It’s insane to think that nearly five months after the True Detective Season 2 casting news started, HBO has still only officially confirmed two members of the cast: Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn. If you’ve been impatient to learn if rumored cast members Taylor Kitsch and Rachel McAdams will round out the cast, you are not alone.

In an interview with AdWeek today, Kitsch confirmed he’s on board the project. But with HBO still being coy, the magazine added this editorial note: “For the record from sources involved in the negotiations: the deal is close, but not complete.” Kitsch went on to confess that he was just as frustrated about the lengthy casting process as you were. Probably a little more so:

Yeah, I'm really excited. I’ve just been prepping. It’s been almost a full year since I’ve been on camera, so I’m itching, man. I’m overdue. You’ve just got to grind it out. Even taking this year off was, I mean you want to work, but you also don’t want to just water it down and work for the sake of working. So, it was tough to sit a year out, keeping a finger crossed that I was going to get True.

After Kitsch burst on the scene in 2006 on NBC’s critically beloved teen drama Friday Night Lights, the Canadian-born actor was welcomed by Hollywood with open arms, but after a string less-than-stellar box office returns on Kitsch-led films like John Carter, Battleship, and Savages, his cinematic leading man status has been put on hold. Kitsch’s eagerness to get back to work is understandable when you compare 2012, where he had four films in the theater, to 2014, where he only gave one (very well-received!) performance in HBO’s TV movie Normal Heart. Kitsch’s rapid rise and fall reads like a highly condensed version of Matthew McConaughey’s ten-year hiatus from critical acclaim. Or maybe that’s just the unavoidable tendency to connect both McConaughey and Kitsch with Texas talking. Seeing what True Detective helped accomplish for McConaughey no doubt played a part in Kitsch’s enthusiasm for the project.

Yeah, I mean it was just showing a lot of patience on my end and turning a lot of stuff down because I wanted to be a part of it. And having this meeting with Nic Pizzolatto, it kind of brought me back to when I was here in New York and why I wanted to be a actor, why you struggle and why you don't quit. And when we’re talking, I mean he’s obviously incredibly smart and passionate, so that rubs off. And you’re just excited to go now. I can’t fucking wait to hit camera. So I’m excited. I loved that first season of it so much. It’s just unlike anything I’ve seen in, you know, I don’t know when. And it was so grounded. It could really happen. This is very similar, and I love that. It makes it more relatable. It makes these guys more real. Nowadays, it takes fucking balls to stand by that and do it that way.

Is that Kitsch’s Tim Riggins-esque way of telling us it will be worth the wait? I think it is.