Danes’ secret for stability: no Homeland at home
Actress ensures her highly strung characters stay on the set
Homeland Time and channel: Sunday at 8 p.m. on Super Channel
Claire Danes called it “a crescendo of mania.” She wasn’t referring, though, to the Emmys — six in all — that the first-year counterterrorism drama Homeland won last weekend, or a whirlwind nine months that saw her film several episodes of the new season in Israel, become pregnant with her first child with husband Hugh Dancy and win half a dozen acting awards for her performance in Homeland, including the Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice Award and, last weekend, the Emmy.
Danes was talking about her Homeland character, bipolar CIA counterterrorism analyst Carrie Mathison, who had managed to hide her condition from her handlers until it was too late. In last December’s first-season finale, Mathison was discredited, sacked from her job, jilted by her lover, shunned by her friends and family and left physically and emotionally broken — Mathison’s “crescendo of mania.”
Viewers also learned — spoiler warning — unequivocally that Mathison was right all along, that the U.S. marine and repatriated prisoner-ofwar she suspected of being turned by al-Qaida was indeed a sleeper agent.
Homeland returns Sunday on the back of a wave of Emmy wins and the kind of anticipation usually reserved for the likes of Dexter, Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey and Mad Men, the series Homeland bested to take the award for outstanding drama series.
Danes says her character is stable and in a more philosophical frame of mind as the new season begins.
“She has taken responsibility for her condition,” Danes explained, at a gathering of TV critics in Los Angeles last month. “She’s a little less paranoid, a little less high-strung.”
Danes has learned to separate the high-strung characters she plays in film and on TV — she won a 2010 Emmy for playing autistic animal-rights activist Temple Grandin in the HBO biography — from her home life.
“If I took my characters home with me, half my life would be a misery, I think,” she said. “I tend to compartmentalize, separate work from my life. I’m not terribly method.
“The acting isn’t easy, but I have figured out how to let it go. That was hard, actually. It took some time to work out. As a kid I was much more superstitious and earnest and fearful. I thought I had to sacrifice my happiness, you know, in the most extreme way. And I realize now it’s a discipline, and it’s a job.”
And when all else fails there’s wine. “There’s wine, yes,” Dane said. “Not this season, but yes.”
Mathison’s condition was part of what made her so good at her job. Now that she’s on the road to recovery, there’s a chance it may affect her work — if and when she’s given the chance to return to her old job, under tight supervision.
“It’s an interesting question,” Danes said. “I think that’s something she really needs to learn herself. She’s confronting herself and taking responsibility for herself in a more complete way.
“I think she probably did believe, deep down, that maybe her condition was responsible for her genius, and I think that’s probably true for a lot of people with that condition. But I think she will find that, with a deeper confidence, she can tame it and still be as brilliant and forward-thinking as she would like to be.”