Grief-stricken and desperate for purpose, Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) becomes entangled with Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) — a man once accused of murder. Obsession turns toxic. Danger creeps closer.
The new series from showrunner/writer/executive producer Howard Gordon (Homeland) and creator Gabe Rotter (The X-Files) asks audiences those very questions. Nile Jarvis is a charming enigma who just moved into Aggie Wiggs’s neighborhood. For Danes’s grieving author, he’s an irresistible subject a notorious real estate tycoon accused of murdering his wife. Nile agrees to let her write a book about him and his case, and things only get darker from there. “Spending all that time with a possible murderer doesn’t scare you?” Aggie’s literary agent and good friend Carol (Deirdre O’Connell) asks her. Maybe it should.
But Aggie isn’t powerless in the pair’s increasingly twisted dynamic. “There was a book that I kept referencing when I first started thinking about this story, called The Journalist and the Murderer,” Danes tells Tudum, referencing Janet Malcolm’s study of the relationship between killer Jeffrey R. MacDonald and journalist Joe McGinniss. “You start to see this writer and this murderer have a kind of equal value. And how is that possible? I thought it was really interesting, this idea of writer as sniper, as a potentially predatory character.”
And as the trailer — and the series — continues, we get a glimpse of Aggie’s own inner nature. “You’ve got bloodlust in you,” Nile tells her. “I can smell it.” The title of the series, drawn from a Johnny Cash song, doesn’t just refer to Nile. “There is enormous similarity between them,” Rhys tells Tudum. “And I think they recognize that in each other. They see each other as peers, very unlikely peers. That is as much a kind of revelation as it is an attraction.”
The Beast in Me hits Netflix on Nov. 13.
