Claire Danes Gets Her Best Role Since Homeland in the Addictive Netflix Thriller The Beast in Me

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Claire Danes is well-known for her incredibly expressive crying scenes. It’s captivating to watch – her chin trembles, eyes squeeze shut, and mouth turns downward as if pulled by an invisible force when she’s portraying sadness. However, this emotional display is really a showcase of her greatest strength as an actress: her ability to portray deep vulnerability and despair. This skill has defined her performances across diverse roles, from the troubled teenager Angela Chase in My So-Called Life and the tragic Juliet to the bipolar CIA agent in Homeland and the overwhelmed mother in Fleishman Is in Trouble. Even when surrounded by others, her characters often feel profoundly and realistically alone.

As a big movie and TV fan, I was completely hooked by Claire Danes’ performance in the Netflix thriller The Beast in Me. She plays Aggie Wiggs, a journalist still reeling from personal tragedy – the loss of her son and a divorce – and honestly, her loneliness just defines the character. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Danes deliver such a complex and compelling performance – she really reminded me of her work on Homeland. Aggie is someone who can’t seem to move past her pain, and blames everyone around her instead of looking inward. The whole series is brilliantly paced, perfectly cast, and honestly, one of the most suspenseful things I’ve watched all year. It’s a real, diabolically addictive ride!

Aggie is struggling to write a book about the surprising friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Instead, she’s stuck in a rut, dwelling on the loss of her family and blaming a young driver, Teddy, for the accident that changed everything. She’s living in a rundown house in upstate New York with her son, and missing her ex-partner, Shelley. Her life is disrupted when a new neighbor moves in: Nile Jarvis, a wealthy real estate developer played by Matthew Rhys. Though cleared of his wife Madison’s murder, many people still suspect him. He arrives with his new wife, Nina, and reveals he’s a fan of Aggie’s previous book, Sick Puppy: A Letter to My Father, calling it “sensational.”

Nile isn’t interested in Aggie’s book, which she hopes will help a divided country. He believes people are more interested in scandal than positive stories, and jokingly suggests she write a bestseller about him. Aggie is taken aback by his openness, but he seems to trust her, perhaps because he sees a connection between them. Nile’s intense anger towards Teddy reveals a disturbing side—what he calls a thirst for violence—which unsettles Aggie. Still, this new project feels more exciting than her previous idea about deceased Supreme Court justices, and it’s more appealing to her editor, Deirdre O’Connell, who is growing impatient. As the story expands—with FBI agent Brian Abbott secretly investigating Nile, Abbott’s affair with his boss, and the controversial construction project led by Nile and his father—Aggie begins to question whether Nile is capable of murder, and this uncertainty starts to affect her own personal search for truth.

As a big TV fan, it’s really clear that the creators of this show – Gabe Rotter, who worked on The X-Files, and Howard Gordon from Homeland – aren’t trying to hide their inspirations. The show is packed with nods to real-life events and the kinds of things you’d expect to see in a high-end drama. The character of Nile immediately brought Robert Durst, the subject of the Jinx documentary, to mind. Even before I knew the lead actress, Claire Danes, had specifically mentioned Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer as an influence, you could feel its impact on the story. The fictional development, Jarvis Yards, is basically a stand-in for Hudson Yards in Manhattan, and the protest against it, led by the character Olivia Benitez, feels a lot like AOC’s fight against Amazon. And Dean Banks, who I loved as Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, plays a powerful, intimidating father figure who definitely reminds me of Logan Roy from Succession. It’s all very clever and knowingly referencing iconic moments in pop culture and recent history.

As a real cinema fan, I was really gripped by The Beast in Me. It’s more than just a collection of interesting characters and a plot ripped from the news – it feels like something special. Sure, it dips into familiar territory now and then, but the dialogue is surprisingly good – a refreshing change from the overly dramatic or quippy stuff you often see on TV thrillers. What really struck me was how efficiently it tells its story. In a world where everything gets stretched out to ten hours or more, it’s great to see a film that respects your time. It tackles really relevant issues – the true crime obsession, the anger about gentrification and big corporations – and weaves them in thoughtfully, though maybe with a little bit of intellectual showing-off (there’s a lengthy explanation of a Freudian concept!). Director Antonio Campos, who also did The Staircase and Christine, is a master of pacing. He knows exactly when to ramp up the action to get your heart racing, and when to let a tense scene linger and really make you uncomfortable.

The most compelling moments happen between Danes and Rhys, who brilliantly plays a character who can be both captivating and terrifying, reminding viewers of his complex spy role in The Americans. In one particularly wild scene, Rhys fully commits to a bizarre moment where his character savagely eats a chicken with his bare hands, asserting dominance over his guard dogs. While his character is full of energy, Aggie feels stuck and isolated, trapped both by her loneliness and by a house falling apart. It makes you wonder if they’re both hiding equally monstrous sides. The rest of the cast is also strong. Snow, who recently starred in the enjoyable The Hunting Wives, leaves you questioning whether her character, Nina, is as naive as she appears. Park brings a unique take to the cliché of the inappropriate boss, and Morales makes you feel for Shelley, even though you want her to stand up to Aggie. And if a character is going to be stuck with a one-dimensional, powerful role, it’s good that it’s Banks, who always manages to make the part his own.

As the season progressed, I hoped the writers would focus less on secondary plots and explore Aggie’s complicated feelings for Nile in more detail. I wanted to feel as anxious as she does, questioning whether she might actually be a deeply flawed person. While this nuance wasn’t always explicitly written into the script, it came through powerfully in the actors’ performances – particularly Danes, Rhys, and Snow – who all portrayed characters caught in webs of self-deception. Shelley’s line, “You’d rather invent a murder than look in the goddamn mirror,” perfectly captures this dynamic. Though spoken to Aggie, it feels applicable to almost everyone in the world of The Beast in Me.

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2025-11-13 11:07