Howard Gordon On ‘The Beast In Me’, Potential ’24’ Revival: Q&A

After four decades in television and almost 60 credits to his name, Howard Gordon is making his streaming debut with The Beast In Me, a psychological thriller limited series starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, which premieres on Netflix tomorrow, Nov. 13. Gordon, Outstanding Drama Series winner for Fox’s 24 and Showtime’s Homeland, serves as showrunner on The Beast In Me, reuniting with Emmy-winning Homeland star Danes.

Created by Gabe Rotter, the 20th Television-produced series stars Danes as an author grieving the death of her son who is drawn to her new neighbor (Rhys), a real estate mogul suspected in his wife’s disappearance, as a subject of her next book.

In an interview with Deadline, Gordon discusses his move to streaming, taking a break from the political/spy thriller genre and The Beast In Me‘s similarities to Homeland. Sitting in his office in front of a poster with his mantra, “Work hard and be nice to people” on it, he also addresses recent comments by 24 star Kiefer Sutherland about a potential revival of 20th TV’s real-time thriller, on which Gordon served as executive producer/showrunner.

“Howard Gordon has come up with an idea that I like,” Sutherland, who plays 24‘s heroic federal agent Jack Bauer, said in a radio interview. “Something has been written, I think it’s really good.” He cautioned that the project “has to go through different channels before it’s either approved or disapproved” but “like everybody else, it’s something I would really like to do. I would like to close that story. It was left kind of wide open. So, fingers crossed. There’s a chance. We’ve taken some considerable steps forward.”

Gordon also provided status update on Accused, the Fox crime drama anthology he developed and executive produced for Fox. The series was not canceled in May after running for two seasons. Instead, Fox TV Network President Michael Thorn said at the time that “we’re talking with Howard if there’s an opportunity down the line to eventize a return, something that can really work for us and Howard, we’d love to do it. Right now there’s no plan but there could be down the line.”

Espionage thriller Homeland, which Gordon co-created and executive produced, helped launch the acting career of Timothée Chalamet with a major recurring role as Vice President’s son. It also was Chalamet’s last TV role. In a recent Vogue interview, the Oscar nominee responded with “a simple, self-assured ‘no’” when asked whether he would go back to TV with no caveats. Gordon reacted to that and spoke about casting the then-teenager Chalamet on the show.

DEADLINE: How was it for you to embrace streaming at this stage of your career. Did you have any trepidations? Was it something that you’d been trying to do for a while?

HOWARD GORDON: I’m pretty agnostic. Back in the 24 days, the conventional wisdom was not to do serialized shows. They encouraged us not to do it, but we wound up doing it. When DVDs and DVR and TiVo were introduced it was like, wow, technology has a relationship to the way we tell stories.

I’ve never really changed my approach, I didn’t particularly dread it, or frankly, I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to it either. I am blown away now that I’m in that machine, or under that umbrella, I can’t believe the kind of instant global access that this show will have. I had a Spanish tutor who lives in Valencia, and we were talking about the show because I just had come back from New York, I was telling her about the premiere, and then she said, ‘Will I be able to watch it in Valencia?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ It’s impressive. I did a show, Accused, for Fox. None of my friends, including my Spanish teacher, who live in Spain could watch it, they couldn’t find it. Only the most computer literate people could get access to whatever obscure platform it was on.

DEADLINE: Since you brought up Accused, what is the status? Fox had said that there’s a possibility for the show to come back as an event. Is it something that is being discussed?

GORDON: Michael Thorn is an old and good friend. I said, look, if you need it, It’s one of those shows that could be jump-started pretty quickly because it’s an anthology. It’s always a new cast, you could do six of them, eight, you could do 12. I’d be open to it but I really feel like we did that show. I was proud of it. I’ll be honest with you, I thought it would get more viewers, or even more critical response than it seems to have gotten. I was a little disappointed and surprised, but you move on. I felt very good about it, myself and the team, we had a great time doing it. All you can control is the experience you have, and it was a great experience.

