She was Angela in “Angela, 15” or Juliet in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the cinema. But it was by lending her features to Carrie Mathison, heroine of the series “Homeland” that Claire Danes saw her popularity explode with the general public. Here it is again today in a new box: “The Beast In Me”, on Netflix.
From 2011 to 2020, she impressed her world by playing a CIA agent suffering from bipolar disorder. A worldwide success that lasted eight seasons, “Homeland” certainly experienced ups and downs in terms of its quality, but established itself as one of the best spy series in history. Claire Danes won two Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes thanks to this role. However, since the end of the broadcast, the American actress has been rather discreet on our screens.
Throughout her career – she was only 13 when she was cast for “Angela, 15” – Claire Danes has made reasoned choices without getting caught up in a need for fame at all costs. After the success of “Romeo + Juliet”, she, for example, refused the role in “Titanic” then obtained by Kate Winslet and even decided to go to university, studying psychology for two years at Yale.
Unexpected late pregnancy
Since the end of “Homeland”, it is over the course of several mini-series that she has reappeared here and there, always well surrounded. First in spring 2022 in “The Essex Serpent”, in six episodes on Apple TV +. Claire Danes played a young widow in Victorian England at the end of the 19th century, alongside Tom Hiddleston and Clémence Poésy. A few months later, we discovered her in “Anatomy of Divorce” on Disney +, as a mother who seems to abandon her children overnight, opposite Jesse Eisenberg in the role of the father. Two high-level performances in very successful productions, even if they remained quite confidential.
On the other hand, the series “The Full Circle” by Steven Soderbergh, broadcast in France on Canal + in February 2024, left us unmoved, despite its five-star casting including Timothy Olyphant and Dennis Quaid. In this overly convoluted puzzle, Claire Danes struggled to generate empathy as the mother of a teenager targeted by an attempted kidnapping.
While she was filming “Homeland”, the actress became the mother of two boys, born in 2012 and 2018, with her husband Hugh Dancy, an actor met on the set of the film “Le Temps d’un été” in 2006. In 2023, the couple also had the surprise of having a daughter. During the filming of “The Beast In Me”, from September 2024 to January 2025, the actress was still a young mother. She recently told the American podcast Smartless, hosted by comedians Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, that this late pregnancy at age 44 had been completely unexpected.
In the mini-series which is currently a hit on Netflix, the actress plays an author destroyed by the death of her son in a car accident a few years earlier. Lacking inspiration, she will launch into a game of cat and mouse with her new billionaire neighbor, once suspected of having killed his previous wife. The psychological thriller genre fits Claire Danes like a glove, who finds a character with the same emotional intensity as Carrie Mathison in “Homeland”. Her performance and the duo she forms with Matthew Rhys are the key assets of the series.