The second season of HBO’s True Detective so far promises to look very little like the first season, from the presence of Rachel McAdams as a tough female detective to the California setting. But if you already miss the swampy Louisiana setting of the first season, you’re not alone. And you might not need to worry.

Speaking to the Southern-centric magazine Garden & Gun, Abigail Spencer, who has an unknown role in the new season, said there really is some Southerness left in True Detective. “There is a shared knowingness I have with Nic, something to do with the Gulf Coast,” said Spencer, who grew up in Gulf Breeze, Florida, three and a half hours from Nic Pizzolatto’s childhood home of Lake Charles, Louisiana. “When I read his script I felt like I was a child again, inserting myself into the story. That’s why I got into acting in the first place, to do and feel just that.”

Spencer describes the “sense of how interconnected everyone and everything was in the first season, which is so Southern,” and suggests that those same connections will define the new season as well—though, still under the veil of secrecy, she couldn’t promise much more. Those wanting to see Spencer in something more literally Southern won’t have to wait long, though; she also returns this summer for the third season of Sundance’s Rectify, the Georgia-set drama in which she plays the sister of a wrongfully convicted man. Spencer admits to Garden & Gun that it took her a while to embrace playing a Southerner herself; “I thought most Southern pieces felt very contrived and made us look bad, to be honest. But I read Rectify and I thought, This is authentic. These are people I know.”

Rectify debuts on the Sundance Channel July 9, just a few weeks after True Detective’s June 21 bow on HBO. The complete Abigail Spencer interview is available in the current issue of Garden & Gun.