This article contains major character or plot details.
For an accused murderer, Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) has a curious way of bringing people back to life — just ask his neighbor, Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes).
Flattened by grief after the loss of her son, acclaimed author Aggie takes on writing Nile’s biography almost as a challenge. She soon gets more than she bargained for. “For whatever reason, this project gives her some kind of reason to be and think again,” Danes tells Tudum. “He’s this unlikely catalyst and muse, and she’s just so relieved to finally have access to her creative self again that she kind of can’t help it.”
Of course, having Nile in her life isn’t a simple proposition — Aggie is soon sucked into the real estate tycoon’s corrupt world. As she attempts to get to the bottom of whether Nile killed his first wife, Madison (Leila George), bodies start to mount. Aggie is forced to confront not just the inner evil of her enigmatic neighbor, but also her own darker urges. “The line between us all is relatively thin,” Rhys tells Tudum. “This could be you; you lose your son, you could be driven to doing this. Any number of external factors that you have no control over could lead you to these things.”
So Aggie has her work cut out for her. Read on to find out more about the twists and turns of The Beast in Me, now streaming on Netflix.
What happened to Aggie’s son?
Aggie’s son, Cooper (Leonard Gerome), was killed in a tragic car accident involving local teenager Teddy (Bubba Weiler) years earlier. Aggie is convinced Teddy was drunk during the accident, but she doesn’t have the evidence.
When The Beast in Me begins, Aggie is still “paralyzed with grief,” to borrow Danes’s words. She’s tooling around her cavernous, empty home and struggling to write a book about the friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Aggie’s Pulitzer-winning days are long past.
When the anniversary of Cooper’s death comes around, Aggie visits his grave and finds Teddy there, bringing flowers to the site. She flies into a rage, and only her ex-wife, Shelley (Natalie Morales), can talk her down.
For showrunner, writer, and executive producer Howard Gordon, Aggie’s bereavement forms the show’s emotional center. “Life is loss, and loss as a theme is something that is catnip, I think, to a writer,” he tells Tudum. “One of the subversive pleasures of being a writer is you get to work through these fears and horrors on the page or on the screen.”
Who is Nile Jarvis?
Aggie’s pain is interrupted when Nile Jarvis and his new wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), move in next door. She soon finds herself on her new neighbor’s bad side when she pushes back on his desire to mow down a path through their shared forest. And Nile isn’t the type you want holding a grudge against you: His wife has been missing for years, and Nile was heavily eyed for the crime, even though he was never arrested.
Nile tries to make peace by inviting Aggie to lunch, where their already tense relationship gets … complicated. “There’s this back and forth between the two of them, about being vulnerable and then trying to intimidate,” Rhys says. “It’s a real smorgasbord, because they’re doing everything. They’re at times flirting, at times kind of leaning in, putting walls up.”
Aggie opens up to Nile about her vitriol for Teddy. “All I wanted was for him to suffer like I did,” she tells him. He recognizes in her fury a “bloodlust” they share. One thing’s for sure: No matter how the two feel about each other, they’re compelled. “At the end of it, the hope is that they kind of go, ‘Wow, I really want to see you again,’ ” Rhys says. “Whether that’s right or wrong.”
At the end of the first episode of The Beast in Me, a pair of revelations complicate Aggie and Nile’s blossoming partnership. First, a man named Brian Abbott (David Lyons) knocks on Aggie’s door in the middle of a storm. Clearly intoxicated and claiming to be an FBI agent, he warns her to stay away from Nile, but he demurs when asked if Nile is still being investigated for murder.
Then, Shelley calls to tell Aggie that Teddy has disappeared, his car found by the beach. A shocked Aggie remembers telling Nile about her rage over Teddy and the pain at seeing him regularly around town. “What did you do?” she asks — him or herself?
Why does Aggie decide to write Nile’s biography?
Aggie has a lot of reasons to pivot from her Supreme Court slog to a biography of Nile Jarvis. It will make her literary agent, Carol (Deirdre O’Connell), happy; it will give her an opportunity to investigate the disappearance of Teddy; and, even if she can’t quite admit it herself, it will allow her to spend more time exploring her twisted relationship with Nile.
“There’s this ruse, the cover, the excuse of seeing if he was truly responsible for killing [Teddy],” Danes says. “But I think Aggie was also successfully seduced by Nile. And she is sincere when she’s talking to her editor. She just knows that this book is going to be a hit. So there’s that part — the ambitious, maybe even venal, part of her that wants to pursue success of that kind and on that level again.”
So Aggie heads to Nile’s and convinces him to let her write the book, as he tears into a rotisserie chicken with unsettling zeal. “She recognizes his isolation, his loneliness, his fear of being powerless, and [how it would give] him a sense of agency,” Danes says. “And he leaps at it. She ensnares him. But it’s certainly a risky move.”
Nile and Nina agree to the book — but not before Nile’s fixer, his uncle “Wrecking Ball” Rick (Tim Guinee), searches her home. The game is entering a new stage.
Who is Brian Abbott?
