Jeff Neumann/Showtime
June 27, 2017
In The Mix

Reign of Command

It’s a plethora of presidential roles for Elizabeth Marvel.

Ann Farmer

Elizabeth Marvel not only plays a politician on Showtime’s spy thriller, Homeland, she is a political animal in real life.

One week after her debut as the show’s president-elect, Elizabeth Keane, she attended the Women’s March on Washington to protest the political positions of the actual administration. “It was an interesting experience for all of us,” she says, chuckling as she recalls the excitement of other protesters when they saw her demonstrating alongside them.

Today, having met up in a Brooklyn coffee shop, she’s wearing a sweatshirt with the word “Feminist” splayed across the chest. She fishes from her shopping bag her next read, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, on race relations in America, and remarks that soon she’ll be embarking on a gender- bending role as Mark Antony for New York’s Shakespeare in the Park.

As for playing a woman president-elect, she says, “I do believe that if you can see it,  you can believe it.”

The producers of Homeland were likely drawn to Marvel’s self-possession, palpable intelligence and mellifluous yet authoritative voice. Something else worked in her favor: “I was wickedly funny,” she says of her audition.

Her prez-elect — introduced in the show’s sixth season, now streaming on Showtime — possesses a knack for the playful riposte. “It’s a free-fire zone,” she remarks in an early episode, ushering the wily CIA director, Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham), into a transition briefing. He provides lip service. She smiles. But her trenchant gaze suggests she sees right through him.

Carrie Mathison, the former CIA officer whom Claire Danes infuses with  the usual hydraulic intensity, also better watch her back. Although chummy with Keane, “What Carrie thinks the president trusts her with and what the president really trusts her with are very different things,” Marvel notes.

Performing wasn’t initially on Marvel’s radar. After trailing the Grateful Dead  for a summer, she traveled to London, where she caught Vanessa Redgrave in performance and became instantly transfixed. Since graduating from Juilliard in 1992, she’s been in constant demand as a stage, film and TV actress, recently playing presidential candidate Heather Dunbar on Netflix’s House of Cards.

To create the character of Keane, she channeled George W. Bush’s restlessness and Shirley Chisholm’s grit as the first black congresswoman. There is, however, one individual not buying it. “It totally cracks him up,” Marvel says of her 10-year-old son, who enjoys telling her, “You may be president at work, but not here.”


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 6, 2017

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