NEW YORK — In the security line at a Manhattan courthouse, Jack Stone empties the pockets of his floppy overcoat and piles the plastic bin to near capacity. A lawyer always on the run defending hookers and drug dealers, he bares his life for the X-ray with a stash that includes his keys, Purell, business cards, breath mints, cream for his eczema — and a hard-boiled egg.
This fleeting scene early in the second episode of “The Night Of” tells you much about Stone, the hero of HBO’s dark and irresistible murder mystery (airing Sunday at 9 p.m.).
It also tells you something about John Turturro, who plays him so masterfully.
“That hard-boiled egg — it gives me a lot of joy,” he says, flashing his signature lopsided grin. No wonder. It was his idea (and his own boiled egg, a snack he often brought to the set). And however wide the gulf between him and his character, he sensed that it would be a telling prop for Stone, “who didn’t seem the type to eat granola bars.”
Stone appeared only briefly in last week’s debut of the eight-episode series.
In that opener, Naz, a Pakistani-American college student (Riz Ahmed, “Nightcrawler”) “borrowed” his father’s cab to go to a party, but en route met with a distraction — an alluring young woman who ended up brutally murdered in her Manhattan bedroom, with all the evidence implicating Naz, her overnight guest, as the killer.