True Detective: Night Country’s Jodie Foster Explains Her Move to TV, Talks Silence of the Lambs Parallels

True Detective is back after a five-year layoff, but that’s nothing compared to how long it’s been since Jodie Foster last starred in a TV series.

Foster — who stars as Alaska police chief Liz Danvers in the new fourth season of HBO’s crime anthology, subtitled Night Country (premiering this Sunday at 9/8c) — hasn’t been a full-time TV actor since her early teen years in the 1970s. (Did you know she co-starred in a TV version of Paper Moon?) But the Oscar winner was lured back to the small screen by the prospect of being on True Detective, a show that she says was “the beginning of my addiction of streaming… It was just one of those things that I just binge-watched and loved and always return to.”

TV has made a lot of creative strides as well since Foster first rose to stardom, she told reporters during a press conference moderated by Variety’s Jenelle Riley: “We’ve come to an amazing moment, I think, in cinema history, and that’s the time that real narrative is really on streaming. I think that’s where some of the best work is being done. It gives you an opportunity to explore characters without necessarily having it be a slave to the genre.” Plus, “having six episodes allows you to bring in other voices, I think, than the traditional voices that we might see and that we have seen in features.”

Season 4 takes place in Alaska, with Foster’s Danvers and fellow cop Navarro (Kali Reis) investigating the mysterious disappearance of a group of scientists at an arctic research station, but Foster and the cast actually shot the season in Iceland. “I’ve had this experience of making really long movies,” Foster says, “but I’ve never has the experience of making a TV show where that felt so much like a family, all of us in Reykjavik and the snow in this brand new city, hanging out with each other. It’s a great team.”

Foster, of course, played another detective chasing a killer in the 1991 film classic Silence of the Lambs, but she dismisses any comparisons between Danvers and her Lambs character Clarice Starling. She does, however, see a similarity in tone between Lambs and Night Country: “This show does exist in genre, whether it’s a horror, supernatural, thriller genre. But so much of how that horror is explored is through the psychological drama, the intimate drama of these people.”

What are you hoping to see in Season 4, True Detective fans? Share your hopes and predictions in the comments below.