DEADLINE: For you that was a rare foray into close-ended episodes. Did the experience teach you to stay in your serialized lane?

GORDON: The fact that they did it is a tribute in and of itself to the work. I know they didn’t want to, they were resistant because the conventional wisdom is people still attach themselves to characters and to a story. What I loved about it is I could work parallel, develop five or six stories at one time, and I wasn’t at the mercy of the story that came before. So for me, just from a creative standpoint, it was quite exhilarating, although it has its own challenges when you have to start from zero every single time.

DEADLINE: The Beast In Me is 8 episodes, probably the smallest order you’ve ever done. Is it easier doing fewer episodes?

GORDON: Just getting your head around, oh, at most, this is going to be 12 episodes, not, for instance, 22. Knowing what the end is, knowing that the order is 8 or in the case of Homeland, it was 12. It was not easier than 24 but it turns out to be just as hard to do 12, actually. No, it really doesn’t. 24 sucks, 24 it’s very hard to do. I can’t even believe we ever did that or anybody ever did that or people still do it, like the Kings. I can’t believe these people can do it.

DEADLINE: 24 is a unicorn. With serialized storytelling — not case of the week — dense mythology and action sequences, it produced 24 episodes in a calendar year for eight seasons. I don’t think anybody else has done it on that scale. Do you think that can ever be replicated?

GORDON: Well, I don’t want to overstate it but I worked seven days a week, 51 weeks a year, for years. I felt like I was in a dream for a decade, truly, in an altered state, and I think people all paid a bit of a price. It was also exhilarating, it’s a little bit like the moth to the flame.

I worry about it, I think it is a structural issue, but it’s also an attitude and consumption issue that we have been habituated — first cable and then streaming — I think this fracturing of attention has actually made not just making something like 24 in a calendar year impossible, but actually consuming it. I don’t think people have got the attention span or the appetite, our viewing patterns and our habits have changed such that we’re distracted.

You knew 24 was on Monday. You knew ER was on Thursday, I remember the nights. I remember looking forward to Northern Exposure on Monday night, even as recently as Game of Thrones, and I think even Homeland, that seasonality from year to year and from week to week was part of the equation.

I think consumer viewing habits have changed that, so I don’t know that even if somebody was trained and had the masochistic ability to do 24 in one year again and again, I don’t know that people want to watch it. But then again, we see things like [HBO Max’s] The Pitt, which is 15 per year. We’ll see if they can really keep on doing it every year. But it seems to me like, maybe people are missing that element and maybe that will adjust somewhat if not return entirely. I know someone is there experimenting and HBO, I think they still release weekly.

DEADLINE: Kiefer Sutherland recently said that you had approached him with an idea for a 24 followup which he likes. Is it something you are working on?

GORDON: It’s absolutely in process, there’s something we are developing. They, meaning Disney [parent company of 20th TV] and such, have not committed to it, so it still is a process. Look, it’s actually no secret, and this is worth saying. I, over the years, and obviously various iterations, not just with Jack, but, trying to spin it off with Corey [Hawkins], and with different people. I’ve also sat through dozens of pitches from other writers. I’ve developed a few. I even did a spin-off.

It’s funny when I saw The Pitt. With [24 creators] Joel [Surnow] and Bob [Cochtan], back in those days we talked about a real-time ER show. I think this show is so good, but I really was like, ‘Oh, my God’. I know the whole conflict with ER versus The Pitt but I was thinking, ‘Wow, they do a great, great job.’ [One of the 24 offshoots explored years ago was a real-time legal thriller.]

Anyway, back to the Kiefer of it all. I have such a nostalgia for that show, and I think Kiefer does too. One thing we couldn’t figure out for a long time was a direction that ever held water, that sustained itself. This feels like it could be, but it’s not formal, it’s not done. And there’s a part of me, Nellie, honestly, that also feels like, particularly at this point in my career and in my life, what I really don’t want to happen is that it’s not good because I don’t think that’s fair to the show. It’s not fair to the fans, not fair to, frankly, to myself. So it has to be something that you connect to, or at least you tell yourself you’re connected to. It may not turn out very well, but you have to at least believe that it’s something.

