Angela Chase at Thirty-Four

There’s a certain kind of person who will always see Angela Chase when they look at Claire Danes—the girl with the dyed hair and the best interior monologue in television history, moving through the corridors of Liberty High in 1994 with that mixture of agony and appetite that only really works at fifteen, when everything actually is that urgent. My So-Called Life lasted one season and ended without resolution, which is probably why it still feels unfinished in memory.

The shoot for Interview Magazine finds her at thirty-four, doing something she doesn’t do often enough in public: just existing without performing distress. Homeland had rebuilt her into a different kind of icon—Carrie Mathison, brilliant and broken and making catastrophically bad personal decisions at the worst possible moments—and had reminded everyone who’d forgotten that Danes was always capable of this. Dustin Hoffman had apparently been paying attention the whole time, lobbying for her when the industry was being careless with her.

The piece covers her career, her life, where she thinks she’s headed. What stays with me isn’t any particular quote but the impression she gives of someone who survived her own teenage mythology and came out the other side as an actual person. That’s harder than it sounds.