You can all relax, Brody is back and taking centre stage in Homeland

He’s the son of a viscount and fought in the Gulf War. The Brit behind Homeland, Alexander Cary, tells Tim Walker about the best characters to write and why you’re not a terrorist until you attack
Tim Walker29 November 2013

Homeland may be taking flak on Twitter but Alexander Cary has survived worse. Cary is an executive producer and one of the key writers of the award-winning US drama, yet his first career was as an officer in the Scots Guards. The 50-year-old Londoner served in Northern Ireland in the Eighties and in Iraq during the first Gulf War. On a show packed with UK acting talent, he lends a British accent to the writers’ room, while his military experience gives him a unique perspective on the character of Nicholas Brody, the conflicted antihero at the heart of Homeland.

Over morning coffee at his house in LA’s leafy Larchmont neighbourhood, Cary seems sanguine about the criticisms levelled at the show, now in its third year. Whether the complaints regard pace, plausibility or the presence of Dana Brody, their ferocity is due, in large part, to the high expectations set by its debut series — which cleaned up at the 2012 Emmys.

“When we first aired we got unbelievable reviews, and we didn’t quite believe it was real,” Cary says. “But last season we started to get more criticism, which made us switch off from Twitter. We read a couple of blogs that we consider to be intelligent and thoughtful — and they’re often quite critical, as well. But we don’t subject ourselves to too many tweets. A lot of it is incredibly mean-spirited to actors and characters on the show.”

He won’t be drawn on the plot twists to come, nor on which actors have signed up for the next series, which was commissioned in October. But the final few episodes of this run will feature Brody front and centre again, with the narrative hurtling towards the fulfilment — or failure — of Saul’s big plan for Iran. Homeland has often held a mirror up to real events but the recent, historic international deal on Iran’s nuclear programme was nonetheless a remarkable coincidence.

“In the first season we wrote about a terrorist hit on America and hoped we weren’t right,” Cary recalls. “In the second, we wrote about whether or not Israel would bomb Iran, and we were still hoping we weren’t right. This third season we discussed changing the dynamic between Iran and the West, and we weren’t even hoping either way, because we thought it just wasn’t on the books.”

Cary’s father is the hereditary peer Lucius Cary, the 15th Viscount Falkland (the Falkland Islands were named after the fifth), but the family’s historic seat in the West Country fell out of their hands long ago, and Alexander says his own title, Master of Falkland, is little more than a source of ridicule for his fellow Homeland writers. Born in Hammersmith, he grew up in the shadow of the Chelsea football ground, where his next-door neighbours were the respected screen actors André Morell and Joan Greenwood. By the age of 12, he already wanted to be a film director. “I didn’t really know what a director was,” he says, “just that it was the guy in charge.”

At Westminster, the London public school, Cary showed little interest in formal education. He was expelled before his A-levels and sent instead to Loretto, a boarding school outside Edinburgh, where it was hoped he’d be instilled with some discipline. He left with unremarkable grades and, following a stint as a runner in a New York theatre, joined the Army on a whim. “I had a bet with a friend who didn’t think I could do it, but I loved it. Having been a total pain in the neck about authority at school, I took a perverse enjoyment in being given instructions and carrying them out.”

After graduating from Sandhurst in 1985, he was posted to Northern Ireland, where he found himself fascinated by the politics and people of the region at the height of the Troubles. “Around every corner there was something dangerous,” he says, “but also something that I found understandable and relatable. In many ways, that informs me in writing Homeland.”

At 27, he was attached to a company of US marines during Desert Storm. On the tarmac at RAF Brize Norton, as he prepared to board a transport plane to Kuwait, he was promoted from captain to acting major, “because they felt the rank would give me a little more weight with the Americans”. Cary was involved in combat, and witnessed the devastation on the road to Basra known as “The Highway of Death”, where US forces decimated the retreating Iraqi army.

Not long after the war, he left the military and then the UK, bound for Hollywood. Having decided writing was the fastest route to a film career, he spent the next decade or so in development hell, trying to flog screenplays that were never produced. Finally, a friend suggested he consider writing for the small screen instead. “I never even watched television,” he says. “I had stars in my eyes about the movies. But I went out and bought The Sopranos on DVD and started watching it, and thought ‘Oh my God, this is great’. After that I watched Six Feet Under, NYPD Blue and the rest, and very quickly decided that I must do television.”

He fired off five TV scripts in three months, and by 2009 he had a spot in the writers’ room for the first series of Lie to Me, a crime thriller starring fellow Brit Tim Roth as a brilliant criminal psychologist. Early on, he says, “I pitched a crazy idea for an episode and Tim’s eyes lit up, because it was just the type of story he wanted to make. I wrote it, he loved it and we developed a fast friendship.” In short order, Cary was promoted to show-runner.

The show’s cast included actress Jennifer Marsala, now Cary’s fiancée. The couple are getting married in Somerset on New Year’s Eve. Cary also has two sons from previous relationships: Lucius, 18, and Sebastian, who is nine.

As Lie to Me came to the end of its three-series run in 2011, the pilot script for Homeland happened to pass across his desk. “I thought, ‘I should have written this.’ It was right in my wheelhouse. I had never met [Homeland creators] Howard Gordon or Alex Gansa, but I had a very specific idea of Brody, and whether he was a terrorist. It’s simple: most married men are always looking at other women, but that doesn’t mean they’re adulterers until they actually commit adultery. Brody was brainwashed, but until he commits a terrorist act, he’s not a terrorist.”

Cary was forceful in his pursuit of the gig and, fortunately, Gordon and Gansa recognised his affinity with the material. His seventh episode as lead writer, Good Night, will be broadcast on US television this weekend, and in the UK next week. “I really like writing for Brody,” he says. “But then, I like writing them all. I’ve had a lot of fun writing David Estes [the late deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, played by David Harewood] and Peter Quinn. Everybody likes writing Saul. I quite like writing Carrie’s dad, actually. I’m aware that people are irritated by the character, but I even like writing Dana.”

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