Claire Danes is our February cover star
Bold, brave and brilliant...
As she returns in the thrilling new series of Homeland – which is set in New York, in the run-up to the presidential inauguration – Claire Danes discusses the febrile phenomenon of Donald Trump, the feverish state of modern politics, and the powerful intensity of her role as a brilliant bipolar CIA agent in the February issue of Harper's Bazaar.
"I do think that England and America are so closely affiliated that it's not terribly surprising there's this parallel phenomenon occurring between our two countries," Danes says. "The Brexit and Trump phenomena are informed by similar forces and social and economic movements. I think it's been really stressful; it's been really scary. I think we're in a fever state and we're all really anxious about how we've gotten here and why we've gotten here."
In fact, the sixth season of Homeland, which Danes is currently filming, features a female president-elect "who is kind of a composite of the two major candidates of this election: some of Clinton and maybe the smallest dash of Trump. She has the kind of tenacity of Hillary but is a little rogue and more intensely liberal."
Carrie Mathison, the transgressive CIA agent with bipolar disorder played to critical acclaim by Danes in Homeland, made her blazing arrival in 2011, and marked the first time that a major show had featured such an unapologetically dark heroine.
"You know, I don't think of her as female," says Danes. "I'm playing a person. I'm playing a person. She's just not defined at all by her sex. She is defined by her ideals, by her patriotism, by her commitment to righting wrongs, by her relationship to her mental condition [but] it's just really beyond the more conventional stereotypes about what it is to be a woman in this world."
For all her imperfections, Danes says she admires Carrie because, "she gets **** done, you know? It's really great because, boy, am I not that in my true self."
Read the full interview by Elizabeth Day in the February issue of Harper's Bazaar, out 5 January. Claire Danes was shot on location at the William Vale hotel in Brooklyn, New York.
