“I kept looking for the wins,” Hanks says) and ended the show on a rather triumphant note.
But back to that True Detective dilemma. Hanks had watched most of the HBO series back home in Los Angeles. When he returned to Calgary to finish filming Fargo, he needed to find out how things sorted out in the psychosphere. So he took to Twitter, asking strangers if they had a plus-one in their living room.
“I had a couple of different offers and I sort of vetted them all,” Hanks says. “And I found a couple — Sarah and Josiah — they played in a band together. She’s made documentaries. He writes for the local weekly music magazine. These seemed like my kind of people.”
So, at the appointed hour, Hanks showed up and enjoyed the show, the conversation and Canadian chips and candies and microbrews. And he had a great story to tell his Fargo cast mates.
“Come that Monday morning, I said, ‘You won’t believe what I did last night,’” Hanks remembers. “I told everybody and they all properly said, ‘That’s insane. And you should never do that again.’”
But now Hanks has some friends in Calgary.
A nod of appreciation to Hanks’ Fargo co-star Allison Tolman, for tipping us off to the True Detective tale.
