True Detective also marked a specific development in his relationship to prestige television: the demonstration that he could anchor an HBO-caliber production at the level of sustained performance that the most demanding television work requires. Film performances are assembled from individual takes across discontinuous shooting schedules; television performances — particularly in a limited series where the character’s arc plays out over many hours — require the actor to hold the psychological continuity of the character across the full span of the production. His performance in True Detective demonstrated that capacity at a high level.
## Three Billboards: The Moral Center of a Film That Resisted Having One
Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) was the film for which Harrelson received his third Academy Award nomination. The film starred Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes — a woman whose daughter has been murdered and who has, in her grief and fury, rented three billboards outside her town to publicly accuse the local police chief of negligence in failing to solve the case. Sam Rockwell played a deputy whose racism and incompetence are initially presented as the film’s comic target and who gradually becomes something more complicated. And Harrelson played Chief Willoughby — the man the billboards accuse.
Willoughby is a character who is dying of cancer, who loves his wife and children, who has a genuine understanding of the case’s challenges that Mildred Hayes does not have, and who is — in the film’s most daring move — sympathetic. In a film built around righteous anger, the target of that anger is presented as a decent man doing his best in genuinely difficult circumstances. This is morally complicated, and it is complicated in exactly the way that makes the film interesting: it refuses to make the object of Mildred’s fury simple, which means the film can’t be simple either.