Inside the Mind Games of “The Beast in Me” With Emmy-Nominated Creator/Writer Gabe Rotter and Writer Daniel Pearle
TV viewers who knew Matthew Rhys from his role as a quiet Russian spy in The Americans were in for a shock when he tore through The Beast in Me earlier this year (and then again later when he was pitch-perfect in Katie DiPold’s hilarious, spooky Widow’s Bay). The Emmy-nominated limited series from Netflix cast the Welsh actor as murder suspect Nile Jarvis, a sometimes-charming real estate mogul who takes the direct approach when trying to convince his Pulitzer-winning Oyster Bay neighbor to write a book about him: “I’m pretty f***ing interesting!”
Listening to Nile’s pitch is Claire Danes’ grief-stricken Aggie Wiggs. He wants to be mythologized. She wants to snap out of her self-induced melancholy. Things spiral downhill from there with a feral velocity that snagged Emmy nominations for Rhys and Danes. Creator Gabe Rotter (The X-Files) and Daniel Pearle (A Kid Like Jake) also earned Emmy nods for their writing. “It’s just about getting in the trenches and figuring out how to balance the thriller element with the character drama,” says Rotter. “Ideally, you’re able to advance the mystery and expose character at the same time. That was sort of our North Star.”
Speaking from Los Angeles, Rotter and Pearle discuss “two-hander” dialogue, “The Art of the Deal” as inspiration, and the virtues of asking lots of questions in the writers’ room.
It’s a rip-roaring murder mystery, but The Beast in Me also excels because you’ve supplied your lead characters with terrific dialogue. What was it like to cook up conversations on the page and then hand your scripts over to Matthew Rhys and Claire Danes?
Gabe Rotter: I’ll just tell you about a very intense experience I had. I’d been working with Claire on this project for five years, but it didn’t occur to me until she and Matthew sat down to do a read-through, a couple of days before we started shooting, that in all of the time developing the show together, I’d never actually heard Claire read the dialogue. As soon as she started reading, I got a lump in my throat that I’ve never had before. My eyes welled up. It came as such a shock. So the short answer is, it’s like having a piece of music you wrote being played by a concert pianist.
Daniel Pearle: Most of the time, writing is so miserable and painful that it’s really fun when actors suddenly bring it to life, especially when you’re hearing it from actors like Claire and Matthew. There is no better high.
Daniel, you met Claire Danes when she starred in the film you wrote, A Kid Like Jack, back in 2020. Obviously, you two clicked?
Pearle: Yeah. On that movie, there was something spooky and crazy about Claire’s voice and her speech patterns, where it was exactly what I heard in my head, but better. We became friends and stayed in touch. With The Beast in Me, she knew this kind of two-hander story would be my favorite thing to write, where so much of the drama comes out of verbal jousting between two people and the ups and downs of their relationship.
Gabe, I understand that you came up with the idea for The Beast in Me after learning about Tony Schwartz, who helped popularize Donald Trump by ghost-writing “The Art of the Deal?”
Rotter: Yeah. It was all over the news in 2016 when Tony Schwartz was doing this sort of mea culpa for mythologizing and legitimizing Trump. That was the original seed for this series.
In the sense that The Beast in Me looks at a writer trying to tell a story about a flawed subject?
Rotter: Exactly. In the first version of the script, Nile was a mobster who loved mafia movies and wanted to be remembered as one of the all-time great gangsters, which is why he beseeched Aggie to mythologize him in the pages of a book.
Aggie suffers from writer’s block. As writers yourselves, was that fun or agonizing to portray?
Pearle: Well, it wasn’t hard to imagine [laughing]. The challenge was, how do you make it compelling, because writing about writing can be so cringy, not to mention, what does it look like on screen? You’re not going to want a bunch of scenes where Aggie’s just clacking at her laptop. So the question became: how do we make her life as a writer feel active, compelling, and cinematic?
Matthew Rhys nails it as a volatile, control-freak Nile. It’s such a radical departure from his toned-down performances in The Americans and Perry Mason. Why did you pick him?
