"She's kind of better at her job than most people. And she doesn't have much tolerance for bureaucratic nonsense," she said of the driven agent, whose quest to stop what she expects to be a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil presumably comes to a head in Sunday's Season 1 finale.
Will there be twists to the very end?
"It's 'Homeland,' " she said, laughing. "Of course."
Even Danes, who said she had "a basic sense of the trajectory" of the show before shooting began, has occasionally been surprised by the series.
Developed by "24" producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa from an Israeli show, it also stars Damian Lewis ("Life") as Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody, a former al Qaeda prisoner whom Carrie, at first convinced he was turned by his captors, spies on illegally and then falls for.
"That weekend with Brody," in which the two antagonists briefly come together romantically and he tells her things he'd so far told no one, "that's pretty shocking," she said.
"That whole scene did my head in. I was like, what? And that's happening? And that's happening?" she said. It was "this wildly layered moment, all these competing feelings and then there's a gun. It was difficult to wrangle all of that, make sense of it."
And television being television - yes, even on Showtime - there wasn't a lot of time to take it all in before bringing it to life.
"You get maybe a couple of days [with the script] before you start something. Maybe a little more than that. But, yes, it's very quick," she said.
Even if it weren't, it might be hard to keep up with Carrie, who's often inappropriate, but seldom predictably so.
