“I went out to appear on Broadway in Journey’s End for five months. To do something very English, very British. Then my personal life changed and I ended up staying there. I made a movie and met my wife.” Hugh Dancy, the Oxford-educated actor son of a moral philosopher and an academic publisher, is telling me how he ended up in America, married to Homeland star Claire Danes and now father to their four-month-old son Cyrus.
The 37-year-old, who is set to star over here in glossy and gory TV drama Hannibal, grew up a long way from his current home in Greenwich Village. He was born in Stoke-on-Trent, brought up in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and went to boarding school from the age of 10, first at Dragon School in Oxford then at Winchester College, where he first got into acting. Another public schoolboy hogging the top roles, then? “I’m not embarrassed about it,” he says of Winchester. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing had I not gone there, both for positive and negative reasons. I was not having a good time at school otherwise, for lots of reasons. Partially because I was 13.”
He concedes, though, that “the other side of that coin was there was a theatre for me to stumble into, amazingly well stocked with people and enthusiasm and money, I guess. Those things served me well. I come from a family of teachers, primarily in public schools, so there is a sense of identity floating through my family.” Boarding school is good preparation for an actor’s life: “It makes it easier to live out of a bag. I never felt the need for a home in the same way [as others].”
He met Danes on the set of the 2007 film Evening. The conversation about where they would live “never came up. Claire grew up in New York and has lived there pretty much all her life, other than when she was a teenager working in LA [on My So Called Life, with which she first made her name]. So she was the one who had roots. Unlike me, in the sense that I hadn’t lived in London all my life. The hope would be that we can spend time here as well.” They recently brought Cyrus to the UK for the first time: “The priority was to see his great grandparents in Cornwall and Marlborough. I’ve hauled them all over. But they’re not the worst places in the world to be dragged to.” They are very private, and married in secret in France in 2009. But my female friends and colleagues are infatuated with the character of Carrie Mathison in Homeland, flawed but brilliant and cleverer than all the men around her. Perhaps they identify with her. And they are desperate to know what Danes is really like.
So, I say to Dancy, how are marriage and fatherhood treating you? “Ah, ha ha. It’s great,” he hedges. “They’re both treating me very well.” How does the family unit function, with you working on Hannibal and Claire embroiled again in Homeland? “If Hannibal comes around again, our schedules would overlap by a couple of months, which would mean either I could be with her or she with me, or neither of us would be working, and there’d be a period where we’d have to commute. It’s a complicated balance, like any marriage. We have got to be happy as a unit and I also want both of us to be happy independently and fulfilled in what we do, so there has to be some elbow room.
“You have to have, not rules, but things to aspire to, like not being apart too long, basic stuff. Don’t take a job in Australia without telling me!” He laughs. “Hah, that came out sounding a little personal. Neither of us has done that yet.” Tell me something about the plot of the new series of Homeland, I say. “Oh. Ha ha. Funny. No.”
They vet each other’s projects, though “not religiously. But if I want a second opinion, why should I look further? She is a magnificent actress. It is not always the same as it would be for me but it is completely committed.
“She tries to be very honest, without artifice, in what she does. And it is hard to do that and be interesting and create something big. I know from experience, and watching her now on set, that she is fantastic to work with, generous without trying to be generous.” Would you work together again? “Well, we obviously had a good time the first time around,” he says drily. “Why not revisit that if — I can hear the clichés coming out of my mouth — we could find the right material?” For Dancy the right material was Hannibal, which reimagines Thomas Harris’s cannibal antihero Hannibal Lecter and his eventual nemesis, investigator Will Graham, at the start of their relationship, tracking down murderers together for the FBI. Dancy’s sensitive, neurasthenic Will is worried that his ability to empathise with evil might make him a killer. Mads Mikkelsen’s arch Lecter tries subtly to encourage the idea.
“I have stuck my hand in someone’s chest cavity,” says Dancy, talking of his preparation for the part. “At some point I may have had my thumbs in an eye socket.” He says that “in no sense” was he seeking a leading TV role, having played a supporting part in Laura Linney’s comedy-drama The Big C last year, as well as appearing on Broadway, playing sexy power games with Nina Arianda in Venus In Fur. But he concedes TV is where a large slice of the action is. “In America, there’s an interesting, really ambitious group of young people making independent movies for zilch money,” says Dancy. “But studio-wise, you have to be wearing a cape. No one is making decently budgeted, not-crazy-money movies, so that middle ground has been occupied by television.” Not that he’d mind playing a superhero, he adds.
I sense Dancy isn’t that fussed about future projects at the moment. When I ask what he does when he’s not working, he gets visibly enthused: “I change nappies!” Sometimes, he recently told an American magazine, not fast enough. “Oh yeah, that can happen. That is an absolute part of the deal — don’t imagine you are going to catch every explosion. It’s a new world and a wonderful one. It’s finding ways to also live our life as a family and not be completely overwhelmed by keeping this tiny creature alive, and cooking a normal dinner. Simple stuff.”
So, yes. On screen Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes catch serial killers and terrorists. But off screen, this is what they are really like.
Hannibal begins at 10pm on Sky Living on May 7.