[This article contains spoilers for Netflix's "The Beast in Me," including the finale.]

LOS ANGELES — There's a moment that happens late in the run of "The Beast in Me," Netflix's new cat-and-mouse thriller starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys as two neighbors with troubling pasts who are drawn to each other's red flags, when levity punctures the tension of the eight-episode series. All it required was a fitting needle drop, the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," and some mild dance moves by Rhys.

"Was it levity?" Rhy says, his sarcasm on full display. "Did we need to inflict that on an audience? I don't think so. I'm sure a few people say, 'What's wrong with his hips?' Others might say, 'Those aren't his hips. That's his pelvis. Maybe he had rickets or polio as a child.'"

"Rickets Rhys," Danes says with a laugh.

"Yes, there he is, look at that — calcified knees," he says.

The pair, talking over video call, are seated next to each other during a press day in New York to discuss the series, now streaming on Netflix, which spends most of its time teetering on the edge of danger. In the show, created by Gabe Rotter ("The X-Files" 2016 reboot), Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a tormented author grieving the loss of her son, who was under her watch at the time, and is struggling to write her next book — an exploration of the unlikely friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, two legal giants on opposite ends of the political spectrum. She's drawn into her own curious dynamic with a new neighbor, Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a famed and formidable real estate developer who once was the prime suspect in the killing of his wife. At once fearful and fascinated by him, Aggie makes him the subject of her next book in a bid to chase down his demons while evading her own.

The series reunites Danes, who is among its executive producers, with former "Homeland" collaborator Howard Gordon, who served as the showrunner. He says the series is an extreme version of the present and the mental silos that take shape.

"We are living at such a time where we tell ourselves narratives, and we live in these truths, and we are so isolated," Gordon says by phone. "We touched on privilege and race and class and those things as well, but those are lower key subsets of a much deeper existential state that we find ourselves in. Aggie has had a narrative that has been a survival strategy — 'The pizza delivery guy — oh, I wish he suffered like I did. This is all his fault.' That narrative turns out to be lethal. She's prosecuting the truth of what happened [in Nile's life] and then having to reconcile herself with that and her own complicity."

Danes and Rhys talked about the intrigue their characters feel for each other, their own experience as public figures, and a possible Season 2. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Claire, this series reunites you with Howard Gordon. How did it feel all these years later to be working with him again? I know you asked him to be a part of this project.

Danes: It felt great. It's also true that I had worked with Daniel Pearle [also an executive producer on the series] before on a movie that had been based on a play that he wrote called "A Kid like Jake." And coincidentally, they had partnered up in the last couple —

Rhys: Did you put them together?

Danes: Not really, but they had met because Daniel came and visited me when we were filming in Morocco. He spent a day on set, and a day that Howard happened to be there, which was not always a given. I certainly wasn't the reason that they had partnered up [as co-showrunners on Season 2 of Fox's "Accused"]. Let's call it kismet. It was wonderful to have that level of trust and history and ease, which we needed because they were working on another project when I asked if they they might join us on this. They were writing as we were filming. But I wasn't so worried because Howard had gotten us out of so many jams on so many seasons in our "Homeland" years.

Q: And it felt as extreme as what you experienced as Carrie in "Homeland," in terms of the inner turmoil that you're asked to go on with this character. Did it help knowing, "OK, I've gone to dark places with him before"?

Danes: I knew that I was in the safest, most capable of hands. I also like that about this project — that it's a little like Aggie, deceptive in its intensity. Upon first glance, it's just a charming house in the suburbs. Then you see the monsters that are kicking inside of it.

Rhys: And you're plumbing.

Q: I was gonna say — she's got some pipe issues in that house. Matthew, what was the appeal of the series for you?

Rhys: The relationship between the two of them. I'd certainly never seen anything similar, the scale of it as a relationship — the nuance, the depth, the humor, the sparring and everything else in between. It was delicious to read, so the great hope is that it would translate to screen. It was an enormous draw and to know I'd be doing it with Danes was equal parts exciting and exhilarating but terrifying.

Q: Aggie is working on a book about the unlikely friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. What helped you figure out why Aggie and Nile are so drawn to each other?

