True Detective: Matthew McConaughey Watches Each Episode As It Airs, Just Like You

True Detective star Matthew McConaughey, because he is, after all, one of the two lead actors in the hit HBO police drama, had a chance to watch all eight episodes of the atmospheric show at once. But he chose instead to watch one episode every week and take the time to stew over the theories, rampant among fans, about just what in the world is really going on in the series.

“They sent me all eight episodes a couple of months ago and I started to watch them and I said, ‘No, I want to do what everybody else does,” said the actor, who’s up for an Oscar for his role in the indie film Dallas Buyer’s Club. “I want to watch one a week and then sit on it a week.”

He made the admission in an interview on The Queen Latifah Show. And understandably, the rapper-turned-actress-turned-talk-show-host reacted with disbelief.

“If we had all eight episodes there’s no way we’d sit on them!” she told Matthew McConaughey.

But McConaughey said the not only does he wait a week before watching each new True Detective episode — he watched the current one more than once.

“I go back and watch it two, three times,” he said. “I’m seeing something different every time and I made it!”

Presumably, Matthew McConaughey knows how the True Detective story ends, or if it ends. But at the same time, if he wants to contemplate the numerous theories about the show, he has no shortage of material.

There is, if course, the mystery of The Yellow King, a recurring motif in the storyline drawn by creator and writer Nic Pizzolato from an 1895 book of supernatural tales called The King In Yellow.

True Detective viewers have been trying to puzzle out who, in the show, the mysterious Yellow King will turn out to be. But as one writer recently pointed out, he may turn out to be no one. Pizzolato has sad that the story is merely a vehicle to explore the relationship between the two main True Detective characters played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

“I don’t give a **** about serial killers, and I certainly don’t care to engage in some sort of creative cultural competition for who can invent the most disgusting kind of serial killer,” Pizzolato told The Los Angeles Times. “You could have engaged the same obsessions in a doughnut shop. But the show probably wouldn’t have sold.”

That led writer Andrew Roberts to speculate that there may be no Yellow King in True Detective at all.

“Could True Detective possibly be hiding nothing in its meticulously crafted story?” he wrote. “Knowing who The Yellow King is at the end of the series isn’t as important as knowing these characters and how they exist in the world that Pizzolatto has created.”