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Few do suffering like Claire Danes. Watching any drama she stars in feels like meeting up with a friend who has been through a breakup they just can’t get over: there comes a moment when you realise, “Oh no, she’s going to cry. It’s going to be tectonic. Can I cope with the sheer depth of her misery?!”
The brow crumples, the eyes scrunch, the lip quivers, the voice splinters. It’s gut-wrenching. That impressively pliable face can register about 13 different kinds of agony. And in The Beast in Me, Netflix’s new thriller about an author with a psychopathic neighbour, there is nowhere to hide, no way to prepare yourself. It happens in the opening scene, her face rearing up out of the screen, blood-spattered, eyes aghast, mouth moving, trying to take in something so horrible that we can only guess at it. Then it comes: a full-throated howl of despair that could rock you to the very core of your spleen.
It’s classic Danes. After all, she trades in high nervous tension. Spot the frowns in Homeland. As CIA officer Carrie Mathison in the hit terrorism drama, she made unravelling look like an art form, her cry-face becoming both a meme and a symbol of unrelenting determination. Or think of her in Fleishman Is in Trouble, another entry in the Danes-on-the-edge canon. Playing a super-ambitious theatre agent who seemingly abandons her kids one day, leaving her ex-husband in the lurch, Danes is remarkable, her character’s businesslike froideur thawing to reveal vulnerability and turmoil. Even in My So-Called Life, the Nineties teen drama with which she first made her name, Danes made teenage angst feel like tragedy.
Baz Luhrmann, who cast her as Juliet in Romeo + Juliet, declared her “the Meryl Streep of her generation”, while David Harewood, her co-star in Homeland, was so taken aback by her presence that he “dried up” mid-scene. “I actually forgot my lines,” he told The Guardian in 2014. “She has an intensity and complete immersion in the character and I’ve never really encountered that before at that level.”
That intensity is certainly there in The Beast in Me. While the series itself is high-class hokum – taut, yes, but totally preposterous – Danes is compelling opposite Matthew Rhys. She plays Aggie Wiggs, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer trapped in grief. That howl, those eyes, they were registering the death of her young son, killed by a drunk driver who got away with it. Wiggs is supposed to be writing a book on the unlikely friendship between opposing Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, but instead becomes fascinated by her new neighbour, Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a notorious real estate mogul who may or may not have murdered his wife.
Critics, by and large, have fallen over themselves to praise Danes’ performance, with Time calling it her best since Homeland. In a five-star review, meanwhile, The Guardian wrote that she and Rhys are “wonderful to watch… Awards will surely be given”. Whether she’ll add to the collection of Globes and Emmys she has amassed over My So-Called Life, Temple Grandin and Homeland remains to be seen, but you wouldn’t bet against it.
Suffering: Claire Danes in ‘The Beast in Me’ (Netflix)
For Danes, the drive has always been there. Growing up in New York with liberal, artistic parents – her father was a photographer, her mother an artist who ran a day care service for toddlers – she told The New Yorker that a “huge emphasis was placed on creativity”. By the age of 11, she was attending classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute, famous for propagating the method approach to acting and having Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino among its alumni. Perhaps it was there where Danes first realised a knack for conveying raw emotion, long before her cry-face would be parodied by Anne Hathaway on Saturday Night Live. Danes thinks her “cry-face” has been “objectified”. “It’s not calculated; it’s not an aggressive gesture,” she told Elle magazine. “It’s been isolated from the rest of my work, like it’s a tacked on thing. It’s not.”
Comments from co-stars haven’t helped. John Leguizamo, who played Tybalt in Romeo + Juliet, once said that Danes was “devastated” during filming and “usually wanted to cry in every scene”. “We were all encouraged to reach a state of utter hysteria on and off the set,” Danes replied to The Independent in 2004. “The other actors were just as deeply into their characters, only they weren’t playing Juliet. They were playing virile, macho, aggressive people, so they were acting accordingly. Juliet does cry a lot in the movie, you know… I couldn’t play a crying scene without crying,” she continued. “I’d be an amazing actress if I could do that.”
Be that as it may, there’s no denying that Danes finds herself synonymous with a very specific kind of performance. The Beast in Me only reaffirms that. While Danes has spoken about being able to shake off her characters after a day of filming – “Putting my jewellery back on, my wedding ring, my earrings, that helps,” she told People – generally it’s more of a struggle for the viewer. Seeing her run the emotional gamut, anguish and pain etched across her visage, is frankly exhausting; hers is a vulnerability we can all relate to. Long may that continue.
