written by David Canfield, Vanity Fair
The two Emmy winners go big in a juicy Netflix thriller centered on a lonely author and her new subject, a wealthy scion accused of killing his missing wife: “These deeply isolated characters finally discover a really perverse friend.”
Here’s the question,” Matthew Rhys begins over Zoom, his screen box sandwiched between mine and Claire Danes’s. “Who has the beast within them?” Danes reacts with the wry, weary smile of someone very familiar with Rhys’s jokes. “I am plenty beasty,” she says. “Right, good—this is a strong start,” Rhys replies. I’ve spoken with both Rhys and Danes several times, and they’re always playful, thoughtful, off-the-cuff interviews. This isn’t typical for most actors of their stature—and it’s all the more striking given their penchant for portraying dark, volatile characters.
What a thrill, then, to see these Emmy winners go toe-to-toe in The Beast in Me, an eight-episode Netflix limited series launching all at once on November 13. As Danes rightly points out, “The success of the show rests almost entirely on the dynamic between our characters.” It’s a brainy, stylish cat-and-mouse thriller driven by two slithery performances—each impossible to pin down, but vividly compelling from start to finish.
The show required two stars who were experienced enough to roll with the punches of a fast-evolving TV series, and have fun along the way. Danes and Rhys had only seen three scripts by the time filming started. “You kept turning to me like I was hoarding some answers and just being sneaky,” Danes says to Rhys. “You didn’t believe me when I said, ‘No, we have no fucking clue.’”
Danes was first hooked by The Beast in Me about five years ago, on the strength of the pilot written by creator Gabe Rotter (The X-Files) that was sent to her by Jodie Foster. Danes has kept in close touch with Foster, who directed her in Home for the Holidays, in the 30 years since that movie’s release; Foster was attached to helm this series at the time. “I loved how classic it felt, surprising and faintly Hitchcockian,” Danes says. She also felt an immediate connection to the role of Aggie, the author of a lauded memoir who’s spent the last few years paralyzed in grief over the death of her young son. “There’s some connective tissue between her and, say, [Homeland’s] Carrie Mathison or Temple Grandin, these characters who don’t give a fuck and don’t censor themselves or apologize for their power.”
Conan O’Brien was also attached as a producer. But despite the names already involved, the team had trouble pinning down Aggie’s counterpart, Nile Jarvis—a wealthy tabloid figure who’s just moved into Aggie’s small town in Upstate New York, trailed by ugly rumors that he killed his missing first wife. Nile takes a wary interest in Aggie, who then takes an even warier interest in him. “He was harder to define,” Danes says. The Beast in Me’s momentum stalled.
Years later, Danes, also an executive producer, asked her old Homeland boss, Howard Gordon, to oversee the project as showrunner and writer. Gordon brought in writer Daniel Pearle as an executive producer. Pearle reworked the pilot with Rotter, while The Staircase’s Antonio Campos came on as lead director. The new team worked to streamline the story; Gordon says most of its original producers, including Foster and O’Brien, were no longer creatively involved (though they remain attached to the show).
“Because of the complexity, it honestly had gotten overdeveloped,” says Gordon, who has won best-drama-series Emmys for both 24 and Homeland. “I call it putting five gallons of shit in a two-gallon jug. There were just too many ideas that were fighting for space.” The main task was figuring Nile out as a worthy counterpart to Aggie, and honing their dynamic: “The character, when Gabe initially wrote it, was a kind of Tony Soprano mobster. He became a rap mogul, and then finally a real estate developer in the Durst-Trump mold.”
Even that final iteration was hard to crack until Rhys stepped in. “He was really the big epiphany,” Gordon says. “It’d always be tricky to play that character, because it really could get arch or cheesy—you just don’t know what it’s like until you hear it or see it.” For Rhys, “It was like my Home for the Holidays. I felt like the Robert Downey Jr. character stepping into this beautifully, ready-made family that had all this shorthand together.”
On their second day of filming, Danes and Rhys faced down a 10-page scene. This reluctant lunch date between Nile and Aggie is where The Beast in Me really opens up. He wants her to approve him building a jogging path in their shared backyard; she is unavoidably fascinated by her maybe-wife-killing new neighbor. The dialogue offers the actors an opportunity to essentially define the show’s appeal.
“In that moment, I realized that this whole experience was a relationship between two people that was going to be incredibly muscular, challenging, athletic, invigorating, exciting,” Rhys says. Danes adds: “It was just effortless, playing with Matthew. You can serve anything, and he’ll serve it right back in a direction that you can’t quite anticipate.”
