As a teenager, every panel of my closet door was adorned in a neat line of magazine pages featuring Claire Danes and/or Jared Leto and, as an adult, I was devastated to discover my mother had apparently discarded my bevy of accumulated Claire Danes materials. This included the Seventeen cover where Claire wore that striped shirt and that light blue corduroy jacket and had the same haircut and reddish-blonde hair color that I did at that time AND the Seventeen cover where Claire is doing a squatty stretch thing and wearing all black and a big hot pink trench coat and her hair is what mine looks like for about three hours after I get it cut and colored, and then never again. The cover story tagline for that cover is “Claire Danes talks about life, love and Leo,” and literally did anything matter more in November of 1996 than life, love and Leo?

Of course we were talking about Leo in the first place because of Romeo + Juliet. It seemed serendipitous, a little blessing from the G-d who so often had forsaken me, when Claire Danes, who I’d adored since My So-Called Life changed my so-called life, was cast opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, my top adolescent celebrity crush, in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Talk about bringing forth bread from the earth!

Throughout her lengthy career Claire Danes has often shown up exactly where I needed her — Little Women (1994) with Winona Ryder, The Hours, Fleishman is In Trouble, Igby Goes Down. It felt appropriate, then, that the actress who once portrayed an overthinking, angst-ridden yet plainly privileged teenage girl has come to me now in new Netflix psychological thriller The Beast in Me as Aggie Wiggs, a slightly unhinged lesbian author with a messy ponytail and a prominent nose who wonders if she’ll ever finish writing her book.

While “Aggie Wiggs” does sound like something a seven-year-old would name her sock puppet, I will allow it, as I will apparently allow quite a bit for a series starring Claire Danes as a lesbian, produced by local deity Jodie Foster. Danes is also an executive producer on the series, as is Conan O’Brien (??) and some other men I haven’t heard of, I apologize to any of them if they are reading this, but they probably aren’t.

Streaming services have been churning out milquetoast psychological thrillers with alarming regularity for the past few years and with few exceptions, these thrillers seem to be automatic hits with audiences. (Critics, however, are often divided.) The Beast in Me is, unlike most of its companions in the genre, not based on a novel, was not pre-ordained by Harlan Coben or Liane Moriarty, although it was reportedly inspired by Robert Durst’s actual story as portrayed in The Jinx. The Beast in Me aims highbrow, evident by its grainy aesthetic and the talent at its center. It is these quality performances that ultimately elevate the work, but the story itself isn’t quite as complicated or interesting as it wants to be, and there are moments that lean a bit more Criminal Minds than True Detective.

Claire Danes can really act the shit out of everything so when the series began lagging in the middle and Aggie was making idiotic choices that didn’t seem befitting of a character that smart, I did start feeling a little sad, wondering if this is all there is out there for actors like her to get a check these days. For the record, I didn’t feel nearly as sad as I did for Sarah Snook while binging All Her Fault. But eventually the plot picked itself back up and got good again, and by the end I felt like… okay that was pretty good actually? It’s certainly worth the six hours it takes to binge.

About that plot. Okay, so — Aggie Wiggs wrote a book about her awful father that won a Pulitzer, but then her 8-year-old son died in a car accident and thus Aggie understandably sank into a depression, and then she and her wife (Shelley, played by Natalie Morales, a shoo-in for Best Hair in next year’s Autostraddle TV Awards), split up. When our story begins, she’s been trying to write her next book for six years and has gotten nowhere. She lives alone in their once glorious Long Island home that is now falling apart a little bit, mired in debt and grief, content in her discontent.

Then, the allegedly beguiling real estate tycoon Nile Jarvis moves in next door with his wife, Nina (Brittany Snow of Hunting Wives fame). Jarvis was widely suspected to have murdered his previous wife, Madison, although her body was never found and he was never convicted. Now he and his family are facing political pushback as they attempt to launch development project Jarvis Yards, and he’s struggling to shake the “did he kill his wife” reputation. On local ground, Aggie’s the sole holdout in Nile’s quest to build a jogging trail through the neighborhood’s communally owned woodlands, which brings him to her doorstep, and then, bit by bit, into her life. He invites her to lunch and eventually suggests she ditch her current book idea (it is a terrible book idea) in favor of devoting herself entirely to his story.

Perhaps nobody is so vulnerable to the flattery of a manipulative egomaniac than a writer in her flop era, a writer desperate to believe that she remains as special as her best work once suggested, that someone as complex and guarded as Nile Jarvis would feel uniquely able to open himself up to someone as clever and intelligent as Aggie Wiggs.

Intellectually, of course, she knows to be careful, and Danes, as always, delivers a masterclass in vacillating vulnerability; in moments where the mask falls and in those where smoothly puts it on. Meanwhile, Jarvis maintains his own self-image through fastidious, violent control, coasting through life insulated by his family’s power, wealth and willingness to play dirty to get what they want. It’s hard for him to imagine that he won’t have control over this book, somehow, too, that it won’t turn out the way he wants it. And Aggie? Doesn’t count on having control of anything, anymore. But he underestimates the strength of a sad lesbian with very little left to lose.

Over that first lunch, Aggie explains her lingering resentment and anger towards Teddy, the other driver in the car accident that killed her son, a boy she’s forbidden by law to encounter due to the restraining order her obsession with his ongoing existence eventually earned. That night, a drunk FBI agent shows up at Aggie’s door, warning her about Nile. The next morning, she learns that Teddy has left a suicide note in his car and disappeared. Immediately, she suspects Nile was behind it. From that point forward, her anxiety never falls below a simmer, as we dive into the titular conceit — do we all have beasts inside us and exactly how fierce are they exactly? What are we capable of?

I have a few questions about Aggie’s wardrobe in this series — it’s like if Lydia Tár accidentally shrunk all her outfits in the dryer or if legendary aardvark Arthur Read got into blazers, and I don’t necessarily mean either of those things in a negative way, but I do think it’s interesting, as a signifier of her sexuality. Largely, Aggie’s lesbianism is just another facet of her character, there’s no real indicators of queer culture or community evident in Aggie’s present life or her memory of it, aside from, of course, having a wife. Her sexuality seems to be what it is to eradicate any potential sexual or romantic subtext from her relationship with Nile. She’s drawn to him for other reasons — she’s bored and curious, she needs money and it’s a killer book idea, she’s trying to figure something out about herself.

“There’s no part of you that wants to fuck me?” Nile asks her, drunk at Aggie’s house one evening. “Even just a teeny tiny little bit?”

“Oh my God!” she laughs. “Jesus Christ.”

He argues their “thing” is “a little bit sexy.” She shakes her head, asks if he’s about to suggest she’s just not yet found the right man. He wants to know how many she’s tried. She says it’s none of his business.

She’s wearing a vest over a white t-shirt, her hair (I dare say its color is reminiscent of Crimson Glow), a cigarette in one hand, the other considering another sip of scotch from the rocks glass on her table. As an actor, Danes is best known for her face when it crumples and cries, but that focus has never felt entirely fair to me. For me, it’s those reluctant smiles, it’s how good she is at rolling her eyes at men, amused by their unearned confidence, their simplicity. It’s the way she leans away from them, and further into herself.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!