Claire Danes

This interview appeared in the MIPCOM 2013 issue of World Screen.

Today she is known around the world as Carrie Mathison, the brilliant but troubled and bipolar CIA agent in the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Showtime drama Homeland, but Claire Danes has been honing her acting skills since she was a child. At 14, she starred in the acclaimed TV series My So-Called Life, for which she won a Golden Globe. She then worked in a wide range of movies, from artistic films like The Hours, Me & Orson Welles and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, to the commercial film Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. She earned her second Golden Globe and first Emmy for her performance in HBO’s original movie Temple Grandin. Danes’ portrayal of a highly gifted yet autistic young woman, who became an accomplished professor, caught the eye of executive producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. In fact, when they were writing the pilot of Homeland, Danes was the actress that immediately came to mind for the role of Carrie, for which, to date, Danes won two more Golden Globes and an Emmy. While shooting season three, Danes talks to World Screen about the craft of acting and the complexities of espionage, psychology and even patriotism.

WS: What appealed to you about Homeland?
DANES: The pilot was immediately gripping. It was obviously a piece of excellent writing, which one doesn’t come across very often. I was intimidated by it. It was ambitious and this character was and still is incredibly dynamic and complex and a little difficult. When I get just a little bit afraid, I think, Gosh, OK, fine, I think I have to do it! The pilot was terribly engaging and I wanted to read the next episode. I believed that other people would feel the same way.

WS: Did you have any concerns about how the writers would deal with topics like terrorism, patriotism, espionage and bipolar disease?
DANES: Absolutely, because the show is talking about incredibly volatile themes and ideas and ones that are playing themselves out in real time. It’s risky and I had to believe that the showrunners and writers would be incredibly responsible and sensitive to the kinds of feelings that they would arouse in people because it’s big stuff. We are talking about some of the fears that are most alive right now.

WS: I am a great fan of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa.
DANES: I am, too. I can’t believe what they are capable of! Everybody is so committed to the show and we all care about it and it feels like a high-wire act but one that is very much worth doing. Everybody involved is incredibly talented. And we all care a lot, that is something very special that I don’t take for granted. But it’s also interesting to be three years in and the experience keeps changing as it settles into the consciousness of pop culture. That’s interesting.

WS: Tell us about your working relationship with the cast and the crew. Is it different in season three than it was in season one? Do you develop a shorthand, for lack of a better word, when you work with people over a period of time?
DANES: Absolutely, but one of the reasons that the show continues to work is that it continues to change, so the dynamics are always shifting. In this season Carrie is incredibly isolated, so I haven’t worked with any of my pals. I’ve had maybe one scene with Mandy [Patinkin, who plays Saul Berenson]. Brody [played by Damian Lewis] has buggered off! Morena [Baccarin, who plays Brody’s wife, Jessica] is in her own corner of the show that I don’t have much involvement with, so it’s been a little lonely in that respect. But mostly the same crew is around so there is familiarity and that sense of community that has remained intact. The show is often about loneliness, so sometimes as an actor I experience that, too.

WS: How did you prepare for the role of Carrie? I imagine you did a lot of research into bipolar disease and the CIA?
DANES: I did. It was a very interesting little syllabus I put together for myself before the first season. I did delve into both of those subjects and found them to be incredibly riveting. I have to tune up every so often; I have to go to that material and remember what I had studied so intensely before we started. But I kind of get it now. It was about seeing her through all these various adventures with as much integrity as possible. These are both subjects that happen to naturally appeal to me. I am interested in psychology. I thought I would be a therapist, actually, if I wasn’t going to be an actor, and I studied a lot of that in college. And the world of espionage is almost by definition totally fascinating, and not entirely unrelated to the world of theater, which of course Argo pointed out so wonderfully. It’s about role playing and being intensely perceptive.

WS: How did your preparation for Carrie in Homeland compare to your preparation for the movie Temple Grandin, another very complex character, she was autistic.
DANES: Not totally dissimilar and I really like doing that. I like having projects like that and getting to expand my understanding of a compelling subject in the process of putting a character together. It’s different now because Homeland just keeps going, while [in Temple Grandin] there was a beginning, a middle and an end to the story we were telling. It was a very intense six weeks but then I was jettisoned out of it. And now in Homeland, it’s just so hard for Carrie, it keeps being so hard for her and now I’m a new mom. Last year I was pregnant, and now I have a six-month-old baby and that has been another challenge, trying to make sense of all of that while playing this very disturbed challenged person.

