Danes was initially drawn to the series because of the portrait of the marriage at the heart of it, and Solomon’s particular gift for weaving the tragic into the comic. “It gets really very dark pretty quickly,” she says, “but it’s absurd too.”
She not only watched two brain surgeries in preparation but also shadowed a surgeon on his rounds, being with patients before they went into surgery and while they were recovering with their families. “I felt horrible that there I was in this room with these people who couldn’t be more vulnerable, and there I was, trying to be discreet in the corner,” she says.
But the experience gave her insight into what kind of person her character Lou Shadwick would be: intense, hypervigilant, and high achieving. “There’s a lot of marathon runners in there, and highly, highly focused people,” she says. “And they carry a lot of responsibility, and I think they compartmentalize very effectively.”
