Claire Danes’ latest series, The Beast in Me, premiering Thursday on Netflix, opens on a close-up of her face, screaming. If you’ve been watching television for the past 30 years, that is a familiar sight.
Danes was just 14 when she was on My So-Called Life, the seminal and sensitive teen drama that premiered on ABC in 1994. Since then she has rarely left screens, whether she was romancing Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet; unravelling a global conspiracy on the long-running counterterrorism series Homeland; or seeking out a mythological creature in the Gothic miniseries The Essex Serpent.
If Danes has a defining skill, it is her ability to convey emotional extremes. She is known for twisting her body in torment, her mouth contorting and her limbs collapsing. In the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women, her Beth March suffered poetically through her deadly case of scarlet fever. On Homeland, she became known for her character’s memorable flights of panic. Fleishman Is in Trouble spent an entire episode exploring her emotional collapse. And now, in The Beast in Me, she is a writer who has shut herself off from the world after a tragedy depicted in the opening scenes.
But even though her characters’ experiences are often painful and specific, Danes has made a career out of amplifying relatable anxieties. As she has grown up, those fears have changed, but she always manages to make them feel bracingly real.
RM Block
Teenage angst
In the first moments of My So-Called Life, Danes’ Angela Chase says, “So I started hanging out with Rayanne Graff, just for fun, just because it seemed like if I didn’t I would die or something.” So yes, Danes’ characters have generally been on the dramatic side.
Many viewers first saw Danes in this series, created by Winnie Holzman, which was cancelled after one season. The reason My So-Called Life became so beloved despite its all-too-short run was largely because Danes was able to accurately capture the joy, pain and confusion of being a teenager.
The 15-year-old Angela is at a crossroads: chafing against the person she thought she was, she befriends the artsy rebel Rayanne (AJ Langer), dyes her hair crimson and lusts after the aloof troublemaker Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto). But Danes never lets you forget that Angela is still a kid. She might affect jadedness, but she remains earnest and naive, as evidenced when, at the end of the pilot, she goes to her mother crying and apologising for her minor youthful transgressions.
Whereas the stars of Beverly Hills, 90210, Dawson’s Creek and other 1990s teen TV shows seemed to exist in a fantasy of high school, Angela felt like a real girl aching with a desire to grow up a little too fast. A year after My So-Called Life, Danes brought that same earthiness to an even more classic tale of adolescent angst: Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo + Juliet.
Professional stress
The hallmarks of Danes’ acting style began to be codified on Homeland, the Showtime series, debuting in 2011, in which she played the CIA agent Carrie Mathison. Carrie, who has bipolar disorder, is an emotional and professional wild card, prone to eye-bulging, lip-quivering outbursts. She is also a Cassandra of sorts – in the first season, only she realises that the war hero Brody (Damian Lewis) has been turned into a terrorist asset.
Danes’ jittery take on Carrie was so immediately identifiable it became the stuff of parody. Notably, Anne Hathaway did an exaggerated take in a 2012 Saturday Night Live sketch. Responding to her sobs, Kenan Thompson remarks: “It’s like she makes her mouth turn fully upside down.”
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Still, there was a reason Homeland was such a phenomenon, at least for the first couple of seasons. Despite Carrie’s many bad decisions – falling madly in love with Brody, for starters – she was a heightened example of a young professional fighting to be heard. Homeland also tapped into overwrought post-9/11 anxieties that those who grew up with Danes were also feeling. For better or worse, Danes as Carrie was the embodiment of the “If you see something, say something” era.
Maternal agony
If Carrie wore her messiness on her sleeve, Rachel Fleishman in the FX limited series Fleishman Is in Trouble was the opposite. For most of the series, Rachel is presented as the villain of the story, a high-powered theatrical agent who disappears on her children and ex-husband, Toby (Jesse Eisenberg). He thinks she has deserted him for a glamorous life with another man. Instead, she is in the throes of a breakdown stemming from her frustrating marriage and from deeper wounds related to becoming a mother.
The seventh episode reveals what Rachel has been battling, as the audience learns that Rachel is suffering from the residual trauma of an invasive birth procedure she did not authorise. She never really recovered, even as she attempted to become a perfect Upper East Side mother, leading to a mental collapse during which she ends up nearly paralysed in her bed. Danes gives a tour de force performance, seemingly reaching into the wells of her soul on-screen.
It is striking to watch Danes in maternal agony. In My So-Called Life, Angela struggles to see her mother (Bess Armstrong) as a real person beyond an authority figure. In Fleishman, Danes is playing someone who is the manifestation of the pain many women try to hide from their children in order to protect them. You get the sense that Rachel, whose children are still young, would relate to Angela’s mom.
Midlife crisis
In The Beast in Me, Danes’ character, Agatha Wiggs, known as Aggie, is slightly washed up. Yes, she’s still reeling from the death of her son in a horrific car accident. But she’s also at a professional impasse.
It has been seven years since her memoir brought her literary renown. Since then she has been plodding along on a book about the friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, a subject that doesn’t seem to much interest her.
That is partly why she latches on to Nile Jarvis, the beguiling and infamous real estate mogul who moves in next door. Played by Matthew Rhys, Jarvis is widely suspected of having murdered his previous wife, which makes him better material than a couple of dead supreme court justices. Even though Aggie squandered her earlier book advance and produced nothing in return, she knows her publisher will jump at an exclusive with Jarvis.
The Beast in Me is on one hand a soapy thriller with a Robert Durst type at its centre in Nile, but Danes captures something more pedestrian in her take on Aggie. When Danes stares at her computer, faced with a miserable case of writer’s block, she embodies the stress and anxiety of being a late 40-something who wonders if they will ever make something worthwhile again.
She is no longer playing the young prodigy she once was in Homeland – she is now someone searching for purpose as she approaches 50. And it is all the more powerful because we’ve seen where she’s been. – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
