National Post (National Edition)
HOME SWEET HOMELAND
WHY CARRIE AND CO. ARE HEADING TO BROOKLYN
NOW I’VE EVEN LOST MY CHARACTER TO BROOKLYN.
One cool afternoon in late October, Claire Danes was in her Carrie Mathison uniform — sensible separates, cross-body bag, furrowed brow — preparing for a scene in Homeland in which she needles a government source. She stood on her mark in a courtyard outside Brooklyn Borough Hall as extras dressed as cops clad in riot gear roamed around her. Danes peered up at her surroundings. “I’m not familiar with this pocket of Brooklyn,” she said. Growing up in SoHo in the 1980s, as a Manhattan theatre kid turned alternative teen idol, she said: “We never went to Brooklyn.”
More recently, Danes added, all her childhood friends have migrated to the borough. During the scene, one of them popped over to the set with her young son, visiting from her therapy practice just across the street. “I’m the last man standing in Manhattan,” Danes sighed, settling into a folding chair that simply read CARRIE. “Now I’ve even lost my character to Brooklyn.”
Carrie Mathison — the sometime CIA agent at the heart of Showtime’s terrorism drama series — has spent the past several years careening around the world in private jets and armoured cars, stoking and quenching various international incidents.
But when the sixth season debuts Jan. 15, Carrie finds herself in Brooklyn, riding the bus, seemingly the quintessential local professional: She works at an airy office in Williamsburg, lives in a BedStuy brownstone with her daughter, Franny, and rents out her garden apartment through Airbnb.
Brooklyn residents who have seen Homeland filming notices pop up across the borough have joked that Carrie will soon be joining the local food co-op. But this is still Homeland, and wherever Carrie goes, terror isn’t far behind.
But instead of the show’s usual examination of the effects of the war on terror abroad, this season focuses on how counterterrorism policies play out at home. The season also moves the series toward its conclusion — Homeland was recently renewed through an eighth season, which could be its last. “We are laying foundations for the house to eventually be finished,” said Alex Gansa, the show’s co-creator and showrunner.
Carrie’s Brooklyn relocation has given Danes a shot at a normal home life.
“It became a kind of migrating experience,” she said of a production itinerary that jumped from North Carolina to South Africa to Germany, with stints in Israel and Morocco in between. “I needed a little bit of stasis.” She and her husband, actor Hugh Dancy, have a home in the West Village, and this season’s New York locale has allowed their four-year-old son, Cyrus, to live full-time in Danes’ hometown for the first time.
“Claire has been so game over the course of this show, but she really wanted to come home, so we fashioned a story around that desire,” Gansa said.
In recent seasons, Homeland has calibrated its plot to bring together its farflung cast of CIA diaspora at some new and plausible point around the globe. “The challenge was what story to tell in New York City,” Gansa said. “Why were we there? Why was Carrie there? And why were her old colleagues from the Central Intelligence Agency there?”
Gansa got his answer in February 2016, during the writers’ annual sojourn to Washington to chat with White House staffers, intelligence consultants and exCIA officials about real-life tensions they could borrow to underpin the show’s plots.
“We heard a lot about the period of presidential transition, the one we’re in right now with presidentelect Trump,” Gansa said. “That struck us as a very interesting period of time to dramatize, and one where you might very naturally be in New York City if the president-elect is a native New Yorker.” The season’s plot swirls around a tense transfer of power in the 72 days between election night and Inauguration Day for the winner, a junior senator from New York (Elizabeth Marvel).
Carrie’s old colleagues Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) are summoned to the city to deliver intelligence briefings in the president-elect’s penthouse suite at the Intercontinental Hotel.
Yes, in the Homeland universe, the president-elect is a woman, but she’s also a bit of a Washington outsider who seduces the press, spars with the CIA and stirs international political dramas before she even takes office. That spins the show into a strange alternate-reality to the one New York is experiencing.
Carrie, meanwhile, is starting a foundation with a new partner, the lawyer Reda Hashem (Patrick Sabongui), dedicated to advocating for Muslims unfairly accused of supporting terrorist organizations. That puts her close to Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend), who is in rehab recovering from a near-death experience at a VA hospital in the borough. It also positions her to bend the ear of the new presidentelect.
