This interview is part of Variety and CNN’s Actors on Actors series. Watch the full video interview now at CNN.com/Watch (or on the CNN app) and on Variety’s YouTube channel starting at 11:59 pm ET.
Claire Danes and Richard Gadd both flirted with madness in high-profile acting duets this season. On “The Beast in Me,” veteran actress Danes played writer and grieving mother Agatha Wiggs, whose journalistic instincts get tripped by her new, threatening neighbor (Matthew Rhys). And on “Half Man,” writer-director-star Gadd’s followup to the sensation “Baby Reindeer,” it’s Gadd who plays the threat as Ruben, a musclebound tough guy who haunts the life of his childhood acquaintance Niall (Jamie Bell) into adulthood.
Claire Danes: I’m very happy to be here with you, truly.
Richard Gadd: Yes, likewise. It’s surreal for me. I’ll tell you a little fact. Back at school, to get us to learn Shakespeare, we watched “Romeo + Juliet.” I remember writing an essay on “Romeo + Juliet.” I remember so clearly an amazing bit you do in that where you wake up and Romeo’s dead, and you do this amazing guttural sob. I remember writing paragraphs about that sob and how impactful it was.
Danes: And then you mastered the guttural sob.
Gadd: I learned from the best.
Danes: You saw my guttural sob, and you raised it. I remember that moment very distinctly. I was surprised by it. I remember the shock of the discovery and being startled by my response, which is what we hope for. It doesn’t always happen.
Gadd: Did you have to prepare for that?
Danes: We were pretty deep into filming at that point – but that’s why Baz [Luhrmann] is such an extraordinary director because he served it to me. But this isn’t really fair, because it’s called “Actors on Actors,” and you’re many other things. I am merely an actor, and you’re the guy providing the context and eliciting the performance. I so wish I could do that myself, but I am limited.
Gadd: You’ve never thought of giving [writing] a shot?
Danes: Well, I’m now producing more. It feels like throwing a dinner party. But I’m not writing it. I guess you’ve always written?
Gadd: Even from an early age. One of the earliest memories I have is sitting and writing — it was called “Felix the Furball,” and it was about this little bit of fluff that kept getting blown out of the house, and it had to find its way back into the house. I remember vividly being at the keyboard, typing frantically, being obsessed with it.
Danes: I remember being really, really little and knowing that I needed to do this acting thing. I always knew I wanted to act and couldn’t really explain it. Did this writer self emerge before the actor self, or were they kind of twinned?
Gadd: I played Macbeth in my school play. And I know it seems daft now to reference it, but it was a watershed moment for me. Have you ever done it onstage, Shakespeare?
Danes: No.
Gadd: What was it like doing it on film?
Danes: Well, Baz was very clear that he wanted to make this as accessible as possible, and there were no pretensions at all. It was about clarity of intention and language. I haven’t done anything like that since then. It was totally thrilling — but I’ve done enough work to know that a well-written scene is just a ride that you are on. And you’ve written a lot of very well-written scenes. What is it like to be on the ride that you have architected yourself?
Gadd: It’s interesting because when I write scenes, I can see them so clearly in my head, and even the rhythm of the speech, I sort of know how it should be said. I spend so long writing the scripts and work so constantly that when you get to set, you know the lines almost too well. You have to find new things within them. It’s a blessing and a curse, in a way — I don’t need to learn lines. You need to unlearn them to be in the moment.
Danes: “Baby Reindeer” and “Half Man” — I don’t know if this was intentional or if this is an annoying thing for me to say, but I feel like they’re in conversation with each other, and you’re playing flip sides of the same character. This is way too reductive, but you were the victim and then you were the abuser.
Gadd: Aggressor.
Danes: Aggressor. Is this something that you were conscious of as you were writing?
Gadd: It’s an interesting question. I never planned on being in “Half Man.” Because after I did “Baby Reindeer” — showrunning and also being in front of the camera, it almost drives you nuts.
Danes: I can’t even imagine.
Gadd: You have to have a split focus. There’s times when I’m acting and I’m also seeing it from a bird’s-eye view, trying to be like “Is this working from the outside?” It can drive you slightly insane. So when I came to “Half Man,” I thought, “I’m going to take one of the jobs off my plate.” But Jamie wanted me to do it and HBO and BBC really wanted me to be in it from a marketing perspective.
Danes: Also, you’re a really good actor.
Gadd: Thank you. But it was so far from anything I’d ever done before. If you see what I was used to playing after “Baby Reindeer” — neurotic, awkward — then you go all the way to strutting psychopath… It sort of terrified me. And I almost turned it down because it terrified me so much. I’ve got this thing in me where I come from a comedy background, so I still feel like a student of the game. And with Donny [in “Baby Reindeer”], I had to go back to a version of myself that was based on myself, but Ruben was like, “How do you get to someone who’s so far away from me?” And it was a real challenge. I had to change everything about myself.
