Timothée Chalamet Plays an Entitled Piece of Crap in This Showtime Thriller

The Big Picture

• Timothée Chalamet proves his acting chops with a morally complex role in
  Homeland.
• Chalamet showcases versatility in playing a charismatic yet callous character on the show.
• Season 2’s car crash storyline highlights the theme of ends justifying means in
  Homeland.

One of the reasons Timothée Chalamet is a legitimately good actor, not just a Gen Z heartthrob, is that he’s willing to play characters that aren’t especially likable or even moral, one of several qualities that made him the ideal choice to play Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides in the Dune franchise. Chalamet does not need the audience to love him in every role and that’s led him to play an assortment of distinctive characters that highlight his onscreen versatility. Chalamet showed this flexibility early in his career, with his role as a spoiled rich kid who avoids taking responsibility for his actions in the spy series Homeland.

What Was ‘Homeland’ About?

Airing for eight seasons on Showtime over nine years, Homeland begins with the rescue of Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a U.S. Marine who was held captive by al-Qaeda for eight years after being presumed dead. CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), who had previously received intelligence stating that an American prisoner of war had been turned to a terrorist cause, becomes suspicious that Brody is the traitor and begins illegally surveilling him, becoming obsessed with, and eventually starting a dysfunctional affair with him in the process.

Despite the initial excitement of his homecoming, Brody soon begins experiencing a variety of problems with his family, partially because he is truly planning to carry out a terrorist attack meant to kill corrupt vice president William Walden (Jamey Sheridan) and partially because of the natural, long-lasting effects of each family member’s respective eight-year ordeals. Many of these familial problems are shown from the perspective of Brody’s daughter, Dana (Morgan Saylor), who is often more understanding of his difficulties readjusting to civilian life than his wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin), but can also be his harshest critic when he genuinely steps out of line.

Who Does Timothée Chalamet Play in Homeland?

Chalamet appeared in the series’ second season as Finn Walden, the vice president’s son. By Season 2, Brody’s public reputation as an American war hero resulted in him being elected to the Senate, a position al-Qaeda took advantage of by having him spy on the government, especially the vice president, with whom he develops a fake friendship. Because of her father’s new position, Dana has to begin attending an elitist private school, where she initially clashes with many of her new classmates, including Finn. However, he does help divert attention from her when she accidentally says her father is a Muslim (which is secretly true) in front of a mostly white, bigoted crowd. After this scene, Chalamet got to begin showing his charisma as Finn continued to win Dana over, with her eventually leaving her first boyfriend, a stoner named Xander (Taylor Kowalski), for him.

While Dana believed she was wrong about Finn and that he was a good person at this point, there are hints of a genuinely callous and cruel side to him that she overlooks. When the pair are working on history homework, Finn acts outraged after reading about Thomas Jefferson’s abuse of Sally Hemings, saying that it makes the president’s words on topics like freedom and equality hypocritical. However, he himself then acts hypocritically, later flirting with Dana by referring to her as “Sally” over texts (the fact that she replies by calling him “T.J.” shows how her burgeoning feelings are partially overriding her own, usually stronger, morals). This shows that his outrage was performative and that he finds a perverse humor in the disturbing historical events he was reading about, which he uses to woo Dana.

The differences in the characters’ morality soon become much more apparent, however. When she is upset by the latest Brody family dispute, Dana goes joyriding with Finn, who drives recklessly while attempting to ditch his Secret Service detail. After he manages to do so, however, he runs over a pedestrian. Dana wants to get out of the car and help the woman, but Finn is afraid of getting in trouble and convinces her to let him keep driving, saying that other bystanders will take care of it and the woman will be fine.

Although she initially goes along with keeping quiet, Dana’s guilt continues to eat at her and, after finding the woman in the hospital and learning that she is dying, and her family is in dire financial shape, she becomes determined to confess to her and Finn’s parents, which he only agrees to with great reluctance. Although upset she didn’t confess earlier, Jessica supports Dana’s desire to report the crash to the authorities, but Finn’s mother, Cynthia (Talia Balsam), begins making plans to cover up Finn’s involvement for the sake of William, who is planning to run for president, which does not surprise Finn. He hints to Dana that the elitist world she is now part of won’t allow her to take responsibility for the sake of her father’s political career and says that the fact that she doesn’t understand or approve of that kind of twisted morality is why he initially liked her so much.

Finn’s prediction proves accurate, though not exactly in the way he expected. By this point in the series, Carrie and the CIA had discovered her suspicions about Brody were accurate and covertly arrested and turned him into a triple agent working against his former terrorist ally Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), allowing him to remain in his senate position for a time to avoid arousing suspicion. When Brody takes Dana to a police station to officially confess about the crash, Carrie confronts him and forces him not to do so for fear of damaging his cover and relationship with the vice president. Brody’s family, especially Dana, who don’t yet know the full truth about him, are disgusted by his apparent lack of moral conviction.

Season 2’s Car Crash Storyline Is Important for Homeland’s Thematic Argument

Dana’s Season 2 arc, especially the car crash storyline, were subject to critical scrutiny, with detractors arguing that most of the material felt like diversions from more important storylines and that it was solely meant to ensure that Saylor, whose work in Season 1 received widespread praise, continued to have extensive screen time. However, if one studies it closely, the relevance of the storyline to the series’ larger themes becomes clearer. Like many other war stories, Homeland devotes significant attention to the idea of ends justifying means, and this theme becomes especially prominent in Season 2.

By the end of the season, Nazir is killed by law enforcement, but the viewers are left to decide for themselves whether his defeat was worth the extreme measures Carrie, Brody, and the agency used to defeat him. This is especially true of Brody himself. In addition to the question of whether him working against Nazir absolves him of his own crimes, the season also highlights Brody’s tendency to justify doing horrible things for good, or at least, understandable, reasons. He initially sided with Nazir after Walden authorized a drone strike that resulted in the deaths of civilian children, which Walden subsequently lied about. But, as horrible as that is, Brody either doesn’t seem to realize, or worse, doesn’t care, that Nazir’s tactics are equally destructive and immoral. His actions when aligned with the CIA in Season 2 are similarly questionable. Yes, Brody is now working to protect the public from Nazir but, by not letting Dana confess, he’s ignoring the importance of the lives of less fortunate civilians in favor of “the greater good”, similar to how Walden did when he ordered the drone strike and covered up its real effects.

Timothée Chalamet’s Role Comes to a Shocking End in the Season Finale

After being absent from much of the later episodes in the season, Finn reappears in the finale, in which he and Brody briefly acknowledge each other at a memorial for Walden (who Brody had secretly helped Nazir kill in exchange for the latter releasing a captive Carrie) at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. After Carrie and Brody sneak out of the ceremony for a romantic rendezvous, Langley is hit with a terrible bombing Nazir had arranged before his death, that kills Finn and dozens of others. The character is rarely referenced again going forward. Brody is framed for the bombing, with Dana’s abbreviated Season 3 storyline revolving around her devastated reaction to that news, rather than her ex’s death. Although the role was small in the overall history of Homeland, it was still important for the points made by the car crash storyline and Chalamet showed that he was more than capable of playing a character with enough humanity to be believable while still being ultimately detestable.

Homeland is available to stream on Hulu

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