Claire Danes on the challenges of "Homeland," and how the #MeToo movement is "overdue"
Claire Danes earned her first Emmy nomination in 1995 for her role in the TV show "My So-Called Life," and for the past seven years has starred as Carrie Mathison in the award-winning series "Homeland." Her performances as the tenacious but troubled CIA agent have earned her two Golden Globes, two Emmys and a SAG Award.
On "CBS This Morning" Monday, Danes described the direction her character is taking in the series' upcoming season, where Carrie Mathison is back to Washington, D.C., but without an official job.
"Last season Carrie was very strongly allied with the president-to-be (and ultimately president), and there was an assassination attempt that caused the president to be, you know, deeply paranoid," Danes said.
The characters find themselves estranged – and Mathison, now deeply suspicious of the president, is on the fringes quietly trying to undermine her efforts.
And how is her mental state?
"It's tenuous!" Dane said. "It's her blessing and her curse. Yeah, we discover fairly early on in the season that her medication is maybe not as reliable as she thought, so her sister – she's been living with her sister, [and] her sister becomes acutely aware she might be less stable than she should be."
Co-host John Dickerson asked Danes how she plays that hyperattention. "Well, it takes a lot of energy to play it convincingly, I have to say, but I think the writers have done a pretty excellent job of making that credible. Obviously we have to take license. She's a superhero. There's no way she could be achieving all that she's achieving. How many deaths has she kind of thwarted in the seventh season? … Or caused!"
When asked how the show's writers responded to the election of President Donald Trump, Danes said, "We were designing a season before the election had happened. So they created a character who was really a composite of a lot of qualities involved of people who were running. So [Elizabeth Keane] had characteristics that could be reminiscent of Trump and Sanders, but she was a woman. That was a nod to Hillary. She was malleable enough that we could point her in any direction that became suitable."
Staying ahead of events may be impossible, but the producers do rely on the intelligence community for assistance.
"This is like the great gift of the show for me, is that we spend about a week in what we call spy camp," Danes said. "One of our head writers [Henry Bromell], who actually died about four years ago, his father was in the CIA, and his cousin was a mentee of his father and was a very high-ranking CIA person and recently retired. And in his retirement he curates this week for the producers and the writers of 'Homeland.' We spend a lot of time in a club in Georgetown and interview people in the intelligence community and the State Department and journalists, and get a really great insight into what's going to be germane and relevant in six month's time or a year's time."
On a different topic, co-host Gayle King asked about the recent push to expose and combat sexual harassment in Hollywood and beyond. "We're all having a moment of reckoning on the #MeToo movement. What do you have to say about it?"
"I think it's wonderful," Danes replied. "I think it's nascent. I think it's all happening right now, it's powerful. It's been a millennia's worth of understandable anger, and we're challenging this huge disruption in power, and I mean it's just started, and I think we're all just making sense of it. I think its great and I think it's unruly — and overdue."
The seventh season premiere of "Homeland" appears on Showtime (a division of CBS) on Sunday, February 11 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. To watch a trailer click on the player below.
