So much of what was pleasing about the show in Season 1 is that it was a high wire act — “Homeland” struck this balance between being a character story and a political espionage thriller. Is the challenge the same this year or is it kind of a different animal, because we know the characters already?
Well, if you looked at the structure of last season, it was a very binary thing. The first half of the season, you were asking the question, “Was he or wasn’t he turned in captivity?” The second half of the season, we were asking the question, “Well, is he going to go through with it?” So it was very pure in that way, and we were able to ask a lot of questions without answering a lot of things.
The second season is a different animal because now it’s incumbent upon us to actually come down squarely on certain issues: Carrie’s reliability, Brody’s commitment to his terrorism. So it’s going to be different. I think we’re still hopefully going to be able to walk the high wire of character development and thriller, but it’s in a different context.
Speaking of Carrie and Brody, is it even harder to get them in the same room, given what happened between them, or is it easier because they now have this history?
Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but their fundamental professional relationship is going to change in Season 2. It’s not going to be the same as it was in Season 1. So getting them together is not [as much of] a problem in Season 2 as it was in Season 1.
There is going to be hopefully a very organic way in which their lives are going to intersect, although that won’t happen right away in this season. But you’ll see how their lives again are on a collision course. Just the way that they collide in Season 2 is different than they way they collided in Season 1.
Are the dynamics of how Brody deals with the intelligence community changed?
Well you have to understand the Brody has been completely exonerated in the eyes of the intelligence community and actually even Carrie. I mean Carrie had this sort of epiphany before the ECT about [Abu Nazir’s dead son] Issa, but before that, I think she is fairly sanguine about the fact that she was wrong, which is what sent her into the ECT, into the mental institution. She said, “Look, I was wrong. I made a mistake. I intruded on this person’s life. I accused him of things that were not true.”
Read the full interview at the HuffPost.