The show similarly swerves with unpredictable gusto. Its engine revs up as Aggie, struggling with writer’s block, realizes her next subject is sitting before her. They come to an agreement: She’ll allow the jogging path if he’ll let her write about him for her new book. Then things go haywire. The young man responsible for Aggie’s son’s death suddenly goes missing, and Aggie suspects Nile may be involved. Nile’s new wife (Brittany Snow), a gallerist, takes an interest in Aggie’s painter ex-wife (Natalie Morales). The Hudson Yards–esque development project spearheaded by Nile and his imposing father (Jonathan Banks) starts bumping up against loud public opposition. And a spiraling FBI agent who’d previously been investigating Nile (David Lyons) pops up, spotting an opportunity for belated justice.
All of this action informs the show’s central dynamic. “You had to believe that they were equally matched adversaries, best friends, and soul enemies. It was a really surprising love story, this wild, undeniable attraction of the mind,” Danes says. “They kind of rescue each other. They find company in each other. These deeply isolated characters finally discover a really perverse friend.”
Rhys gives The Beast in Me an intoxicating menace. He came out swinging without even knowing the depths of Nile’s madness. “At times, I said, ‘I feel odd. I feel real mustache-twiddling,’” says Rhys. He credits director Campos with encouraging him to commit to the bit. Gordon says the actor managed to set the tone by balancing “voluble, articulate fuckery” with mysterious quiet. “On one hand he’s charming and seductive; on the other hand, there’s a flash of something that we’re not quite getting,” Gordon says. “Sociopaths are really tricky to write.”
The Beast in Me is Gordon’s first streaming limited series. So while his overarching process remained the same—he tries to keep the writing process fluid, allowing the performances to inform the story’s direction—he’s aware the show will be consumed differently than something that airs week to week. “Whether it was Homeland, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones, even the premium cable business was about delivering a show seasonally,” he says. “I do worry that people…bingeing in one sitting or in multiple sittings of multiple episodes are losing the anticipation, and then the proper digestion. That’s what I miss.”
But the format does have an upside. “It’s really amazing to be able to tell a story across eight episodes, and know that there’s an end point—that you can really stick the landing,” he says. Did they pull it off? “Towards the end, I said to Howard, ‘So what does happen?’ and he didn’t answer the question,” says Rhys. Danes interjects: “He didn’t know!”
“It was a little dicey, but we found it,” Danes says later. “Endings are terrifying.”
This is my first time playing a lesbian—my first lesbian!” Danes exclaims in the middle of our conversation. Rhys laughs, spotting an opening: “The first of many, Claire.” Danes smiles again, but she has a real point here: “It was like, Oh, right. I don’t have to conform to these sets of expectations that I find myself having to normally as Claire. I exist happily in the margins.” She had a new wardrobe to play with—it’s woodsy, it’s queer, and it’s highlighted by a killer pair of pinstripe pants—and a well of dark, eccentric humor to draw from.
“There’s something so professional and so non-dramatic about it, and yet she summons these emotional states that are quite remarkable to observe,” Gordon says. “Especially for one who’s been famous for so long, she’s, like, annoyingly normal.” This turned out to be true of Rhys as well: “They’re both family people. They seem to be in very good marriages, and they’re very good parents.”
The whole production started leaning on their chemistry. At one point, Campos asked the pair to play Scrabble or chess together, to see what would come of it. “I was like, There’s no way on God’s green earth I’m playing Scrabble with Claire Danes,” Rhys says. “Look at the books behind her.” (For the record, there are a lot of books in Danes’s Zoom background.)
But if you consider these two actors’ TV résumés, you realize they’re both old pros in this particular game. Homeland found magic in the forbidden chemistry between Danes’s CIA agent and Damian Lewis’s recruited terrorist, and was also written fast during production. Rhys spent six seasons on The Americans fleshing out one of TV’s most complex marriages ever with his eventual real-life partner, Keri Russell. The stars have built careers on brilliant chemistry.
“That is the major gift of having done this for a while. There’s that shared history and language that comes with it—and achy joints,” Danes says. “We were both concealing quite a lot from each other and pretending otherwise [in The Beast in Me]—and that is something we have explored before in previous roles. We knew how to do that. I mean, it’s a kick.”
Featuring Work by Production Designer Loren Weeks
