Featured Image Credit: Good Hang with Amy Poehler
Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity
Callum Jones
The TV series that propelled Claire Danes into stardom ‘shouldn’t have been made’, according to the actor herself.
To those who grew up in the mid 90s to early 2000s, Dane will be more recognisable as Juliet opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo in 1996's Romeo + Juliet, or as fallen star Yvaine in 2007's Stardust. Or perhaps you are more familiar with her TV roles, like Carrie Mathison in Homeland.
However, the TV series that really got the star's career running was released in 1994, starring Danes as 15-year-old Angela Chase as she goes through the trials and tribulations of adolescence, with the likes of Jared Leto, Jordan Catalano, Bess Armstrong, Wilson Cruz, Devon Odessa and Tom Irwin also heading up the cast.
And it wasn't without critical acclaim, with the 46-year-old winning a Best Actress Golden Globe in 1995. But it was sadly cancelled after one season, and Danes told Amy Poehler on her podcast, Good Hang with Amy Poehler, that its subject matter is what makes it so 'radical', so much so that it defied expectations.
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My So-Called Life was frequently praised for its realistic depiction of adolescence, and over on Rotten Tomatoes, it stands at 94 per cent.
Poehler and Danes even recreated an iconic scene from the show, in which Chase and Jordan Catalano (Leto) walk down the school corridor holding hands, in anticipation of her interview on TikTok.
Talking about My So-Called Life's legacy, the Beast in Me star said: "It’s still radical! It remains ahead of this time. It shouldn’t have been made. It almost wasn’t made many times, and it just wills itself into experience. It’s not very often that we spend that much time, intimate time, with a teenage girl."
She described reading the pilot, which was written by Wicked playwright, Winnie Holzman, before her audition, adding: "I remember reading the pilot before the audition and just having a very profound experience. It was really powerful to have some woman, some writer person, so perfectly articulate my internal life."
Danes revealed how 'fortunate' she felt that My So-Called Life was her Hollywood breakthrough, as she continued: "There’s some zingers, there are some really well-crafted lines. I feel wildly fortunate that that was my entry point.
"We’re seeing the world from inside of her and really through her vantage point. And she’s so earnestly wrestling with big stuff. It’s just so well-balanced and it’s so of her."
Danes also spoke in April last year about how proud she was to be involved in My So-Called Life and working with Holzman, as she said during her speech at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Gala: "Oh my God, how lucky was I? I was 13 when I shot that pilot.
"When I met this genius woman, this Cyrano, who wrote one perfect diary entry after another for me, who rescued me from the punishing halls of actual high school and transported me to the halls of self-reflection and art, of poetry and music.
"Who allowed me to be exactly as I felt I was not, who I was supposed to be, who I was supposed to see on TV."