Danes in July, 2013. “I loved discovering the camera,” she said of her first onscreen performance. “It was like a confidant.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic

On a muggy June morning, in a sprawling, unnamed, and unnumbered red brick building near downtown Charlotte, North Carolina—which serves as the headquarters for Showtime’s political-thriller series “Homeland”—tornado warnings were being broadcast on TV. Outside, torrential rain brought traffic to a standstill on the highway. Inside, the cast and crew of “Homeland” were hard at work by 8 A.M., calmly building their own storm for the first episode of the much awaited third season (which will première on September 29th). In the finale of Season 2, the characters had survived “the worst terrorist disaster since 9/11”: a car bombing at C.I.A. headquarters that killed more than two hundred people. The emotional weather buffeting them now was contained within a behemoth enclosed wooden set, where the homes of the show’s two central figures—the bipolar, transgressive C.I.A. operative Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and her suspect, Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a captured Marine sniper turned Al Qaeda sleeper—had been meticulously designed, right down to the CDs on Carrie’s bureau (the Temptations and John Coltrane’s “Newport ’63”).

In the vastness of the studio, the only sure way to know that acting was taking place was to huddle near the twin monitors behind the set. On the screens, Carrie sat on her living-room sofa, her eyes fixed on her television, where her longtime mentor, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), now the head of the C.I.A., was being strategically sandbagged at a congressional hearing on the bombing. Danes had no lines in the scene, but as Berenson’s testimony shifted from showboating to scapegoating—he referred to a “case officer” who was “unstable”—her face was a barometer of Carrie’s interior. Incredulity, sorrow, and humiliation swept over her. The director Lesli Linka Glatter, a noisy dynamo in a T-shirt, vest, and cargo pants, stood so close to a monitor screen that her nose almost touched it, her head rolling with each shift in Danes’s expression, as if urging her into every unsettling transition. When Carrie finally sat back on the sofa, with a gesture of abject disbelief, Glatter’s arms shot high above her head, as if Danes had scored a goal, which, in a way, she had. “Cut! That’s great!” Glatter called, while Danes quietly dried her eyes.

After four takes, four huddles, four different versions of Carrie’s chagrin, Glatter declared herself satisfied. She was excited by the spectrum of feelings that Danes had laid out for her to choose from in the final edit. “We talked about how it could land,” she explained. “One was anger. The other was a kind of betrayal. To me, the one with the tear—my heart hurt. But I don’t know where that’s gonna take us.” Glatter, who is also a co-executive producer of the show, added, “I always come with a clear plan, but then you have an actress like this who is fearless, and you really want to see what she’s bringing to the party.”

Eleven director’s chairs were arranged in a semicircle around the monitor screens. On some of them, emblazoned in white, were the names of staff grandees. The chair meant for the Emmy Award-winning Danes, however, was marked simply “Carrie”—a sign, if more were needed, that the agitated, wayward espionage agent was more real to those present than the thirty-four-year-old actress who had given life to her in twenty-four previous episodes. Danes, still dressed in Carrie’s unassuming mufti of black slacks and white shirt, strode resolutely off the soundstage and settled into her chair. “I didn’t think the scene would be very emotional,” she said. “But, in the actual playing of it, hurt is sort of unavoidable. I don’t really edit as I go along. I leave them to decide.”

Although there is nothing domineering in Danes’s demeanor on the set—she creates no commotion around herself—onscreen she is capable of what David Harewood, who played the stonewalling deputy director of the C.I.A. in the first two seasons, calls a “tsunami of emotion.” In extremis or out of it, her body semaphores feeling. As one “Saturday Night Live” cast member commented during a recent lampoon by Anne Hathaway, “It’s like she makes her mouth turn fully upside down. Her eyes seem to be looking five directions at once. It’s like her whole face is chewing gum.” Danes, speaking of her portrayal of Carrie’s manic moments in Season 3, told me, “I don’t even know how it happens, but I start shaking. My body expresses it. It’s really fun when it starts becoming physicalized. It’s not necessarily a conscious decision. It’s a little mysterious to me.” That kind of porous physicalization comes, in large part, from Danes’s early training in dance, which she began at the age of six. “Dancing is a kind of drawing,” she said. “I’m interpreting what I’m hearing with my body. Acting is like that, too.” She added, “I use my body to generate feelings a lot. If I have a very emotional scene, I’ll often walk in circles before. It gets you out of your head. I’m not afraid to use it.”

Danes is frequently accused of being over the top. “ ‘Homeland’ is actually TV’s best post-9/11 metaphor yet, where Carrie is America and America is a mad, paranoid, overacting blonde,” one TV critic wrote of “Homeland” ’s first season. But, then, people suffering from psychological disorders often are melodramatic. “We are so much bigger in life than we realize,” Danes said. “We’re betraying so much more than we think.” Over the decades, in her performances, she has explored a full spectrum of disturbance, from spousal abuse, autism, and paralysis to Carrie’s bipolar disorder and the paranoia of adolescence. At Harvard last year, to accept the Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ Woman of the Year Award, she joked about her penchant for roles that turn acting into an extreme sport. “I’m just working my way through the DSM-V”—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—she said. “So whatever mental condition you have for me . . .” But, in its silliness, the Hasty Pudding roast—which required Danes to parade down Massachusetts Avenue wedged between two burly drag queens, to read a faux-Shakespearean speech sending up her brief appearance in “The Vagina Monologues” (“To be or not to be an angry lesbian”), and to challenge-dance with a gangly, moonwalking “Virus”—revealed more of her personality than her acting roles do.

“He’s allergic to peanuts, sensitive to wheat, lactose-intolerant, and just plain weirded out by fruit.” Facebook

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In her work, Danes flirts with the darker forces; in her life, she exhibits a wacky charm and a swift, playful mind. She has a particular affection for puns. When she first went to dinner at the home of her friend Jenette Kahn, who was a producer of “The Flock” (2007), in which Danes co-starred with Richard Gere, she arrived with a gift of bespoke lingerie: a camisole with an image of Sigmund Freud printed on it—a Freudian slip. When Patinkin recently sent out an S.O.S. for Danes’s roast-chicken recipe, he received a forensic two-page e-mail on how to cook the bird, which ended, “I hope this arrives in time (thyme?).” In June, on a visit to an antique store in Charlotte, Danes couldn’t resist buying a hamburger timer in the shape of a hand, with a clock embedded in the palm—a hand burger timer. “I’ve never seen in any other actor such a divide between the performance and the person in the room,” the novelist Michael Cunningham, who became friends with Danes in 2004, during the filming of his screenplay “Evening,” said. (In 2009, he officiated at her wedding, in the South of France, to the British actor Hugh Dancy, whom she met on the set of “Evening.”) “Claire’s buoyancy is real. She’s not impersonating a buoyant person.” One of the lessons of her adulthood, Danes has said, was “that there is real honor in being a total goofball.”