Claire Danes is the cover girl for the new issue of Interview Mag. She looks pretty glam, right? Like… Jerry Hall in the 1980s. I wouldn’t think that the Jerry Hall styling would work on Claire, but it really does. Claire’s interview was conducted by Dustin Hoffman – you can read the full Interview piece here. I’m not going to pretend like Claire is the best interview ever or anything. She’s an interesting, smart and talented woman, but on the page, she’s very boring. Some highlights:

Her experience on a TV show: “I’d actually only done one series before Homeland—and I was 14 when I did it, and we only made 19 episodes—so Homeland has really been my first time aging with a character and experiencing her develop and change. I know that this is not an uncommon story, but I got excited again about television from watching The Wire. That show blew me away; I just could not believe how enormous and layered this world was that they’d created, and how deeply I could delve into it. It was just so thrilling to watch a show like that as an audience member that I became interested in getting involved in something like that on the other side, as a performer. But working on Homeland has been very rewarding. I really enjoy the relationship that an actor has with a team of writers on a show like ours. It’s a very intimate process. You really have to work in tandem.”

Playing Carrie: “She seemed completely alien to me—completely other. She still does in some ways, but I’ve spent a lot of time with her now. Because she is so different from who I am, she is that much more enjoyable—and, in some ways, easier—to play. Carrie can be manic. Last season, she was pretty consistently medicated, so there were no episodes where she was really spiraling out, but those scenes are kind of fun to play. In the first season, when she really spun out initially, it was kind of a euphoric mania, and that was interesting because I found that I got a bit of a contact high from it—It was exhausting, but it was also exhilarating. But there are different types of mania. At the beginning of this season we’re in now, she’s a different kind of manic—an agitated manic—and all of those manic scenes just happened to be lumped together in the same couple of days at the very beginning of filming. At the time, I had a 6-month-old son, and I was in a completely antithetical state of being. I had just come out of my mommy cocoon and my cushy, mushy love planet. So entering that mania at that point was not as enjoyable.”

[From Interview Mag]

She talks a lot about her research into bipolar disorder, and she and Dustin say something interesting, which I’ve never heard before – that when you’re bipolar and you go off your meds, the high is similar to snorting cocaine. Is that really how it is?

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to cover this is because in this weekend’s episode of Homeland, EVERYTHING CHANGED.

SPOILERS SPOILERS for last night’s Homeland.

So, yeah… “Still Positive” was one of the crazier episodes of “Homeland” in a while. I’m developing a theory about Homeland, based on this season and last season – my theory is that it takes a good three episodes for the Homeland writers to warm up. The first three episodes of this season were too Dana-heavy when it should have been about Saul and Carrie… and even Brody in his sketchy Tower of David. We’ve only seen Brody in one episode so far, right? Anyway, the past two episodes have been really good because we’re back to high-level stagecraft, double-crosses and denouements. At first I was impressed with this new Iranian terrorist, but after last night’s episode… OMG. He’s PSYCHO. Who kills his ex-wife with a jagged bottle?! A psycho. I’m not even being facetious. This guy is a stone-cold psychopath who will screw them over. This is not some ideological purist like Abu Nazir.

Also, the huge spoiler… Carrie is pregnant? I didn’t see that one coming. It’s obviously Brody’s baby because all of those pregnancy tests (YIKES) and the timing. Is this season of Homeland going to feature an abortion?

Photos courtesy of Interview Magazine.