Interview: Claire Danes, actress

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:05

WHATEVER happened to Claire Danes? Once she was up there with other serious habitual Oscar botherers like Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon. Jodie Foster was a mentor, coaching the teenage Danes on how to effect a credible transition from teen star to leading lady. But after Shopgirl, Stardust and The Family Stone she seemed to curl away from the camera. Her last movie was in 2007, and her pensive, swooning Juliet of Romeo + Juliet seems a long time ago, in a different time.

"It was," she agrees placidly. "I now have longer hair."

Danes is back on screen with Me And Orson Welles, although she's playing neither of the title characters in this fictionalised account of a wide-eyed teen (Zac Efron) who falls for the charisma of Orson Welles (Christian McKay) and his newly founded Mercury Theatre, who are staging Julius Caesar. Danes plays Sonja, Welles' efficient, ambitious girl Friday, who gives Efron's struggling thespian his first bout of puppy love.

This is not Danes' first experience of Shakespeare of course. In Stage Beauty she and Billy Crudup perform an arresting version of Othello, and Baz Luhrmann's caffeinated rendition of teen amour.

Originally Luhrmann had wanted Alicia Silverstone or Natalie Portman for Juliet, but the 16-year-old seized her audition by the scruff of its neck, rather traumatising a jaded Leonardo DiCaprio.

"I think what happened was Leo was really tired, because he had auditioned, like, five girls already that day," explains Danes. "I was the last one, and he really didn't want to be there. I was getting frustrated, because it's a two-way street when you act. You need to have help from your partner, so I dragged him into it."

Nor is this the first time Danes has auditioned for Richard Linklater, who first met her when she was 13 and he was casting his slacker comedy Dazed And Confused.

"I got several callbacks, and before the last one I did a bike tour of the five boroughs of New York and was beet red by the time I arrived for Richard and exhausted. I mean, I showered, but I wasn't at my best. I must admit I wept when I didn't get that one."

"She was too young for the part," recalls Linklater. "But I told her, 'You're one of the best actresses I've met in this whole audition process. You're so natural and real.' I wasn't surprised when, a year later, she's on My So-Called Life. I love the way her talent rises to the top."

The word on Me And Orson Welles is affable, and with Efron as a lead it's expected to do decent business, especially among hormonal teenage girls who have never heard of Orson Welles. But Danes, 30, isn't expecting her life to change.

"Every time I make a movie I'm prepared for it to become influential and career-defining – but I have no control over these things," she says. "I loved Stage Beauty and nobody saw that. So I've stopped investing in those kinds of outcomes. Now, I decide what it means to be successful, not the public or journalists."

I don't think Danes is very keen on journalists – although she's polite and smiley today. She's not exactly forthcoming though, and gets a bit starchy when I ask how she would have coped with a director as smart, mercurial and flirtatious as Welles. ("He was incredibly specific and perceptive, so any direction that is that astute is very helpful – but who knows?")

Before getting scooped up by Linklater to film in a wintry Isle of Man, Danes spent some of her two-year absence on Broadway, playing Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion but much more of it getting engaged and then marrying Hugh Dancy, a British actor perhaps most familiar to us from the BBC's Daniel Deronda and his charming prince in Ella Enchanted. The couple met while filming the family drama Evening in 2006, and romance blossomed over trailer games of Scrabble and Boggle. Even now Danes is not prepared to discuss this, having been badly burnt in the past by accounts of her relationships.

It's a wonder every leading man she has ever had hasn't fallen for her, but Matt Damon did after she made him a better lawyer in The Rainmaker, and so did Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty.

That brought Danes her first damaging scandal. Crudup was living with his pregnant girlfriend, Mary Louise Parker, and left to move in with Danes. The tabloids in America had a field day, and Danes brought the shutters down.

Now we can only see her being expressive onscreen with her girl-next-door beauty and a face that is an open window on emotion. Born and raised in New York, the drive to perform hit when she was a four-year-old "hamming it up" for her artist parents in their loft in New York. "I remember sitting on the bed and Madonna came on television. I started jumping up and down on the mattress yelling 'I want to be Madonna!' I was five and I wanted to be a rock star. Then I found out about acting and that idea seemed very compelling."

By ten, Danes was attending lessons at the Lee Strasberg Theatre. Her breakthrough role was as angst-filled teen Angela Chase on the critically acclaimed but low-rated television drama, My So-Called Life. The show lasted five months before being cancelled, but reruns gave it life after its premature death and Danes caught the eye of moviemakers.

Romeo + Juliet made her an even hotter commodity, but by 1999 she had decided she needed an education. Encouraged by Jodie Foster, who had directed her in Home For The Holidays, she chose Yale. It was an education, she says, but mostly in socialising with people her own age.

"I didn't know how to hang out properly before that," she says. "I got to order pizza at midnight, play video games, and I went to university parties." But acting drew her back and she left Yale early after two years.

She returned to the screen with Igby Goes Down and a supporting role to Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman in The Hours. Appearing in an arch teen "dramedy" or a feminist biopic seemed within her ambitions but it was more startling to see her take on the role of Kate Brewster in her first ever blockbuster, Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, opposite the Governator. Danes now says the decision had less to do with expanding her fanbase, and more to do with a 12-hour flight from Australia.

But although she wasn't keen on my suggestion of Orson Welles, there is one writer-director that Danes has pursued in the past and would still like to work with. "Ricky Gervais," she says.

Danes and Gervais worked together on Stardust, in which she played a star and he had a cameo as a conman. "I love British comedy and I watched a lot of it when I was preparing to play Eliza Doolittle. I got obsessed by Steve Coogan and Catherine Tate too. So while I was filming with Ricky, I tried to hassle my way into Extras, but he wasn't having it, even though I was being as forward as I've ever been with anyone." v

Me And Orson Welles is released on 4 December meandorson wellesthemovie.com

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 22 November 2009.