While Homeland previously cooked up some fantastical terrorist plots in its far-flung locales, its homecoming has forced it to stay grounded. “We were not going to tell a story about a terrorist attack on New York City,” Gansa said. “It’s bad karma, for one thing, but it’s also counterfactual. There hasn’t been a big attack here since 9/11, and positing one happening just felt wrong.”
As a result, he said, “we are telling a different kind of story this year, one that doesn’t have that easy thriller trope baked into its DNA.”
Instead, the season plays with psychological reverberations of the war on terror in the United States.
“We deal with the threat itself,” Gansa said. “How real is it? How scary is it? How existential is it? Have we overreacted since 9/11? What are we doing, how much are we spending, and what kind of an industry have we built up over domestic counterterrorism?”
The domestic interlude — Gansa hopes to shoot the next two seasons abroad — also allows Homeland to explore a side of Brooklyn not often seen on TV. The borough is known for its comedies like Master of None, Girls, Younger and High Maintenance, which have spotlighted the bars and cafés of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and take a light look at Brooklyn gentrification. This season of Homeland draws out its conflicts. Much of the action takes place in Bed-Stuy, where white transplants like Carrie live close to the poor immigrant and Muslim populations that often end up in the cross hairs of American counterterrorism policies.
The locale was partly inspired by Gansa’s brother, who lives in a brownstone in nearby Crown Heights, and by the Homeland production designer, John Kretschmer, who lived in Bed-Stuy while working on the show The Following. Michael Klick, a Homeland producer and locations scout found a Bed-Stuy block dotted with “brownstones that have been fixed up, apartments across the street, and boarded-up buildings: an area in transition, but one that she could afford.”
He was also looking for an area with a sizable Muslim population. The show placed Carrie’s main client, Sekou Bah (J. Mallory McCree), a Muslim son of African immigrants, just across the neighbourhood, in a subsidized apartment in the Marcy Houses. Both interiors were shot in Greenpoint’s Cine Magic East River Studios.
In previous seasons, we’ve seen Carrie living in polished, almost antiseptic apartments, but her move to Brooklyn called for a place that was a little rougher around the edges. Indoor spaces are often expanded on sets for ease of shooting, but Homeland kept the hallways and stairwells in Carrie’s brownstone realistically narrow.
Kretschmer took care to build unfinished details into Carrie’s fixer-upper. For the finishing touch, he said, “we laid a real solid oak floor, and then let the rest of the construction crew maul it, to give it that patina of age.” Little details — jazz posters framed on the walls, a couple of German children’s books in Franny’s room — made it feel like Carrie’s own.
New York is an expensive place to do anything, but generous tax cuts for filmmakers have attracted a record number of TV shows to the city in recent years. (In the 2015-16 season, 52 shows filmed in New York full time.)
That has put even greater pressure on Homeland to spotlight something new.
Klick’s job, he said, was to “avoid the dead zones around the city that have been overfished” while “exploiting as much as we can different places and different looks, to try to show the city in ways it hasn’t been seen in a postcard.”
Then there are the New Yorkers themselves. One sequence shot outside Carrie’s brownstone brought camera crews and blaring emergency vehicles to Bed-Stuy for five days. “There were confrontations between our crew and disgruntled homeowners,” Klick said.
“Everything is a struggle. Every place you go you are displacing people who are already struggling to get by, and all it does is piss them off.”
To the cast, New York brings the comforts of home. In addition to Danes, other New Yorkers on the cast include Friend, Patinkin, Abraham and Marvel, who said of her experience this season: “There’s nothing better than working from home.”
It has also given Danes an excuse to connect with her Brooklyn friends. The show’s Greenpoint studios put her in the path of one friend’s bike route to work; after her therapist friend dropped by the set, Danes seized the rare chance to head over to her office during a break and use a real bathroom.
Even strangers here feel familiar. “I’m really enjoying all the New York accents on the crew,” Danes said. “It feels so comforting.”