Hay soars in ‘Flesh and Bone’

Ballet’s divine difficulty and the punishing world it inhabits are exposed on “Flesh and Bone,” an eight-episode Starz drama that shatters dance illusions even as it makes a viewer ache to be as transcendent as its dancers seem to be.

Airing on Sundays this saga is graphic, disturbing and often flat-out exasperating, yet it dazzles with its beauty and dark eroticism. It seems always to be asking whether the dream is worth the cost.

The prism for this inquiry is Claire, who arrives in New York burdened by self-destructive forces and a troubled past even as she vaults into the limelight of American Ballet and its despot, Grayson.

Ben Daniels plays Grayson with such feverish fidelity that the viewer may forget he’s not really a dance pro. But the cast is also stocked with ballet performers, most notably Sarah Hay, as Claire.

Until now, the 27-year-old Hay’s sole acting turn was as a member of the dance corps in the 2010 ballet thriller “Black Swan.” But she has been dancing, she says, “from the womb.” Growing up in Princeton, N.J., she began at age 8 at the School of American Ballet.

Along the way, she endured her share of obstacles, including a body petite and curvy at 110 pounds — and thus unacceptable to ballet orthodoxy.

“It’s like the modeling industry,” she says softly. “They have this cookie-cutter idea of being skinny and tall. I left the country five years ago to reach what I feel is my full potential as an artist” — she is a soloist at the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, Germany.

Hay was first approached about the role during a wide-reaching talent search.

“I got an email that just said ‘an audition for a television show’ and I thought, ‘A reality show? No way!’”

Then she says she checked the project’s credits, which include executive producer-creator Moira Walley-Beckett (herself a former dancer and a co-executive producer of “Breaking Bad”), and fellow exec producers Lawrence Bender and John Melfi.

Hay’s full-blown entry into film has given her “a newfound respect for actors,” she says. “The amount of effort and energy that goes into being an actor is something that I can’t compare to anything else.”