The 2011 role that saved Claire Danes from Hollywood exile: “It was grim”
The unfortunate reality is that Hollywood is far less forgiving to female actors than it is to male stars, which impacts which projects are given the green light.
While there are male actors like Jared Leto and Vin Diesel who have starred in multiple flops and still given opportunities, there are stars like Claire Danes who were seemingly placed in “Hollywood exile” after the industry determined that they were no longer desirable.
Hollywood is renowned for its unspoken ageism, and its particuarly challenging for female child stars to continue their careers after trying to take more adult parts. Although Danes had made a name for herself for her breakthrough performance in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, a few misfires in the immediate aftermath suggested that she was becoming unemployable.
Despite winning a Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the HBO television film Temple Grandin, Danes said that the accolades didn’t end up benefiting her career.
“It was confusing,” Danes said. “I got a lot of plaudits, and it didn’t translate into more work. I was really, really struggling during that time. It was grim. I was very hurt. Two years of not working was brutal, and a point came where I thought, I really like interior design… Someone suggested, ‘Maybe your real success is in your personal life.'”
Despite feeling so discouraged that she considered quitting acting altogether, Danes was offered the lead role of Carrie Mathison in Homeland, an ambitious espionage thriller from Showtime – although she accepted the role, Danes said that she had some reservations about playing such a self-destructive, complex character.
“Do I want to play this toxic person for that long?” Danes said. “I was scared of it, and I thought, ‘OK, right, that means I have to do it.’”
Homeland explored the operations of the United States Homeland Security offices in the midst of international espionage expeditions, and Mathison is a leading CIA agent working under the spymaster Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin)… Although the show would expand to scope out different continents and introduce different villains, the first three seasons focused on the arrival of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), an American prisoner-of-war. Despite his rescue being seen as miraculous, Mathison suspects that Brody might have been compromised and turned into a sleeper cell by Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Homeland offered a grounded look at international politics that provoked many controversies, as some felt that the series was too keen to demonise minority groups by framing them as enemies of the United States. However, Homeland was also quite ahead of its time, especially in predicting the way that American politics would evolve in the last decade; the final three seasons of the show showed how a right-wing conspiracy radio host incentivised a resistance movement that threatened to compromise a Democratic White House.
Although Homeland’s quality was more-or-less consistent throughout, Danes received nothing but raves for her performance; Mathison was a complex character whose tactics often vexed her superiors, leading to instances in which she is framed as an antagonist. This was an era where television was coasting on the appeal of male anti-heroes like Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, Walter White in Breaking Bad, Don Draper in Mad Men, and Vic Mackey in The Shield, but Danes offered a female counterpart to the equation.