Rotter: He’s not a guy who typically plays psychotic, unhinged characters, but we met with Matthew and realized he’s a one-of-one actor who, as it turned out, does have that psychotic gear. I think he only had the first two episodes of the scripts when he signed on, so it was a leap of faith on his part, too.
Pearle: It certainly helped that he got probably the best scene partner in the business.
Rotter: Which is funny because they both live in New York and have lots of friends in common, but Claire and Matthew had not worked together before. We lucked out, because their chemistry together was off the charts.
Daniel, you mention the “two-hander” aspect of this show, which comes across in the first episode when Nile and Aggie meet for lunch and sparks fly. What did you want to demonstrate with this sequence that took two days to film?
Pearle: That’s really the inciting incident for this whole story and probably the first time she’s laughed in four years. Aggie surprises herself by perversely having a good time with this man whom she really finds quite objectionable. From a plot perspective, we knew Aggie would reveal the anger she felt towards the man she held responsible for killing her son because that’s going to lead Nile to do what he did. But more than that piece of information, it was really about the fact that Nile and Aggie are drawn to each other. It was hard to outline, because you couldn’t totally predict where all the beats were going to be. They just had to try it on and swim around, because we had two virtuoso actors who could actually sustain eight pages of dialogue.
Rotter: And I think it was their first day together.
Pearle: Yeah, first or second day. They were nervous, but that scene gave Claire and Matthew a real foundation, where they both found this current that runs between them and really propels the whole series.
Nile keeps Aggie off balance much of the time, and his zigging and zagging seem to activate her in some way.
Pearle: When we meet Aggie, she’s cocooned in this state of suspended isolation, sort of paralyzed by her grief. But Nile has no respect for any boundaries, coming in her front door and provoking her. Unexpectedly, she kind of needs this, and that very much has to do with Nile’s ability to provoke.
The Beast in Me was shot in New Jersey. Gabe, as creator of the show, were you mindful of the impact a project of this scale could have on the local filmmaking community during a time when so much production has been going out of country?
Rotter: I was sad to not be shooting in L.A., where I live and where so few productions are happening at the moment, but I was delighted to find that the level of talent and available artists on the East Coast was staggering. I couldn’t believe what a thriving business it’s become in New Jersey, where we were able to get the caliber of artists that we did.
The Beast in Me builds on this character-driven relationship and expands it into a broader murder mystery with a lot of moving parts. What was your process for meshing the backstories, flashbacks, and secondary characters into a cohesive whole?
Rotter: With Howard Gordon at the helm and three other writers in the room with us, I think it really just comes from asking the right questions: We know Nile Jarvis is in real estate. What’s he building? How can we dramatize that? Maybe that connects you to his move to Oyster Bay. Similarly with Aggie and her ex-wife, we might wonder how she ended up in this neighborhood? How could she afford this nice house four years ago, but now it’s in disrepair?
Pearle: You hope for a very intentional web that comes out of many meandering conversations, pitching, and going back and forth. You trust that there’s some sort of collective unconscious at work because sometimes it can feel like you’re just throwing darts, not knowing if they’re going to be on target.
Rotter: Something I learned from Howard and Daniel’s style of writing in that room was just how deeply they interrogated these characters and their connections. That became the basis for a lot of stories that we hadn’t anticipated, and there’s a real magic in that.
Gabe, this mad drama between Nile and Aggie unfolds against a real-world backdrop encompassing business, politics, wealth, celebrity culture. Were there larger themes you wanted to address in telling this story?
Rotter: I don’t pretend to have thought much about what we’re saying thematically with regard to culture and politics or any of these ideas writ large. But I do think the idea behind this particular show is about the stories that we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and how powerful those stories can be – even if they are not the truth.
The Beast in Me is streaming on Netflix.
Featured image: THE BEAST IN ME. (L to R) Matthew Rhys as Nile Jarvis and Claire Danes as Aggie Wiggs in Episode 103 of The Beast in Me. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