Danes: I’ve never had to ask that much of my body in order to prepare for the role.
Gadd: Donny Dunn was like 68.8 kilograms [151 pounds]. Ruben at my heaviest was 110 [242 pounds]. I wanted it to be real, so a lot of it was putting a lot of fat on top of the muscles. It’s quite helpful, because as the character, you feel physically imposing, and Jamie Bell’s very petite. When I was acting with him, I could almost ingest him, I was so much bigger than him. It helped in that respect. I like that because — I don’t know about you. I hate feeling like myself on set.
Danes: Uh-huh.
Gadd: They’ll put you in a shirt and you go to set and I’m like, “I still feel like myself.” So how do I feel like a character in my body? I like to feel different. I wouldn’t say it’s Method or anything. I just like to feel the physicality, whether it’s frail or big. Do you do stuff like that?
Danes: I don’t know if it’s ever been necessary for me to transform in such an extreme way. Some roles are more remote than others, and I do have to apply myself with a bit more rigor in putting them together. Those are the most rewarding, really — high-risk, high-reward. I resent them initially and then I’m so grateful and I find the most freedom within them. Sometimes it’s quite stressful to play somebody who is super familiar, who you overlap with.
Gadd: Yeah.
Danes: But I’m curious to talk to you about that, too, because “Baby Reindeer” obviously is a fictionalized version of a story that you partially lived. What is that exercise? What is it to play an imagined version of something that you know so deeply?
Gadd: It could feel totally surreal. There were times where we’d be doing scenes and I’d almost dissociate and get confused.
Danes: I bet.
Gadd: It felt surreal — the set kind of disappears, not to sound too pretentious. You’re taking your life and doing a story based on it and then putting it into the machine of the television process. It’s just so odd to go behind a bar — having worked in a bar for four years — and go into comedy stages and reenact jokes that I did years before. I almost couldn’t believe that it led to this point. There were times when I was doing comedy, trekking up and down the country and performing to three people. I could drive to Birmingham from Glasgow and just be like, “There’s three people here. What am I doing?” And then you can’t believe that’s become something within Netflix.
Danes: Did you discover anything new in the telling of it?
Gadd: When I was doing comedy — and some of the jokes in “Baby Reindeer” are genuine jokes that I used to do — I used to think I was at the vanguard of change. I was going to revolutionize the form.
Danes: Yeah, well…
Gadd: I would go up and down the country and be like, “Why are they not laughing? Why aren’t they getting this? This is groundbreaking stuff.” It wasn’t until I parodied it in “Baby Reindeer” that I realized, “Oh, wow, what was I playing at?”
Danes: Well, you were playing! You are at the vanguard. A different vanguard than, maybe, the one you intended.
Gadd: I’d ruined stag dos and hen nights. They would come expecting comedy.
Danes: You are actually always on a razor’s edge. You’re poking at something uncomfortable. Now, more people are noticing and appreciating it.
Gadd: Agatha Wiggs is such an emotional role — a grieving mother. You bring such a rawness and intensity to every scene. How did you maintain the mindset all the way through?
Danes: I thought pretty hard about what it might be like to lose a child before we started — and boy, was that unpleasant. The challenge with her was playing such an intellectual. Writers, they’re not always the most performative people, but she had this animalistic self kicking in there. So how to honor both of those realities and have them convincingly coexist. But I realized, watching your work, there’s a real parallel between the two stories we’ve told. It’s about people enmeshed, and one self is carried in the other. They’re hostile relationships, but there’s something deeply romantic at the core, too.
Gadd: I had this question in my head the whole time with “The Beast in Me,” whether your character was in love with the Matthew Rhys character.
Danes: I think they were falling in love, weirdly, but there genuinely was no sexual tension — and that was curious. I’d never seen that, or certainly never played it.
Gadd: It was like a psychological attraction? He had this sort of sociopathic mind.
Danes: Yes, and she had very predatorial instincts, also. They weren’t as overt, but there is something opportunistic and potentially exploitative about what a writer does, right? They have a lot of power they can abuse. But they were both suffering, and neither of them fully admitted to themselves the degree to which they were. He externalized his anger in a way that I think she wishes she could have. And they were also both pretty bright people who suddenly found another person who could think at their frequency, and they were thrilled by each other. She just found a good tennis partner.
Gadd: You guys had amazing chemistry.
Danes: They were fun scenes. It was just throwing words back and forth, and how would you create suspense with these two people not making out? Where’s the friction? It turns out there was plenty. But that was the trick of it. I’m relieved we somehow made that happen.
Gadd: Do you ever get nervous? I always ask actors that.
Danes: Yes, of course. The first week, it’s just dreadful. You have this self-consciousness that you just have to shed, and the only way to move through it is to do it and feel like an asshole. Then you eventually convince yourself that you have a relative ease.
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