What if your next-door neighbor was once the prime suspect in his wife’s mysterious disappearance? Would you keep your distance, or take it upon yourself to find out the truth? In Netflix’s new thriller series, The Beast in Me, Claire Danes opts for the latter.

Created by Gabe Rotter, The Beast in Me revolves around recluse author, Aggie Wiggs (Danes), who struggles to pen her next novel following the tragic death of her young son. She’s paralyzed by her grief and is unable to write, that is, until she finds an unlikely subject in real estate scion Nile Jarvis (Rhys), who moves in next door. Jarvis, however, isn’t without his notoriety: He was the main suspect in the killing of his wife. Wiggs knows this — and wants answers. But compulsion and curiosity soon evolve into a perilous, possibly deadly game of cat and mouse.

“Whether it’s Monica Lewinsky or Amanda Knox or Nile Jarvis or whatever, sometimes we are quick to make assumptions,” Howard Gordon, The Beast in Me showrunner and executive producer, told Tudum. “But when we are forced to look at it from another angle, do we have the humility and the compassion to listen and to revise the narrative?”

When did The Beast in Me premiere on Netflix?

The Beast in Me debuted on Netflix on Thursday, Nov. 13 at 3 a.m. ET. All 8 episodes dropped at once.

Who’s in The Beast in Me cast?

While Danes and Rhys lead the series, The Beast in Me cast includes the following stars as well:

• Brittany Snow

• Natalie Morales

• David Lyons

• Tim Guinee

• Hettienne Park

• Jonathan Banks

• Deirdre O’Connell

• Aleyse Shannon

• Will Brill

• Kate Burton

• Bill Irwin

• Amir Arison

• Julie Ann Emery

What drew Claire Danes to the project?

Danes was drawn to The Beast in Me primarily because of Wiggs. The obsessive, grief-stricken novelist was unlike any character she’d played before.

"I loved this character who was just kind of a wild amalgam of qualities that I hadn't quite played before," she told People. "She's really quite introverted and controlled and contained, but also has this animalistic energy, and that was in an enjoyable contrast."

Jarvis brings out that “animalistic energy” in Wiggs. Their relationship, which Danes previously referred to as “a little Hitchcockian,” is filled with contradictions — they’re polar opposites that shouldn’t necessarily work together, yet they do. They find common ground through their similar traumas.

“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,” Danes told the Los Angeles Times of Jarvis’s effect on Wiggs. “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.”

What has Matthew Rhys said about the show?

For Rhys, bringing Jarvis to life was an absolute pleasure. The Americans star isn’t usually considered for grittier roles like this, which is why he was “100% in” after reading the script.

“I don’t get to play these parts, and I’m desperate to do it just because they’re so enjoyable,” he told Tudum. “I got approached by the Beast team, and they sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Look, if you’d be willing for me to play, I would love to,’ because the material was so rich and the part itself was so alluring — but also slightly frightening in a challenging sense, because I think it’s very easy to walk those parts into possible cliché, which I was very wary and scared of.”

Rhys wanted to bring a warmth to Jarvis — to ground him, in a sense. As he told Tudum, “I wanted there to be a humanity to him, I think, because they’ve [Javis and Wiggs] both been through such enormous moments in their lives — there’s a damage to him that’s made him vulnerable.”

Is The Beast in Me based on a true story?

The Beast in Me is not based on a true story. While it explores themes and archetypes common to true crime stories, the miniseries itself is purely fiction.

The miniseries, at its core, tells a story of loss and grief — and the messiness of the human experience.

“It’s sort of the problem of our time is that people can’t hold two seemingly incompatible truths in their brains at the same time,” Gordon told TheWrap. “And it does challenge you narratively, but I think that’s where the reality is, because as we know, good and evil and human behavior doesn’t exist in some binary moral, zeros and ones. The fun stuff is in the messy middle.”