The biological inheritance of charm is not a simple thing, and the suggestion that Woody Harrelson’s ease with people and his capacity to make audiences like him have something to do with his father’s similar qualities is not a claim about criminal heredity. It is an observation about the transmission of certain kinds of social intelligence across generations, which happens in families regardless of what else those families contain.
## True Detective and the Character Who Fit Best
When Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective premiered on HBO in January 2014, it was immediately recognized as something different: a crime drama that used the investigation of a series of murders in rural Louisiana as the occasion for a philosophical inquiry into determinism, nihilism, time, and the specific psychological damage that sustained exposure to human violence produces in the people tasked with confronting it.
Harrelson played Marty Hart, the Louisiana State Police detective who serves as the more conventional half of a deeply unconventional partnership. Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle was the visionary misanthrope, the character whose philosophy organized the show’s intellectual landscape. Marty Hart was the man next to him — the detective who presented himself as a normal person while being, as the show gradually revealed, quite far from normal: a man whose belief in his own decency was used as a shield against examining what he actually was.
The performance required Harrelson to inhabit a specific kind of self-deception: a man who is certain he is the reasonable one, the grounded one, the one without the other guy’s problems, while being completely blind to the ways in which his own behavior has cost him everything he claims to value. It is a harder role than it appears, because its central quality — a character who is wrong about himself — is easy to play as simple hypocrisy and very difficult to play as the genuine self-blindness it actually is.