DEADLINE: In an interview last week, Timothée Chalamet said firmly that he will not be returning to TV. What do you think about that, and how did he get on Homeland? Were you involved in his casting?

GORDON: I knew his mother who was a dancer in New York and her brother, Timmy’s uncle, who was a writer and a director. So I knew [Timothée] as, oh, he’s really talented, and he’s doing this off-Broadway thing, I may even have seen him in one of his plays when he was 12 or 13 but that was it. I didn’t pull him or anything, it was like, oh, that’s Tim, that’s Nicole’s son. And he was so good on Homeland, it was just great.

Then when I did Tyrant, I actually wanted him to do that part, I called him and I asked him to do it. He was going to Columbia [University], I think, at the time, and I remember saying, well, as a producer, I’m not sure where this part’s going, I wouldn’t want to sell you something. But as someone who knows your mother, maybe you should go to Columbia. Anyway, I don’t take any credit for anything that happened since then, but that was maybe the last time I’ve talked to Timothée Chalamet.

He didn’t stay at Columbia, he lasted a year there anyway. I gotta give it to him, though, he is good. I’m bummed that he would say something like that, just make a unilateral, pronouncement about television.

DEADLINE: How did you get involved in The Beast In Me? How early did you come on board, and why did you want to be part of it?

GORDON: There is a friend of Claire’s [Danes] who is a writer named Daniel Pearl. I met him on the Homeland finale. I was in Morocco, he was visiting Claire and we spent time that day. I remember thinking to myself even then, Wow, he is really smart. If I ever do another show, I would love to look him up.

So, lo and behold, he did a script for Accused, and it was great. Thus began, I would say, a semi-partnership. In the second year, he became my co-showrunner on Accused. He hadn’t done that much, he’d done two writers rooms, he is a playwright by training. He’d done a play that was turned into a movie that Claire was in called A Kid Like Jake.

Meanwhile, at the end of Homeland, Claire had a production deal still with 20th TV, and as a producer, she got brought into this project, which was a spec script by Gabe and Conan O’Brien’s company, [O’Brien’s exec] David Kissinger had brought it in. So it was something that was in development, and they sold it to Netflix. I had nothing to do with it, I knew it was happening just because when I’d see Claire, this was on her radar.

They did many iterations of it, Jodie Foster was attached as a director at one point. Claire actually approached Daniel and I, who were in the middle of doing Accused and said, Look, I’ve been doing this project that needs to be reimagined or developed differently. The premise of what happens was really intriguing to me.

I always think you have to find something very universal as a writer, that you want to work through or that you’re curious about. And with Jack Bauer and with Carrie [Mathison], I’m always going. I’m a workaholic, I know I am. I know I got a problem. Obviously I’m not saving the world, I’m writing a TV show. But it has gotten in the way of my life as a husband, as a father.

With Jack Bauer, his marriage was being tested, I was interested as a man who was roughly his age at that time. With this, the prospect of what we do with grief and how we process it, and then the stories we tell ourselves to survive, the blame we distribute to other people; I found that character, her essential state of stuck-ness, really intriguing.

But also, it wasn’t an obvious thriller. It wasn’t some guys at a plumbers convention in Las Vegas, he has an affair, wakes up and the woman winds up dead next to him or something. It wasn’t a standard thing, it felt like, what is this? The themes were interesting. And then also the loneliness that we all are feeling at this time. I think those two characters felt like they really are gifted and they’re brilliant, but they’re also broken. That setup felt really compelling, it was fun to figure it out.

DEADLINE: After years of working on political/espionage thrillers like 24, Homeland and FX’s Tyrant, did you want to get away from that with The Beast In Me?

