No one can bring out your inner monster like a bad neighbor.
Claire Danes (Fleishman Is in Trouble, Homeland) and Matthew Rhys (The Americans, Perry Mason) will find that out for themselves in The Beast in Me, an eight-episode drama now streaming on Netflix from creator Gabe Rotter (The X-Files). Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a grieving writer; Rhys plays Nile Jarvis, her new neighbor and possible murderer. But who’s the monster? And who’s the bad neighbor? That’s another story.
Showrunner, executive producer, and writer Howard Gordon, who worked with Danes on Homeland, was ecstatic to team up with her again. “I was a fan well before I [met] her,” he tells Tudum. “She really has that uniquely rare ability to convey the most interior thoughts, and you know what's going on inside her. There’s a fierce intelligence, but there’s also her vulnerability. She really conveys that.”
Danes was the obvious choice to play Aggie, but finding Nile was much more difficult. “That was the far more challenging part to cast for,” Gordon adds. “For me, the heavy lifting in the show was really, really making that character by turns dangerous, charming, and even vulnerable.”
Enter Rhys. The Americans star isn’t typically asked to play slimy characters like Nile; he jumped at the opportunity. “Matthew happens to be, aside from also another incredibly sweet guy, a fiercely good actor,” Gordon says. “And I have to confess, not only was I surprised by their chemistry, but I was surprised by how virtuosic he was.”
You can get a look at The Beast in Me above and stream it now on Netflix.
In The Beast in Me, acclaimed author Aggie Wiggs (Danes) has receded from public life since the tragic death of her young son, unable to write, a ghost of her former self. But she finds an unlikely subject for a new book when the house next door is bought by Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a famed and formidable real estate mogul who was once the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance. At once horrified and fascinated by this man, Aggie finds herself compulsively hunting for the truth — chasing his demons while fleeing her own — in a game of cat and mouse that might turn deadly.
The title of the series comes from a Johnny Cash song — but it’s not as simple as it might initially seem. “It really is about all of our complicity,” Gordon says. “Whether it’s Monica Lewinsky or Amanda Knox or Nile Jarvis or whatever, sometimes we are quick to make assumptions. But when we are forced to look at it from another angle, do we have the humility and the compassion to listen and to revise the narrative?”
Here are the not-so-friendly neighbors we know of so far:
Writer Daniel Pearle (American Crime Story), director Antonio Campos, Jodie Foster, Caroline Baron, and Conan O’Brien, Jeff Ross, and David Kissinger for Conaco are also executive producing.
Yes! Below, check out some images from the series, featuring looks at Danes, Rhys, Snow, Morales, and Lyons.
The Beast in Me is now streaming.