Danes: I don't think we ever had to answer it, because I don't think they ever fully understand it themselves. He allowed certain parts of her that she had been in real denial of to surface and breathe. There was part of her that was really desperate for that, and it leads to a lot of mess. But ultimately, she works through it. He animates her, he enlivens her. She is in a very bad way, this paralysis is killing her. And he's a very unlikely prince to find her in that glass box. It's perverse, but kind of wonderfully so.

Rhys: There's an enormous amount of familiarity and kindred spirit, but [they're] also great polar opposites. There's attraction on both levels then, which sparks enormous intrigue. For elements that they share, both two very intelligent, bright, sharp, perceptive people who seemingly have gone through similar trauma in their own lives, they are different. There's this glee in the evolving of the two of them, which is really fun to play.

Q: What was your entry point for Nile, Matthew? How did you calibrate his level of danger? Was there anything you read or watch ed to help you understand him?

Rhys: There's a couple of ways — a light dabble of narcissists, sociopaths, "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson. I read a bit about people who have killed people in crimes of passion, impulse killings, and how they tend to deem themselves the victim sometimes in those moments and, therefore, the murder was the result of their victimization, which I think did help and lend itself with Nile for me.

Q: We see how many people he kills within the show, but there's an allusion to more in his past. Did you have discussions with Howard on exactly how many people he has killed in his life?

Rhys: It was discussed. I genuinely didn't think it was any more than the two you see. The myth had begun early on, which can sometimes perpetuate itself. I stuck to the original two. I kept the count low.

Q: Claire, I know this sounds like I'm being facetious, but I do feel like it's a detail that says a lot about Aggie and her headspace at the time. What do you think it is about her that she feels OK, as a woman living on her own, opening the door at late hours to men who are banging on it?

Danes: [Laughs] That was all in the pilot and I really loved it. I loved those barking dogs. It was a wonderful metaphor. There's part of her that was desperate to be released from this awful, punishing purgatory that she's in and she needs an out. She doesn't have much of a choice but to investigate the source of this knocking. She's not going to make it if she doesn't dare open the door.

Q: Can we talk about the roasted chicken moment? It haunts me.

Rhys: You're not the first. What was so haunting about it — it's yucky, the eating of the feet. I loved it. I thought it was such an immediate shorthand for who Nile is. It kind of screamed volumes in one lip-smacking moment.

Q: As the title suggests, the series challenges viewers to see how we grapple with our demons and our worst compulsions. I know it's fiction with extremes, but it feels very specific to the times we're living in — how tempting it is to lean into the anger or resentment we're feeling.

Danes: Nile is an unapologetically florid character. Even before we know he is a murderer, we sense his danger and it captures our attention. We can't help but embolden him with our interest. It's a kind of shamelessness that exists in our political world right now. There's some mirroring going on there, but we're active participants too. The rubbernecking is also problematic and Aggie does eventually admit to her complicitness. I thought that was useful to think about, how can we all be more honest about who we are in our lives and in our culture and what choices we're making.

Q: There's something that both these characters are grappling with, which is notoriety and the public having an idea about them because of the things that they've gone through. What 's that experience like for you as someone in the public eye?

Rhys: I've only really ever experienced it once, and it was when Keri [Russell] and myself had a child. We don't get followed by photographers or anything like that, but they camped out for the picture of our child. It elicited in me a rage which I've never encountered since; a protective range that I didn't know was in me. Not to get too cliche, but it felt very primal, burning. I'd never experienced that and that was the only real time I've ever had to deal with it.

Danes: There was a time in the arts before social media, when there were a lot of tabloids, and I was not yet married, and I was less boring than I am now. But there were paparazzi that ... their interest would spike and their ubiquity would increase. That was really unpleasant, but that faded. I don't have social media now, maybe I should, maybe I will one day — if I do, I'll do it carefully. I just decide to be myself and most people kind of become pretty disillusioned pretty quickly: "Oh right, you're just another person next to me on the train ..."

