Hugh Dancy - The Talented Mr Homeland
Interview from The Sunday Times
He’s half of one of the most understated couples in acting. Hugh Dancy, the husband of Claire Danes, is stepping out of her shadow into a drama about Gallipoli
As he breezes through the door of a pretentiously down-at-heel patisserie in Greenwich Village, Hugh Dancy seems to be missing something. A labrador, perhaps. Or a shotgun cracked open over his arm. Dressed in a green woolly jumper, checked shirt, wax jacket and sturdy shoes, he looks as if he could have been kidnapped from a Land Rover in the Cotswolds and transplanted into Manhattan as a tourist attraction — an idealised version of the English country squire.
Certainly, the impossibly handsome actor’s very obvious Englishness seems to be part of the allure for his wife of six years, Claire Danes, the blonde star of the television series Homeland. Their three-year-old son, Cyrus, has spent most of his life on set with his mum in places such as Berlin and Johannesburg. One of his first words was “Action!”. Cyrus’s dad, meanwhile, has been spending his winters in Toronto, shooting the cult TV series Hannibal — a Silence of the Lambs spin-off in which he plays a seer-like FBI investigator.
“Home is nominally here in New York, but for the past three years it’s been pretty much on the move,” Dancy explains as we sit down to order breakfast. “If we weren’t doing one show, we were doing the other, so our time here’s been pretty limited. It’s chaotic, but good.”
Cyrus, he adds, has had a chance to hear a variety of languages as his mother’s psychologically tortured character was whisked around the world by her hit show’s ever more elaborate plotlines. “He has a lot of air miles. I discovered that you’re allowed to plunder your child’s air miles until the age of 18, so I can feel a little less bad about having to buy him all those tickets.”
Danes as Carrie Mathison, the CIA officer with bipolar disorder in Homeland
Dancy’s hair is clipped shorter than his many female fans may recall from his breakthrough roles as a tousled heart-throb in the BBC mini-series Daniel Deronda and the TV film David Copperfield.
Although much of his recent output has been performed in an American accent, the 40-year-old’s next appearance on our screens is in a role that is unquestionably British. Deadline Gallipoli tells the story of three war correspondents covering the disastrous invasion of Turkey by allied forces in the First World War.
Directed by Michael Rymer, the mini-series explores how newspaper reporters on the front line found ways around military censorship to reveal the spectacular body count. Forces from Australia and New Zealand suffered the lion’s share of the casualties. The reports prompted a crisis for the Liberal government of Herbert Asquith, and saw General Sir Ian Hamilton relieved of his command.
Dancy plays Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, whose accounts of the “most ghastly and costly fiasco in our history since the Battle of Bannockburn” were the first to reach home — after being smuggled in a letter handled by Sir Keith Murdoch, the father of this newspaper’s proprietor.
“He was such a very, very English Englishman,” says Dancy of his character. “He was a total iconoclast and a raging egotist, among other things.”
Bartlett certainly had a colourful life, coming from a well-to-do family that had gone bankrupt. Aged 18, he fled to Monte Carlo and struck it lucky at the casino.
Dancy as the FBI investigator Will Graham, under restraint in the cult TV thriller-horror series Hannibal
“He seduced a young eastern European widow and brought her back to London. He used the casino winnings to install her in a flat somewhere, then he’d climb out of his uncle’s place at night and go and see her — until the money ran out and she went home.” All the frontline reporters were chancers, says Dancy, “and he was the biggest cowboy of the lot of them”.
The way his story is usually told, Dancy also sounds like a bit of a chancer. He fell into acting as a 13-year-old boarder at Winchester College, after being ordered to help out as a stagehand on a school production as punishment. He clearly wasn’t too much of a rebel, however, as he got the grades to go on to read English at St Peter’s College, Oxford. Straight after graduation, he headed off to London to make his name on the stage. He acquired an agent a few weeks after starting out as a waiter at Julie’s restaurant in Holland Park. He never looked back. With nothing other than a few student productions under his belt, was he signed up for his looks?
“When Claire was doing Homeland and I was doing Hannibal, both our characters had to go to extreme places relatively quickly”
“Well, sure, that’s relevant,” he says. “Broadly speaking, it’s how you present yourself. Somebody has to be the first person to hire you. Before that you go to lots of auditions, lots of meetings. People are weighing you up — the way you look and talk, everything.”
Dancy’s father, Jonathan, is an internationally renowned moral philosopher. His mother, Sarah, is an academic publisher. They never quite understood why their eldest son wanted to act. He insists that he is too thick to do much else, but that’s clearly not true. Dancy is of a generation of well-brought-up English actors who have managed to avoid being Colin Firthed into a lifetime of stiff-upper-lipdom. He did his share of ruffle-shirted period drama, but never got stuck there.