As Aggie dives into research, she meets Nile’s father, Martin (Jonathan Banks), and learns more about Jarvis Yards, the real estate development that’s taking up much of the family’s time. The Jarvises are facing off with Olivia Benitez (Aleyse Shannon), a city council member who’s adamantly opposed to the development — and behind the scenes, they’re still being quietly investigated by Brian Abbott, who’s been forbidden by his FBI superiors to go anywhere near Nile.
Aggie confides in Abbott about her suspicions around Teddy’s disappearance, and the pair plot to steal Nile’s location data and find out exactly where he was that night. While Aggie is visiting with Nile and his father, Abbott breaks into Nile’s home and hacks his computer — just barely getting away before Nile and Nina return home.
Meanwhile, Aggie’s preconceptions about Nile are being challenged. She visits with Madison’s bereaved parents, Mariah (Kate Burton) and James (Bill Irwin), who tell her that they believe Nile is innocent and that Madison killed herself. They even show her a suicide note that seems to clear Nile entirely.
Did Aggie misjudge Nile? Rhys’s seductive performance might have you asking the same question. “Nile was a really tricky character to make full sense of, and figuring out how to make him seem really credible and grounded was a trick,” Danes says. “He also has to be really engaging — and seductive and appealing — in addition to being genuinely terrifying. So that’s a lot to ask of a writer, and then an actor. I was not envious of Matthew’s job.”
Of course, there are plenty of twists and turns to come. When Abbott searches his stolen hard drive, he doesn’t find Nile’s location information. He finds an even hotter smoking gun — a video stream of Teddy being held captive. Nile has kidnapped him in a twisted act of generosity.
“A mad dog has an affection for its owner and goes and kills the squirrel and brings it to the front doorstep,” Gordon says. “It is bizarrely an act of love or an act of affection.”
Rhys underlines that Nile sees something of himself in Aggie and is acting out what he interprets as her deepest desires. “There is enormous similarity in the two, I think,” he says. “I think they see each other as peers, very unlikely peers. And I think that is as much a kind of revelation as it is an attraction to go, ‘God, I never thought I would see you as a friend or certainly a confidant.’ ”
Abbott’s knowledge of Nile’s crime is short-lived. In an attempt to protect Aggie, Abbott lies and tells her to call off the search. Then, he heads straight to confront Nile — who bludgeons him to death and heads to Aggie’s.
Did Madison kill herself? Or, did Nile kill his wife?
Aggie’s relationship with Nile has already cost her. Nile’s art gallerist wife, Nina, was taken with Shelley’s artwork and offered her a gallery show, only for Nile and Aggie to pull the rug out from under the plan for fear of the deal looking shady. A furious Shelley responded by lashing out at Aggie and blaming her for Teddy’s suicide. So Aggie would be forgiven for turning Nile away when he shows up at her door in the middle of the night looking for a drink.
But of course, she doesn’t. Instead, the pair’s professional relationship is blurred by a night of drinking and dancing — the ever on-the-nose Nile even throws on the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.”
“What I love about the writing, but what terrifies me as an actor, is you are now skirting this very fine line of singing along to ‘Psycho Killer’ — flagging the irony of it without it becoming cliché,” Rhys says.
The connection between Aggie and Nile continues to get thornier, even frustrating Nina with its intensity. “What I love about the scene is you’re really seeing, for the first time, the two of them really unwind, relax, and start to laugh,” Rhys continues. “And just that moment where he says, ‘Isn’t there, like, a tiny part of you that wants to sleep with me?’ It’s as fun as it is true. It’s one of the most revealing moments between the two, and they’re really laying bare to each other.”
Danes has a fittingly different read on the scene. “They don’t actually want to have sex with each other,” she says. “There’s a friction and a tension, but it’s not exactly a sexual one. I think that renders it unique.”
Just as the pair is getting close, Aggie breaks new ground in her investigation. As Martin incites a riot at Councilmember Benitez’s rally against Jarvis Yards, Aggie speaks to Madison’s brother, Chris (Will Brill). She learns that Madison’s parents have a vested interest in Nile’s innocence: Their entire net worth is tied up in Jarvis Yards. Chris also gives her a collection of Madison’s things — including a journal that proves Madison’s note was actually written after a previous suicide attempt, and not the one that led to her disappearance.
Horrified at her discovery, Aggie sends a text to Abbott — just as Nile is disposing of his body. He reads the message and realizes that Aggie is onto him. The hunter has become the hunted. “I always thought of these two characters as being like the snake and the mongoose,” Danes says. “I liked that they needed each other and recognized themselves in each other, and respected and even admired the gifts within the other, and were just really keen for a fight.”
As Aggie tells Shelley earlier in the episode, “Maybe I don’t know how to write or how to live without someone to fight.” Now her fight is really about to begin.
When she can’t find Abbott, Aggie heads to his apartment, where she meets Erika (Hettienne Park), Abbott’s FBI superior and sometime lover. Erika, who’s wrapped up in a corrupt relationship with Nile’s Uncle Rick, is also looking for Abbott. The pair discover Abbott’s hacked live stream of Teddy, and Erika goes to get a warrant, as Aggie heads home.
What happens to Teddy?