Rhys: That's not what I said. [Danes laughs]

Danes: You can turn it into something more than it has to be. Sometimes it's a choice. But I've also never been the kind of famous that some people that I have worked with are; honestly, it's different. It's at a nice level now where I can do work on a pretty big scale, and I can move pretty easily through the world. So, I will take it. People like Jennifer Aniston — it's a different deal. I actually have never experienced that and I can't imagine.

Q: Let's talk about the prison scene in the finale. What did you enjoy about that final conversation between the two of them? And what did you think about where your characters ended up?

Rhys: All has been laid bare. There is nothing else now. The game's done and it's all put away; we've walked through the minefields and we've met now in no man's lands. It was the honesty of that scene that I enjoyed. Although, you still see the colors of Nile still going.

Danes: He still has plenty of bravado. He's killing it in prison. I was surprised to find how happy I [Aggie] was to see him. What is that? After all of that.

Rhys: You get me!

Danes: She understands how evil he is, but there is a part of her that remains fascinated, and there's a part of her that is very willing to exploit him here for her own personal gain. She's not lying when she says she needs more material for her book. So there's something rough about it. I appreciated that about the story, that none of it is fully resolved. And even though she does atone in critical ways, she's still up to her old tricks. She is still ruthlessly hunting for material.

Q: Matthew, how did you feel about Nile meeting his fate in prison?

Rhys: I resigned to the universal [understanding] that we need to see it. I was like, "OK ... I'll die." But then I did speak to Howard and Daniel, and I was like, "Could it be possible that we start Season 2 with me on a gurney in an ambulance, sitting up, giving it the full Hannibal?"

Danes: Yes!

Rhys: "The Beast in Me 2." It's just Nile knocking on your door, once again, saying, "See, it was in you too! Not just me!"

Q: It's hard to know when a show is gonna come back for another season. But is that something you're interested in?

Danes: Oh God, this is why I need Gabe, Daniel and Howard, because I'm infinitely better at the playing of it, other people can imagine it. They do the hard work of dreaming it up.

[Reporter's note: Gordon says he'd be interested in exploring Aggie's father in a potential second season.]

Q: Matthew, I know you're about to embark on your one-man play playing actor Richard Burton. How has it been preparing for that?

Rhys: You know what's funny, talk about the absolute kernel and beginning of those people under the spotlight. Elizabeth Taylor and Burton were ground zero of what we see today. It was unbelievable what they went through. It was discussed on the U.S. Senate floor, whether she should be let back into the country

Danes: That is when we had a monoculture. The list was short.

Rhys: And the Vatican condemned the relationship. The level of insanity that surrounded them was unimaginable. And so every time you go, "There was a paparazzi on my street when Sam was born ..." You're like, "Oh, it's nothing compared to what they went through." Burton really, truly was a hero of mine. To get to play your hero is equal part terrifying and a true gift of an honor.

There's a number of things you easily relate to [as an artist]. The arbitrary nature of this career, how the impostor syndrome was enormous in him. He was deeply in this conflict of going: I work incredibly hard at this thing, but what is the other element — that alchemy? He hated being told that he had a gift. He found it very unsatisfactory to be said, "I have a gift" because I work very hard at something. It's not just a gift. And the arbitrary nature of why one person is chosen to wear the crown.

Q: Claire, I know things are always evolving in Hollywood and there can be long gestation periods, but I've been curious about the status on the Hillary Clinton series "Rodham " that had been in development with you attached to play her. Do you think it will ever make it to screen?

Danes: I wish it would go, but I don't think so. It was a shame because my friend Sarah Treem did such a beautiful job in writing it. I'm going to start another show called "The Spot" that is —

[A publicist intervenes because it hadn't been announced yet. Hulu has since revealed a straight-to-series order of the drama, which will also star Ewan McGregor.]

No, I'm not doing anything. I'm gonna be knitting.

Q: Before I let you go, do you think that jogging path Nile was pushing for ever materialized?

Rhys: Yes!

Danes: He won that one.

Rhys: That's the next book, "My Path to Emancipation" by Aggie Riggs. And then one day, they dig it up and they're like, "Oh, my God, what was underneath the path?!"

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