As ‘The Night Of’ signs off, star Bill Camp reflects on the ‘subtle beast’ of his character

After watching HBO’s eight-episode mystery “The Night Of,” which wraps up with a 95-minute finale on Sunday night, there’s something you might not expect from Bill Camp, who portrays the laconic, thoughtfully intense NYPD Det. Dennis Box.

Though he speaks with a similarly thoughtful cadence as his character, Camp also has a tremendous laugh, which comes loud and easily when asked whether he’s had any experience with speculation among viewers about the fate of the show’s 23-year-old murder suspect, Naz Khan (portrayed by Riz Ahmed).

Speaking by phone from Cincinnati, where he is working on “Killing of a Sacred Deer,” the next film by “The Lobster” director Yorgos Lanthimos (in which he portrays an anesthesiologist for a surgeon played by Colin Farrell — and that’s all he’s willing to say), Camp takes a moment to collect himself.

“Pardon me, I guess I answered your question,” he said. He adds that he’s been asked about the show practically everywhere he goes. From his sister in Vermont to a teenager at his neighborhood book store and through a recent visit to Australia — where a fan offered one of many theories about a show that counts a Bible-quoting hearse driver, a gold-digging stepfather and someone who shares the name with a drug store chain among its suspects — people want to know what happened (and don’t even get us started about that blood-spattered deer head.)

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“All I can do is just kind of smile,” he said. “It’s fantastic. Clearly [co-creators Steve Zaillian and Richard Price have] written this kind of masterpiece of mystery. They’re obsessed by it.”

Exquisitely rendered with dialogue consistent with Price’s vivid, character-rich New York City crime novels and with a patient storytelling style, “The Night Of” is the kind of show that rewards obsession.

With a similarly thorough eye for detail and a pulse rate that never rises above walking pace, Camp’s rumpled, deeply human detective in some respects offers a living reflection of the show’s eagerness to examine the night in question and its fallout from all angles.

“I’m interested in the scenes on either side,” writer-director Zaillian told The Times before the series premiered. “The waiting around, cops wanting to go home because their shift is up, the kids whose lives will be altered completely because of these little things — that’s what makes it real.”

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Already harboring a weary, seen-it-all look when the series opens, Box carries the weight of a job that grows only heavier as the series unfolds. At one point, there’s a conversation with the district attorney that reveals Box’s plans to cash in his pension. But later, he has trouble looking festive at his own retirement party, eyeing a gift set of golf clubs as if they’ve appeared from an alien world.

“There was a part of me that was like ‘Oh, what’s he going to do?’ There is still a fascination with what he does,” Camp said of his character. “There’s an inside engine that I don’t know what Dennis Box is going to do with himself after that.”

The show never entirely reveals what he’s thinking, and it’s that mystery that attracted Camp when Zaillian first offered him the role in the series, which was based on the 2008 BBC drama “Criminal Justice.”

“There was something that was complicated about him but that was not illustrated in any way,” Camp said. “There was a diligence in terms of the way he certainly approached his work, you know?”

The same could be said of Camp. A lauded, longtime presence in New York theater, Camp earned an Obie Award in 2002 for his turn in Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul” and a Tony nomination for last year’s production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Of late, he’s built a reputation as a scene-stealing character actor in TV and films.

He was a “Macbeth”-quoting “Crazy Man” in the Oscar-winning “Birdman” and was featured as a black-ops agent in this year’s “Jason Bourne” and a doomsday cult member in “Midnight Special.” Prior to “The Night Of,” Camp also appeared on the HBO dramas “The Leftovers” and “Boardwalk Empire.”

“It keeps me curious, the more stuff I get to do,” Camp said.

On “The Night Of,” his character may be most tidily summarized by attorney (and Box’s occasional verbal sparring partner) John Stone, played by John Turturro. Speaking with a measure of admiration, Stone tells Khan that Box is “a talented oppressor, a subtle beast.”

It’s a characterization reflected when — after his shellshocked suspect refuses to confess — the detective gives him an Ivy League T-shirt for his first ride to Rikers Island. And one with enough resonance to form the title of the second episode. Camp said it shaped his performance as well.

“It was something that Steve [Zaillian] reminded me of early on, that truth about him that others observe,” Camp said. “It’s sort of a weird contradiction; as an actor, contradiction is sometimes a really helpful thing to have.”

At the Television Critics Assn. press tour last month, Zaillian said a second season was a possibility, although this story was designed with a definitive ending. “There are ways of taking what [the show] feels like and what it’s about and doing another season on another subject,” Zaillian said. “We’re talking about it.”

Speaking about the onscreen rapport he developed with co-star Turturro — who took over the role of Stone after the death of James Gandolfini, who is listed as executive producer — Camp credits having acted with him onstage years ago and calls working with him a “playful, joyful” experience despite the pitch-dark subject matter of “The Night Of.”

When presented with the idea of the two of them becoming a show unto themselves, there’s that laugh again.

“We joked about that, I’ll say that much,” Camp conceded. “ ‘Box and Stone,’ the spinoff.”

‘The Night Of’

Where: HBO

When: 9 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

chris.barton@latimes.com

Follow me over here @chrisbarton.

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