True Detective star Kali Reis: ‘I got accused of my character being a rapist! What century do we live in?’

Kali Reis is not where you’d expect her to be. The former world champion boxer who plays a hard-as-nails cop in True Detective is video calling in from her stepdaughter’s bedroom, a dazzling mélange of pink wallpaper, LED strip lighting and Care Bears posters. The single bed behind her is full to bursting with giant plush toys. It looks like the personal hell of Alaska state trooper Evangeline Navarro, who Reis portrays in the HBO thriller. “This is where I have my personal raves,” she says, laughing.

The fourth chapter in the True Detective saga, subtitled Night Country, is good. Really good, in fact. As Navarro, Reis brings a bristling intensity, whether she’s pinning down a bad guy or reluctantly opening up about her mother’s unsolved murder. The 37-year-old more than holds her own among a heavyweight cast, led by Oscar winner Jodie Foster, after two forgettable seasons fronted by Colin Farrell and Mahershala Ali, respectively.

With , Reis and Foster have guided the show back to the brilliance of, but in a very different way. Foster plays Liz Danvers, the cantankerous police chief of a small town on the fringes of the Alaskan wilderness. She and Navarro must work out how and why a group of polar scientists left their station and ended up naked and frozen to death in a jumble of bodies out on the ice. In McConaughey and Harrelson’s Louisiana-set series, women fell into three categories: sex workers, “nagging wives” or dead. flips these tropes on their head. “This series wouldn’t work with two female nurses,” Reis says. “You have two detectives in a male-dominated world who have a gender fluidity that you can see throughout the series. They have this very masculine energy they both have to carry in this profession.”