HOMELAND at TCA: Live-Blog

HOMELAND will return to our TV screens this fall, but the cast and producers are participating in a Television Critics Association session this evening.

Follow along for the live-blog, but warning, there may be slight spoilers since many of us have seen the first two episodes of season 3…

5:06 PM: We just saw a sizzle reel of what’s to come in season 3. All I can really say is that Brody has a very different look next season.

5:07 PM: “Carrie is always sitting on her own, personal, ticking bomb,” Claire Danes says of Carrie going off her meds again next season. She calls it impossible dilemma, because Carrie’s not great on the meds, but she’s even worse off them.

5:08 PM: “I miss my friends, I miss my acting buddies,” Danes says of Carrie’s isolation in the early part of the season. “I’ve been feeling a little lonely as Claire, the actor…both Saul and Carrie share a profound amount of guilt for this bomb [from last year’s finale] and this loss.”

5:10 PM: “The decision to not have Brody in the first couple of episodes was strictly a decision of the story,” executive producer Alex Gansa says. He says if there’s a backlash to the lack of Damian Lewis, “it’s completely out of our control.”

5:11 PM: There’s an upcoming scene where Dana is with her father’s prayer rug, Gansa says that the image can be interpreted in multiple ways.

5:12 PM: “I don’t think it’s a betrayal to say he’s not in the first two episodes,” Gansa says, but he does allow that saying when Brody DOES return would be a betrayal to the series.

5:14 PM: “Brody is on the lam,” Lewis says. “He’s disappeared into a network, a tunnel…that Carrie has [set up]. He’s the most wanted criminal in the world at this point…when you do see Brody, what state is he in?” He jokes he pitched that Brody should be on a yacht.

5:15 PM: “Certainly one of the themes of season 3 is the cost of what being an intelligence officer [is],” Gansa says.

And on Saul’s actions in the first few episodes: “We just find Saul in a very difficult spot, because you have a man who is loathe to make decisions who has to make the most difficult decisions of his life,” Gansa says.

5:17 PM: Why does Peter keep getting drawn into Carrie? Rupert Friend says that they’re both edgy and do go to extremes for what they need to do.

5:19 PM: “Morgan is constantly surprising,” Lewis says of his on-screen daughter. “She’s an instinctive and constantly present actress. She’s two, three years older now, and the difference between 15 and 18 is extreme…she’s flourished into a young woman.”

As for the loss of the Brody/Dana relationship: “She was the one person who seemed to have the breadth of imagination and curiosity of what happened to her dad…they had a strong, strong mutual connection.”

5:23 PM: On the backlash in season 2, Gansa says, “I don’t think we were responding to it in season 3. Our job is to put out the shows in the best way possible.” He says obviously they wish the backlash hadn’t happened, but the Emmy love they got was nice.

5:24 PM: Season 3 has shot some scenes in Puerto Rico and they will likely be going back to Israel to film the final few episodes of the year.

5:26 PM: Danes calls her HOMELAND contract “insurance” that at least once a year, she’ll get to do stimulating, worthwhile work.

5:27 PM: “A lot of different scenarios were considered,” Gansa says of HOMELAND’s potential storylines for season 3 for the Brody family and Brody. He says the unanimous vote was that they wanted to follow the Brody family. He points to all the family members of real tragedies are paraded in front of the camera, and so they felt that was a good place to explore.

5:30 PM: Danes says she has a stack of books by her bed on bipolar disorder and she watches YouTube confessionals from people who are living with bipolar disorder.

5:32 PM: On the SNL parody: “I’m friendly with Anne, and I was in Toronto with Hugh [her husband who was filming HANNIBAL]” and started getting texts from SNL host Anne Hathaway, Danes shares. She said Hathaway apologized “and this was all before it aired and I was like, ‘Oh shit.'” Hathaway sent her flowers to make amends.

“I enjoyed her flowers,” Danes says, but she also acknowledges that due to US-Canada restrictions, she wasn’t able to view it in a timely manner and she thinks the time has passed for her to see it. But she admits she was genuinely flattered: “Oh, boy, we’re relevant. We’re in the zeitgeist.”

5:34 PM: How long would they like to run? “As long as you’ll keep having us,” Gansa says.

5:36 PM: “I wasn’t surprised at all,” Lewis says. He says he agrees you need to be ruthless in character and in storyline, and that they’ve been trying to kill him off since the first episode.

5:37 PM: Howard Gordon says the 24/HOMELAND overlap is going on, since the 24 writers room just started and HOMELAND is filming episode 6.

5:38 PM: “It was a real surprise…I didn’t know I was a guest star!” Friend says of his recent Emmy nod.