When Aggie arrives home, she finds Nile waiting for her. They take a tense walk in the woods before Aggie finds an excuse to head inside. She discovers Nile has already been there and has taken a red pen to the first draft of her book. And that’s not all. Over the phone, he directs her into the trap he’s laid for her. “I didn’t know you had it in you until I went upstairs,” he says.
Upstairs, Teddy is lying strangled to death, and the police are heading to Aggie’s home.
Why did Nile kill Madison?
In Episode 7, “Ghosts,” The Beast in Me flashes back in time to the days before Madison’s death — and we fill in the gaps of the series’ central mystery. Nile, as it turns out, is being investigated by the FBI for using cartel funds in the construction of Jarvis Yards — and there’s a mole in his inner circle. Martin and Rick try to defuse the situation by blackmailing Erika into their employ, revealing why she now finds herself in their pocket.
Meanwhile, Nile concludes that the mole must be Nina, who is serving as Madison’s personal assistant. But she quickly disabuses him of that notion, revealing that the mole is Madison.
“I think she’s tired of taking care of Madison,” Snow says. “I think she’s just tired of being thrown around, and she does it out of anger and impulse.”
Of course, what happens next is not what Nina intended at all. “I don’t think she realizes what it inevitably unleashes,” Snow says. As it turns out, Nile did kill Madison, in an act of violent fury over her collaboration with Abbott’s FBI team.
Rhys didn’t have Nile’s guilt confirmed until midway through filming the series. “As an actor, you want to map things to a degree,” he says. “But then also I think the type of person Nile is, he’s going to play his innocence until they’re holding up the evidence in front of him and going, ‘No, we know you did.’ His delusion is so far-reaching, he will happily say, ‘No, I’m innocent.’ ”
Nile leaves his father and uncle to clean up his mess, which they do by burying Madison in the foundations of Jarvis Yards. No wonder it’s priceless property.
How does Nile get caught?
Even with Aggie on the run, the walls wind up closing in quickly on Nile. Rick tells Martin about his son’s latest murders, and the old man keels over with a stroke — another indirect victim of Nile’s cruelty. Aggie heads for Nina’s art gallery, where, as the police close in, she makes a final desperate plea for help.
Aggie digs deep, admitting that she sees herself in Nina’s denial. Aggie has spent the series blaming Teddy for the car accident that killed her son, but now she admits that’s a convenient story that allowed her to evade blame — something she feels Nina is also doing.
“I think she’s burying it so far down that she starts believing the lie,” Snow says. “I have to — on the surface — play that she doesn’t know. But I think the cracks throughout the whole show are open to interpretation.” Since Aggie last saw Nina, Nina’s discovered she’s pregnant with Nile’s child — yet another reason to protect him from the law.
Later that night, after Aggie has been arrested, Nina finally confronts her husband. She lays out Aggie’s evidence: the journal, the suicide note, Nina’s own observations about Madison’s mental state. Nile responds with fury, admitting to the murder and also mocking Nina mercilessly for pretending she didn’t know. He even suggests she wanted Madison murdered and used him as a tool.
It’s a concept at the heart of the series. “This idea of somebody having a shadow self, having their id become manifest in another person,” Danes says. “What if your most heinous, darkest urges actually come into existence? I thought that was really intriguing.”
The next day, Nile announces Jarvis Yard’s deal with Councilmember Benitez — and leaves the stage to a shock. Nina reveals that she recorded their conversation the night before, and Nile is hauled off to prison. At first, he claims innocence, but once Rick turns state’s witness, Nile pleads guilty. Before he’s taken away by the police, Rick removes Martin’s life support, protecting him from continuing to live in a world with his monstrous son.
Aggie’s book (fittingly titled The Beast in Me) is released months later, after she has one final interview with her subject. Nile takes the opportunity to needle Aggie one last time for her interest in him. “We did that — together, both of us,” he insists of Teddy’s murder.
This will be the last time Aggie and Nile meet. In the next scene, he’s stabbed to death by a fellow prisoner: one final fix from his Uncle Rick. “Is it karmic justice? A happy ending?” Aggie asks as she performs a reading from her book. “Retribution is seductive like that, promising a clean line between good and evil. But it’s an illusion. I know, because I felt its pull.”
Aggie is at peace now, even meeting Shelley’s new partner and smiling her way through it. “I think she’s faced the ugliest parts of herself,” Danes says. “Not indirectly, not metaphorically, not by transferring her own ill will onto some other human — but by recognizing her failures and her own violence. I think she comes to some, maybe not peace with that, but acceptance of it.”
Of course, Nile will always be some part of her. “I imagine that there’s part of her that kind of misses Nile,” Danes continues. “It’s perverse and impossible to reconcile, but there it is.”
In the final images of the series, we see Nina and her new baby, a small light of doubt lingering in her eyes. “Just like Jonathan Banks’ character and Matthew Rhys and their duality — I do think you wrestle with what are you giving your child to set them up with?” Snow says. “Are you setting them up for success? Are you setting them up for failure in what you give them and how you give it?”
In other words, can you pass the beast in you down to the next generation? Nina — and everyone else — is about to find out.
The Beast in Me is now streaming on Netflix.
