When prestige TV was first thought to be eclipsing movies, with quality scripts and meaty acting roles, two shows frequently bandied about were “Homeland” with Claire Danes and “The Americans” starring Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell.
Danes acknowledges other parallels with Rhys.
“I mean, you married an American lady, I married a British gentleman,” she said, referring to her marriage to Hugh Dancy and Rhys’ partner, Russell.
“We’ve just been mirroring each other’s lives,” added Rhys, noting that they also had children around the same time.
Danes and Rhys had never worked together, until now. They co-star in the new cat-and-mouse limited series, “The Beast in Me,” streaming on Netflix.
Danes plays Aggie, a prickly Pulitzer prize-winning author who has a looming deadline for her second book and a major case of writers’ block. She’s also grieving the death of her young son and dissolution of her marriage soon after. When Rhys’ Nile, a real estate tycoon, moves in next door, his reputation precedes him because he was a suspect in his ex-wife’s disappearance. Nile’s aggressive dogs and loud security alarm unnerves Aggie. He and his new wife try to charm the neighbors but she’s a tough nut to crack and returns their gifted bottle of wine.
“You’re not how I pictured you…at all,” Nile says to Aggie in an early encounter. “On the page you’re a lot more self-assured.” Somehow he entices Aggie to have lunch and the ice between them begins to thaw.
“I think they’re both crazy smart and rarely encounter another person who thinks as quickly as they do. They’re kind of hyper-perceptive. And they kind of enjoy challenging each other,” said Danes.
Although she doesn’t completely trust Nile, Aggie proposes she write a book about him to get his narrative out there.
“He goes, ‘Hang on, I can undo this kind of, you know, a societal scar that I’ve been living with, and I can possibly clear my name,” said Rhys. “He foolishly thinks he could use Aggie in that sense.”
“The Beast in Me” reunites Danes with some of the team who worked on “Homeland,” including showrunner Howard Gordon.
When filming began, only three scripts had been written so no one really knew what was going to happen. “We were all discovering the evolution of the story in real time,” said Danes, who adds her history with the production team made her “trust them implicitly.” Even Rhys was OK with the unknown because it served his portrayal of Nile.
“In a way it’s kind of liberating because then you’re only playing the present and what’s on the page in that moment,” he said. “Sometimes I think when you do know the outcome, I have a tendency sometimes to kind of play into that or to do something ridiculous that flags it. So there’s freedom in the fact that you don’t know.”
What they knew for sure was to lean into their character’s unlikely chemistry.
“The pyrotechnics were pretty much contained within these sparring sessions. There is a little murder in there, but that’s not where the tension really lies. They are hiding a lot from each other. They’re playing each other but they also are forging a genuine intimacy and connection that unnerves both of them.”
“I mean there’s actually nothing I enjoy more than that,” she said.