“I didn’t ever consciously try to avoid anything — looking back, maybe I dodged a bullet there by not getting too drawn down that line.”
Dancy branched out early, with roles in projects such as the military thriller Black Hawk Down, which involved going through basic training with the US Rangers. “I thought it was going to be PE, come to Jesus, press-ups in the mud, all those clichés, but actually it was more about getting a little hint of what that indoctrination is.”
Playing the British writer Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett in the mini-series Deadline Gallipoli
America’s showbiz fraternity is rattled that so many prime roles go to British actors and actresses. Henry Cavill, the current Superman, is from Saint Saviour, Jersey. The Billy Elliot stage star Tom Holland, from Kingston-upon-Thames, is inheriting the Spider-Man costume from the Epsom-raised Andrew Garfield. Across every level of American entertainment, familiar British faces pop up, such as James Corden as the new David Letterman or Ruth Wilson and Dominic West in The Affair. “I would prefer not to become a professional American. I don’t particularly aspire to that. In fact, I don’t aspire to that at all,” says Dancy.
“There’s a tipping point where three or four guys or women are in a particularly visible series at one moment, and it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, the Brits are invading,’ but we’ve always been around. You can hypothesise as to why people hire us or why they don’t, but I haven’t heard of any theory that holds water.”
These days, it’s hard not to think of Dancy in his principal role as Mr Claire Danes. Is that how he’s seen? “I don’t know how I can answer that,” he protests. “Possibly by some, and possibly not others.”
The couple met in Newport, Rhode Island, on the set of Evening, a drama that also starred Vanessa Redgrave, Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. “I didn’t arrive on set as the great seducer,” Dancy laughs. “All I knew is, I was working on a movie I’d been actively trying to be a part of for a while and I was suddenly there, a little overwhelmed by the reality of it — and the reality of the people I’d be working with.
“I knew I was coming back to New York the following January to do a play. We worked together, it was at arms’ length, but with the knowledge that we were going to be in the same city for a while and we’d get a chance to test it out. Obviously that happened, and here we are.”
According to some accounts, the couple’s eyes first met as the cast played Boggle and Scrabble of an evening to pass the time. “Well, you see, that’s one of those things,” says Dancy, before going on a rant about how throwaway comments made in interviews years ago, either by himself or Danes, get preserved in the amber of the internet and thrown back to haunt them years later.
“I mean, maybe. I don’t actually like Scrabble very much. Did I say that? Or did she?”
The film “lives with us”, he says — they were married by Michael Cunningham, who wrote the script. But it’s not particularly anniversary-appropriate: “Not least because I play this drunken guy who’s desperately in love with her, then dies awfully.”
Dealing with the constant glare of the public eye is not that hard, he argues. The trick is “not really thinking about it that much”.
“After a point, avoiding it becomes thinking about it. That can become obsessive and distracting. It’s a reality, but not one you have to engage with all the time. You find the balance that lets you best preserve your privacy.”
Aside from posed pictures on the red carpet, the juiciest any paparazzi pictures get are of two young parents pushing Cyrus in his buggy. “I think ‘annoying’ is the best word for it,” he says. “So far, annoying has been the worst version of what we have had to deal with. If you’re cautious, annoying you can live with.”
Dancy is currently shooting a drama called The Path for the American streaming service Hulu, in which he plays a cult leader trying to hold together his flock. Danes recently finished work on Homeland. “The series on telly now is the one she just finished filming,” he says. “They tend to be only a few episodes ahead.”
Dancy and Danes in 2007, soon after they became a couple, at a screening of The Evening, in which they both starred
That’s why the family is back, united, in Manhattan for once; and close to moving back into their house, which has been under renovation for a couple of years. “It’s the first time it’s been that way for a while, that we are here and can see that the time is stretching into the future a little bit.” A picture of domestic life emerges. When they are together, the Dancy-Daneses spend their evenings helping one another learn lines over a bottle of red. “It’s such a fast pace. It’s a lot easier to do it with someone else,” he says. “When she was doing Homeland and I was doing Hannibal, both those characters had to go to extreme places relatively quickly. We both end up institutionalised at the end of respective seasons; she’s being electrocuted, I’m accused of being a serial killer.
“So, not exactly the same things, but I’m going mad, she’s kind of going mad. It’s a TV filming schedule, so you don’t have a lot of time. You just hope you didn’t overshoot it. There’s nothing more embarrassing than bad mad acting. It’s like bad drunk acting. I was able to come back and share those insecurities with her.”
When Danes is asked about her husband, she often mentions the love of tea he instilled in her. She likes to list his schools (there was the Dragon School, in Oxford, before Winchester) and the fact her intellectual in-laws have a home in France, where the couple tied the knot. She seems to like being married to an Englishman.
“I’d like to reduce that,” he interjects. “She likes being married to this Englishman.”
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