Claire Danes’ Two Favorite Scenes in ‘The Beast of Me’ Have One Key Thing in Common: Facing Off with Matthew Rhys

Welcome to My Favorite Scene! In this series, IndieWire speaks to actors behind a few of our favorite television performances about their personal-best onscreen moment and how it came together. 

Claire Danes vs. Matthew Rhys is a joy to behold. These well-matched, canny actors know how to milk a scene. Both are TV vets and Emmy winners (“Homeland,” “The Americans”) and both are contenders this year for “The Beast in Me,” Netflix‘s psychological thriller limited series. Jodie Foster passed to her old friend Danes a spec mystery pilot from Gabe Rotter, about a noted gay author with writer’s block grieving for her late son.

Danes developed the project, bringing in some old collaborators she trusted, including “Homeland” showrunner Howard Gordon. “The Beast in Me” is a two-hander that pits Danes’ high-strung Aggie Wiggs against her equally neurotic new neighbor, wealthy real estate scion Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys), who is under suspicion for the disappearance of his first wife.

Danes and I spoke on Zoom about the producer and actress’ two favorite scenes in the eight-episode limited series.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Anne Thompson: I loved “The Beast in Me,” but your character often acts out in such intensely emotional ways that I’d yell at the screen. That’s what you want, right?

Claire Danes: Yeah, she’s a brilliant lady who makes maybe some dumb choices along the way, compulsive choices.

‘The Beast in Me’Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

The story came from Jodie Foster. She’s a friend?

I’ve known her for many decades now. I had a small role in a movie that she did in the ’90s called “Home for the Holidays.” I was enrolled at Lycee Francais out in LA, and she had been there herself, and then I eventually ended up going to Yale, like she did. She recognized a lot of herself in me, which was deeply flattering.

We had a couple of projects fall apart over the years, which is a sign of true friendship in this business, and she brought this to me. I loved the world and the basic premise. It was surprising and classic; it felt like suburban noir. I found [Aggie] to be an intriguing composite of paradoxical qualities: she’s cerebral, and she’s also visceral and impulsive, and has these animalistic urges. Hence the title.

Well, she might be in the middle of a nervous breakdown?

She’s not in a good way, especially in the beginning. But there was this paradox in this basic idea that this menacing, nihilistic person [Nile Jarvis] actually infuses her with life.

Like a muse?

They become muses for each other. They are both so isolated and in such pain that neither of them is fully admitting to. And they’re excellent company: they also think fast and well. I don’t think they meet many people who can keep up with them in that way.

Let’s talk about your two favorite scenes.

They’re both long scenes, like a short play, they’re uninterrupted. In the pilot, the lunch scene when they meet, it’s unusual to have that much expanse of time with two characters just batting words back and forth to each other.

Editor’s note: You can watch that scene in the video above.

‘The Beast in Me’Chris Saunders/Netflix © 2024

Were you shooting in chronological order, more or less?

Yes, we had to be, because we didn’t have all of our scripts, so we couldn’t afford to jet too far into the future, because that had not yet been written or shootable. The [lunch scene] was many pages. We shot it over the course of two days. It was Matthew’s second day of filming, and he didn’t have the advantage of living with this story to the extent that I had. It had been simmering in my imagination for many years, so you get more work done than you realize on those subterranean levels, right? So I was more immersed in it. It was jarring and daunting for him.

DId it feel like a competitive tennis match?

It was so enjoyable to play. Daniel’s such a deft, gifted writer, and he shines with scenes like this, so it felt like like a downhill ski ride, like a slalom every time, and you could totally trust the text, and it would take you in different surprising places. And Matthew is such a dreamboat of a partner.

Had you met before? Had you rehearsed?

We had a read-through, we had a day of fairly superficial work, but we were still new to each other, for sure. But you could trust the gravitational pull of the quality of the writing, and there was little resistance, so there was a lot of momentum quickly that would build for you.

It goes back and forth between him throwing her off balance and she coming back and throwing him off balance.

They’re equally matched, which thrills and delights and entertains them both, because they’re both really smart. He’s faintly excited to have a neighbor of note. She’s written a book that he did genuinely like, probably because he related to the portrait of the father. She’s genuinely disarmed when he suggests that it was a love letter to her dad rather than a condemnation. And then there’s that incident with the phone, and she’s horrified and elated by it.

There’s a strong engine, and a clear motivation for her to pursue him, because she wants to figure out if he did have something to do with [killing his wife], but actually the truer thing is that she was enlivened by his presence, that her state of stasis was finally disrupted, and she had some blood circulating again in her.

Her writer’s block ends when she pursues writing a book about him, and he embraces that. On the one hand, you have elements of a procedural, as though she is a journalist or a detective tracking down what happened. On the other, she puts herself is in danger. She’s in denial about that.

And I love that this vulnerable, even feeble woman has the gall and the chutzpah to dare do this. But she has little to lose.

She’s close to being almost suicidal herself.

Yeah, she can afford to take the risk.

And he is in this horrible death lock relationship with his father [Jonathan Banks] that he needs to escape from. [The book] is a vehicle for him to do that.

She did see an opening. She had this insight that he needed to reshape his narrative, and that would appeal to his narcissism.

You were reminded of Janet Malcolm’s 1989 non-fiction book “The Journalist and the Murderer”?