WS: I’m a working mom, too, but I cannot even fathom how you juggle the demands of your role and have enough energy for your baby!
DANES: I don’t know I’m still figuring it out! In some ways they are so opposing that it kind of makes it easier because they are like negative and positive reflections of one another.

WS: Is television acting enjoyable and challenging because you get the chance to grow with your character?
DANES: Yes, when you are working with writing of this quality it can be a really deep experience rather than a superficial and repetitive one, which I have found it to be. It’s good storytelling so the characters actually evolve and travel, literally, so that’s been great. There is a certain rhythm to it.

WS: In most episodes you have so many lines to learn, have you had to change your method of memorizing and preparing for scenes?
DANES: Basically I’m just always learning lines! When I get the script I tag the crucial scenes and the longer, more involved scenes and it’s a layering process. When my hair is being blown out, I’ll do one pass. When I’m being driven to work, I’ll do another pass. I just do constant drills with Hugh [Dancy, Dane’s husband] whenever I can. It’s important not to be, as Robert De Niro calls it, “bedroom ready,” which is when you think you’ve got it when you’re in your bedroom and then you get to the set and you realize, oh wait, no, I could have spent more time on this! That muscle gets stronger the more you do it. One thing I like about television is the consistency of it. We have such erratic jobs and there is so little security, it’s really nice to feel like this is my studio. I get envious of artists who aren’t dependent on so many different factors, they don’t need a director, a writer, or another actor to play with, or a boom operator to catch the words, etcetera, etcetera. I’m in shape if I’m doing it all the time and that is a big gift for an actor.

WS: Because of the intensity of the subject matter and Carrie’s condition, is it difficult to dive in to her persona and then at the end of the day go back to being Claire Danes? As the subject matter becomes more psychologically complex, does that take a toll on you?
DANES: I’m pretty good at differentiating and letting it go when the day is done. I’ve been playing Carrie long enough that I know her pretty well now so I can attach and detach with some ease. Actually, it’s kind of easier when a character is very different from yourself. Sometimes, paradoxically, when there is a scene that actually overlaps with something you are experiencing directly or personally, it’s harder to play because you’ve got sort of a blind spot, it’s still unclear to you because you are in it and it’s harder to articulate it as that character. So it’s helpful that Carrie is a very different kind of person.

WS: Do you have to like a character before you take on a role?
DANES: Yes, I do and that is why acting is so fun because you feel a kinship with somebody you regard as incredibly other or threatening. And then you realize, Oh, right, we are all kind of connected.

WS: As a viewer, I love Carrie’s humanity. As flawed as she is, that’s what draws me to her.
DANES: I think she means well, she really does. Ultimately she makes countless transgressions and she has serious issues with impulse control—for sure. But actually she is a deeply moral person and a deeply patriotic person. She’s a little bit like a super hero. She’s very troubled and it’s very hard for her to cultivate real relationships in her life and for her to experience real intimacy, so she has sacrificed herself for this bigger cause. She doesn’t have much to lose because her life is a little empty anyway and that’s a really interesting conflict to play with.

WS: You mentioned patriotism. I know from having spoken to Howard Gordon he’s very intrigued with the concept of what it means to be an American nowadays. You have an international perspective. You spend a lot of time in the U.K.
DANES: I do, and I’m from New York, which is an unusual expression of America. It’s incredibly international. There are different kinds of people there. It’s interesting; I don’t really feel American until I’m not in New York. I dated an Australian guy for seven years and we had a place in Sydney. I spent a lot of time there and I was in Sydney on 9/11 and I never felt more connected to my homeland as I did at that moment.

WS: Speaking of international, Homeland has sold so well in a lot of countries around the world. Is it all the themes it presents that make it so appealing to viewers in all these countries?
DANES: Yes, I think so. We are talking about these characters as being flawed and vulnerable and I think by extension our country as being flawed and vulnerable. Obviously, something we still honor in the show and still celebrate in the show is the value of our country, but I think that’s not so common, it’s not so usual and I think that’s appealing to international audiences, too.

WS: At the beginning of the season, do you know what the story arcs will be, or does the story unfold for you as you receive each script?
DANES: I am given the basic arc, certainly of my character and of the show at large, but they are writing the show as we are filming. It changes in profound ways over the course of the filming. So I can’t take anything for granted, it’s like surfing.

WS: As an actor, do you have to be a little more flexible in a TV series than in a movie because you don’t always know what your character is going to be doing next?
DANES: In some ways it’s not so problematic because the character doesn’t know what’s next either. All you really have to do is play what you know and trust that it will all make sense in the end!