For Claire Danes, playing an author struck by tragedy who is writing a book about a possible murderer meant venturing into “some dark places in my imagination.”
The star and executive producer of the Netflix limited series The Beast in Me joined castmates Matthew Rhys and Brittany Snow, alongside showrunner and executive producer Howard Gordon, creator and executive producer Gabe Rotter, executive producer Daniel Pearle, executive producer and director Antonio Campos, and composer Sean Callery on a panel for an FYC event in Los Angeles on Saturday.
Danes stars as acclaimed author Aggie Wiggs, who is battling writer’s block following the death of her young son in a car accident. That is, until a wealthy real estate mogul, Nile Jarvis (Rhys), suspected of murdering his first wife (Leila George), moves into her Long Island, N.Y., enclave with his second wife, Nina (Snow). Soon, Aggie begins sleuthing and working on a new book about Nile, who at first cooperates with her.
“I had to really imagine her grief,” Danes told Gold Derby about her character. “And so I read a number of books about losing children, and that was a necessary evil, not joy, of the assignment.”
While the Emmy-winning actress called the process “daunting” during the panel discussion, she also said she was “excited by the challenge of playing a very cerebral person,” who “also had a kind of viscera underneath.”
“The first episode, it’s just so much time with a sad lady in a big house. A big, sad house,” she said.
“That was the original title,” quipped Rotter, who noted during the panel that his inspiration was ghostwriter Tony Schwartz’s experience writing Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal.
“[Schwartz] was given unfettered access to [Trump] and followed him around and listened to his phone calls and sat in on his meetings and very quickly realized he was dealing a monster,” Rotter explained, “to use his words, and my words.”
To create Rhys’s intimidating but slyly humorous character, Nile, the Emmy-winning actor told Gold Derby that “it was literally all in the script.”
“There were real moments where I thought the key was not getting in the way,” he said. “It’s like The Iceman Cometh. Before you’ve turned up, everyone has talked so much about who he is and what he’s done, you have to do very little when you arrive.”
“It’s kind of great,” he joked. “Perfect for a lazy actor like me.”
Shaping the script and the series’ arc — specifically “really the mapping out of what actually happens” — was what Gordon said he and Pearle were brought onto the project by Danes to do.
“They had been developing it for a while and it really had some interesting characters and an interesting premise, but also a fairly potentially static premise,” Gordon told Gold Derby. “A lot of it was just the invention of how to create a dramatic scaffolding in terms of what really happens.”
The Emmy-winning producer of Homeland and 24 added during the panel, “I always used to say to the writers’ room, ‘What the f–k happened?’”
The eight-episode series, which premiered Nov. 13 on the streamer, represents a reunion for Gordon, Danes, and Callery, who previously worked together on Homeland. Gordon also worked with Rotter on The X-Files.
“In terms of the working relationship, it’s so comfortable and there’s so much respect and we have a shorthand and it was just great,” Gordon said about working with Danes again.
“I think we have a synergy,” Callery told Gold Derby about working with Gordon. “When you know someone for 25 years, it’s sibling-like.”
The series itself takes many twists and turns as multiple characters come under suspicion, including Snow’s Nina.
“I really love playing unexpected characters, especially women who maybe are perhaps underestimated,” Snow told Gold Derby.
The Hunting Wives actress added that she “didn’t exactly know how it was going to end up.”
“We never got all eight scripts at once,” she explained, “so that was really challenging but also really rewarding for me to actually fill in those puzzle pieces as I went.”
While the series takes on heavy topics like murder and loss, the cast members said they were still able to keep the mood light on set.
“There were times when during takes we were having maybe too much fun,” Rhys told Gold Derby. “But I do sometimes think projects of that nature tend to lend themselves to a happier set because when the material is very dense or dark, you kind of need to blow off steam. So there was a lot of mocking of each other’s characters in between takes and things like that.”
Danes told Gold Derby that she “had a lot of fun” on the project.
“My friends saw the show, and they were like, ‘You talked about it as if you were having a party, like, there was nothing remotely pleasurable about what we saw,’” she said. “So even though it is very dark material, we just got so lucky, and had an amazing rapport with each other, and it was actually, you know, it was very playful, and light in between takes. Weirdly.”
The actress, who was recently honored at the Gotham Television Awards, said that in addition to taking home a lot of Aggie’s blazers from the set (“I really loved her wardrobe,” she said), what was also deeply meaningful about the limited series was the relationships.
“I made real friends on this one,” she said, “and that’s not always the case.”
As far as awards buzz goes, Danes, who earned her first Emmy nomination at age 16 for My So-Called Life, said the recognition “doesn’t ever get old.”
“It’s very meaningful every time you get any validation that a performance has translated and connected with a bunch of people,” she said. “I’m just really grateful I get to keep attempting to do this acting thing, which I’m really very fond of. I do enjoy it.”
