Now that season 6 of Showtime’s Homeland has premiered showrunner Alex Gansa and Rupert Friend (Peter Quinn) have both discussed a bit more about what to expect going forward.
Homeland is known for being topical and, as Gansa tells The Hollywood Reporter, this season is no different. The new season’s focus will be on the transition of president-elect Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel) as Carrie (Claire Danes) works in New York protecting the rights of Muslim-Americans.
“My first reaction [to the election results] was, ‘Oh my god, we are now counterfactual to the point of being irrelevant.’ It took a while to dig ourselves out of that feeling. We just came back to the fact that Homeland, after all, is fiction,” said Gansa. “It’s always been a parallel reality. But it comments, in an interesting way, on current events.”
Season six will also see the return of Quinn after his horrific exposure to sarin gas last season. Gansa spoke about his motivation to tackle a story of a veteran returning home from war.
“Here’s this guy we’ve known all along, this pillar of strength, this laconic action hero. And now we get to depict him as a casualty of that war. We’re hoping that has some resonance and reality for our audience.”
Friend, who plays Quinn on the series, echoed Gansa in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“I saw this as an opportunity to explore something that’s under-explored in our popular narratives — which is a modern returning soldier,” said Friend. “Not with fanfare and streamers, like maybe it was 100 or 50 years ago. But modern warfare spits veterans out and forgets about them…This is a popular show and a popular character and it’s important we tell this story as truthfully as we can.”
Gansa also addressed the obvious comparisons to Trump and Clinton that Marvel’s character may draw saying that it’s “almost besides the point”.
“We were going to create our own maverick president-elect with some very strong ideas about where she wants to take the country and how intelligence agencies go about gathering their intelligence — what their actual charter and purpose is. We wanted to put those forces against each other and have Carrie squarely in the middle.”
Homeland airs on Showtime on Sundays at 9 pm.