Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys Go Delightfully Gloomy in ‘The Beast in Me’

“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 recent 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 gloomy, 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 elderly 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 speedy during production. Rhys spent six seasons on The Americans fleshing out one of TV’s most intricate 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.”

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