In the new thriller The Beast in Me, a memoirist takes on a sinister property developer who may or may not have killed his first wife, and it’s not entirely clear which of the two is more dangerous. It has been billed by Netflix as “cat and mouse”, but Claire Danes prefers to think of it as the more evenly matched snake and mongoose.
“I liked the idea of a writer being truly dangerous, and predatorial,” she says of her character, Aggie Wiggs – grieving the loss of her young son and living divorced and alone in a big house she can’t afford – who develops a fascination with her new neighbour. Nile Jarvis (I can get on board with everything in the gripping eight-part series except, perhaps, just about every character’s name) is certainly monstrous, may also be a murderer, but might just have found his equal, because “she’s a real fighter, and she doesn’t have that much to lose”.
