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When people want to point to a child actor who successfully transitioned to an adult career — with a minimum of scandal or destructive behavior — their first example is usually Jodie Foster, who starred in Taxi Driver at 13 and won two best actress Oscars before she turned 30. The second example may well be Claire Danes, who shot the pilot for My So-Called Life when she was 13 and, more or less, hasn’t left our TV screens since, winning multiple Emmys (including two for the Showtime series Homeland).
What you may not remember is that Danes crossed paths with Foster early in her career. At the start of her post-My So-Called Life fame, Danes played a small role in 1995’s Home for the Holidays, which Foster directed. According to Danes, that early point of connection seeded a friendship that grew as Danes enrolled at Yale, Foster’s alma mater, and also led to a years-long effort to make the circus drama Flora Plum together.
Foster was the first person to send Danes the pilot for The Beast in Me, the hit Netflix limited series in which Danes stars as Aggie, a troubled author who becomes captivated by the accused murderer (Matthew Rhys) who has moved in next door. Though Foster didn’t wind up directing the show — she stayed on as an executive producer — she clearly knew it was the kind of material Danes excels at: playing a brilliant woman in over her head while also capturing Aggie’s fascination and repulsion with her new neighbor.
As a producer on the series, Danes had more control over the story than she has on nearly anything else she’s worked on, from the identity of her accused killer neighbor — the original idea had been an Italian gangster-type before they settled on an real estate tycoon modeled on Robert Durst — to the furniture in Aggie’s house. “It’s more Zoom meetings,” Danes, 46, jokes about the added responsibilities of producing. “It was so great to get to be a part of the conversation of what house we want Aggie to live in, to draw the bigger world and not be surprised when I found myself on set. The first week was so much fun, and I really liked everybody, I realized, because I had a hand in hiring them. That didn’t feel like dreadful homework in any way.”
On this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Danes tells me about all the other ways she helped shape the series, from the electric scenes she shares with Rhys — “You need to believe there’s a genuine connection between them, and an attraction” — to being on the other side of screening audition tapes. Hear it all on today’s new episode, which also includes my conversation with Christopher Rosen about Monday’s Gotham Awards and the earliest buzz about Avatar: Fire and Ash.