GORDON: The world is so complex. With 24, 9/11 gave it a context. It went from this kind of wish fulfillment that generally had been very black and white — bad guys, good guys across the spectrum, and that includes some of the bureaucrats, the people supposed to be doing their job, who were asleep at the wheel or corrupt or incompetent.

Homeland was a way to grapple with some of the complexity, and at this point in time seems almost quaint, because the world has gotten so complex. For instance, a show that I’m watching and admiring is Slow Horses. I’m enjoying it so thoroughly, and I find it amazing that they do what we did, which is to say they bump up against real themes and real stories, but what leads the story is those characters, and they’re so vividly drawn and so specific, I am kind of blown away by it.

For me, I was a little bit burned out. I thought through a few things, but I think this was a relief to just be able to do something that you don’t have to tread too carefully on because there’s a danger with that kind of stuff about getting reductive.

I’m not sure what there is to be said about the spy thing. [John] le Carré, when it was the Cold War, the subject he was describing was so specific, this bipolar world and the two great powers jockeying in the intelligence world for the rest of the map. Now, the world has gotten so multipolar, polarized and atomized. It’s really, really hard to me to write about it. I think about The Diplomat, which does a very nice job. It’s quite different than Homeland but creator Debora [Cahn]’s very talented, and I think it’s terrific.

DEADLINE: She comes from your school, from Homeland.

GORDON: It really feels like her two roots, Homeland and The West Wing, come together in it.

DEADLINE: The Beast Like Me feels a little bit like a version of Homeland in its early seasons, with Claire’s character in both cases suspecting someone of something unimaginable, and she’s trying to find proof. Was that lost on you?

GORDON: No, it wasn’t lost on me. I think you’re identifying a definitive marker for her performance and her character and for me thinking about it, but yes, you’re absolutely right, it wasn’t lost. When we were doing the scene under the bridge with David Lyons when she’s pitching her crazy theory to this guy, it was a lot like [Homeland‘s] Mandy [Patinkin]. We referenced it, meaning, the writers, Daniel and I and Gabe, it’s just, what can you do? It’s Claire Danes, she is a hyper intelligent character who has a theory that nobody believes. That’s the premise for a lot of things, but I think the colors and the time of life and the circumstances around that basic energy of somebody quickly separated became something quite different. But I was totally aware of that energy, more of an energetic or a structural similarity.

DEADLINE: Talk about Matthew Rhys taking on that compelling and creepy character.

GORDON: I’ll say one thing before we get to him, finding that voice. I would say he was the hardest character to find, because a sociopath — which is what he is — is very hard to write, and I think to act without it becoming something that is unrecognizably human. So from the writing perspective, what was interesting is, I think he was a very loquacious, very verbal, very charismatic, a guy who’s unafraid of language and unafraid of talking and being a salesman, but he was doing it relentlessly. And one of the secrets I found was finding silences, where he can be very talkative and sometimes cruel, sometimes direct in a way that was uncomfortable, sometimes charming, but sometimes silent. It was almost like finding the rhythm of the character’s voice. That was the secret to me on the page.

Matthew took it and delivered like you only hope for, it got the music of the character, but then he added something that was not in it. Aside from his natural charisma, there was a vulnerability that I think is the secret ingredient to that character where you feel for him and you’re like, how can I possibly feel for this guy? I think when you’re very confused in a good way about how you feel about a character, I think you’re in a good space for an audience or for viewing experience.

I think both of these performances are really virtuoso. Claire is just magnificent. But Matthew to me — only because I’d worked with Claire so I know how great she is — Matthew is just phenomenal, really terrific, and also turns out to be a really wonderful person.

DEADLINE: This is a limited series but in success, is there a potential for continuation?

GORDON: It was meant to be a limited series. It certainly is possible, because whoever is left standing at the end of this is still around, and I think if there’s a story, we’d be up for it; I do think that there’s certainly room for another chapter.

But it was a really good experience, I have to mention [director] Antonio Campos, he’s super talented, and it was a great, a really great team. We had a good time, the process was really rewarding, and I think it reflects in the work. I’m very, very satisfied.