I read that book in college. I have to read the opening first line: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what’s going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Malcolm’s doing exactly what Aggie does to Nile, and she presents herself to a man who’s on trial for killing his family, and she wants to write a profile about him, and he agrees, and she builds trust, and he is certain that she is going to redeem him, and she does the opposite, but you know she takes full responsibility for the complexity of what that means, morally speaking, and she’s punk rock, and dangerous. She talks about writers as having predatorial interests sometimes. I’ve been the subject of a lot of profiles myself, so I know what it is to be in that dynamic, and it’s a very specific and perilous one.

What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you along those lines?

Oh, so, so many things. The worst is when people you love are misrepresented, but it’s stressful and you have very little control. You are going to be affected by the flattery, your vanity is going to get stoked, and it’s going to get you into trouble, and you’re going to say something that you didn’t mean or want to, and it will be used against you, so I’m familiar with that dance. I thought, “How cool that we would get to explore that in this way and dramatize it as a series.” It’s about that power struggle, and, and also, who’s driving the narrative, right? I’ve lived with a writer. It’s hard, they often get the loudest word, if not the last word, and you are source material, and it’s an inherent risk in being with somebody who does work of that kind.

‘The Beast in Me’Chris Saunders/Netflix © 2024

Let’s do the other scene, where they get drunk and Nile dances to “Psycho Killer.” She doesn’t realize that she’s in danger yet, right?

No, she’s having a blast. They’re having a party. They’re zingers in there, enjoyable lines, and they’re being genuinely playful with each other, and they’re both enjoying the absurdity of their arrangement and their reality and their connection. There’s self-awareness, and also a total obliviousness to the real dangers at play, and his arrogance and ignorance in assuming that he might actually be able to bed her.

Given that she’s not interested in men.

Right, she finds that hilarious, but it’s also a great advantage that he can’t use that.

Editor’s note: You can watch that scene in the video below.

Was it liberating to play a character who doesn’t have to worry about appealing to men in that way?

I loved it. I felt a little bit like I did before I became a sexualized person in the world when I was a kid, like 10 or 11, and the freedom that comes with that. You don’t realize the pressures that you are under to present in a particular way. It’s like the rules don’t apply to me. This world was so not designed for me. That is the thrill of performing, embodying a person and being allowed to take a deeper dive into who they might be. You get to play with your nervous system and your body, and enter that imagined existence more fully.

In playing a homosexual character, I didn’t know that there might be a feeling of liberation in living in the margins in terms of how you relate to to the world and how you move through it, and there’s something great about being able to subvert norms. She obviously has a rich internal sexual life, and one of her great sources of suffering was being estranged from her ex-wife, who she was still in love with.

In this second scene, she’s watching Nile with a great deal of amusement as he dances to Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” in this weird way.

They’re both finally having some fucking fun, and she hasn’t had any real fun in a very long time and and they’re just taking pleasure in each other’s company. She’s amused by his narcissism, she finds it hilarious. It doesn’t take long for that to have totally flipped. Eventually she’s brought to the scariest room in the house and place in the world for her, her child’s bedroom, which she’s been avoiding, literally and metaphorically, for way too long, it’s the greatest source of her suffering, and he accompanies her to the darkest place again in every way, and she experiences real release there, and is held literally by him there.

She’s crying. And that is the place where he does this awful, horrible thing later.

When I read that, I yelped out loud. I don’t know if that was Howard’s idea or Daniel’s, but that is also classic “Homeland” stuff. They’re just unafraid to go to the total edge, and there’s nothing subtle or discreet about it. It’s a lot, but it works, and boy, does it keep us tuned in. I love writers, and it’s one of the reasons why I love television specifically, because of the relationship that develops so directly between actor and writer, especially if you do a show over time. With television, you’re in an ongoing conversation with the writer, and you are playing to each other’s strengths. I’m talking about writers being scary, but they’re also the best collaborators.

You brought your old team back together.

I had worked with both Daniel and Howard independently, and it was coincidental that they had been partnered up already before I asked them to get involved with “The Beast in Me.” When we needed to build a whole season out of one germ of an idea, one episode, I knew both of their sensibilities were appropriate for this, and Daniel has this incredible wit, and he understands intimacy, and Howard is a master television craftsman. He’s not afraid to make big, splashy, people-pleasing pulpy drama thrillers.

Did you find that there were connections with Carrie Mathison in this character?

Her doggedness, maybe her righteousness too, a fierce myopic focus and will, and a crazy confidence that in the end, both have nothing to lose. And they don’t play by society’s rules, and they never have, and they don’t care to, and they’re not worried about it.

What’s next?

I’ve just wrapped yesterday another rich role, the show is called “The Spot,” and I play a neurosurgeon married to a man played by Ewan McGregor. It’s a portrait of a marriage through a crime, because they get into some trouble. It’s loosely based on “Macbeth,” but here the roles are flipped. It’s a tragedy, but it’s written by Ed Solomon, and it has a lot of humor in it too.

You prefer television to movies?

I like the experience of growing with the character. I am enlivened by that process.

Are you thinking about directing? You might be ready.

I’ve been enjoying producing. I did not produce this last show that I did. I was more of an actor for hire. I didn’t love going backwards. I want to produce again. I’m definitely thinking more about the project in its entirety than I was when I first started. I was just in my lane as my character, and I have a more aerial view of the whole enterprise now, which is fun.

“The Beast in Me” is now streaming on Netflix.