In the early days when television was gaining ground on films with its captivating stories and complex characters, two standout series were often highlighted: “Homeland,” featuring Claire Danes, and “The Americans,” with Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell.
Claire Danes has noted some intriguing similarities between her life and that of Rhys.
“You married an American woman, and I married a British man,” Danes remarked, alluding to her husband Hugh Dancy and Rhys’ partner, Russell.
Rhys chimed in, “We’ve been mirroring each other’s lives,” pointing out how they both became parents around the same time.
Despite these parallels, Danes and Rhys had never shared the screen until now. They are teaming up in the captivating new limited series “The Beast in Me,” currently streaming on Netflix.
In the series, Danes portrays Aggie, a sharp-witted Pulitzer Prize-winning author grappling with a looming book deadline and severe writer’s block. She is also dealing with the grief of losing her young son and the breakdown of her marriage. Rhys plays Nile, a powerful real estate mogul who becomes her new neighbor. Known for his past involvement in his ex-wife’s mysterious disappearance, Nile’s presence is unsettling to Aggie, especially with his noisy security system and intimidating dogs. Despite Nile and his new wife’s attempts to befriend the neighbors, Aggie remains distant, even returning their offering of a wine bottle.
“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.
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