(New York Daily News) Newlywed Hugh Dancy has been busy in the sack – but not in the way you may think.

A week and a half into rehearsals for the downtown drama “The Pride,” the actor has been working overtime to memorize his lines (the play opens Jan. 27).

“I’ve been learning lines anywhere I can, even in bed,” he says of the script, about a steamy love triangle.

And, yes, he says, wife Claire Danes has been happy to give an assist in the rehearsal department.

Meanwhile, Brit castmate and “Bright Star” hunk Ben Whishaw is just trying to adjust to life in the Village.

“I still haven’t figured out my way around, or north from south,” he says of his digs. “I haven’t gone too far from home.”

(Playbill) The 2007 Tony-winning revival of Journey’s End was just the beginning of Hugh Dancy’s New York stage career. He’s set to surface next Off-Broadway — in February 2010 at the Lucille Lortel — in a new prize-winning London import, The Pride, which won its first-time author, Alexi Kaye Campbell, the Critic’s Circle Prize for Most Promising Playwright as well as the John Whiting Award for Best Play.

Dancy didn’t see The Pride during its premiere Royal Court engagement — and not because he knew he’d be playing it stateside. “I’d like to claim such high motives,” he quipped impishly, “but to be fair to myself, I wasn’t actually in London.”

He didn’t catch up with Campbell until Play Two, Apologia, when it opened at the Bush Theatre in London. “We went out afterwards and talked more about that play because it was right there in my mind,” recalled Dancy. “It’s wonderful. It’s about the children of a woman returning to their family home just after she has written an autobiography in which she hasn’t mentioned any of them.”

Campbell, like Steppenwolf’s versatile Tracy Letts, got to playwriting from acting and has worked extensively as a performer in theatre, film and television.

— Harry Haun

(New York Times) Even at this point in awards season, things can begin to seem a fait accompli, with the same names — Mo’Nique and Christoph and George and Kathryn — getting, and giving, the full-court press. But the Bagger is mindful that there are always wrenches in the final nominee lists (remember Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor” and Melissa Leo in “Frozen River”?). Also, it’s a slow week, and there’s time to luxuriate in interviews that don’t involve dodging trays of canapés and fans with outstretched camera phones.

So the Bagger had afternoon tea recently with Hugh Dancy, the fine-featured British actor best known for parts as the romantic lead in movies like “Ella Enchanted” and “The Jane Austen Book Club” (and for being married to Claire Danes). His performance as a young engineer with Asperger’s syndrome in “Adam,” a tiny film made and released on a shoestring, drew critical praise. (As Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The Times: “Playing a character who is mentally disabled can be a fast track to Oscar or to oblivion, and rare is the actor who can resist the statuette-winning, Hanks-Hoffman strategy of mannered tics and mechanical talk. And when you consider that not even Sean Penn could pull it off without making our eyeballs cringe, the performance of Hugh Dancy in the charming romantic comedy ‘Adam’ is all the more impressive.”)

(more…)

While Claire Danes concedes that she’s lost many friends to Brooklyn over the last decade, she’s only vaguely familiar with the borough. “I do love walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, I have to say,” she told us at the opening night of County of Kings, Lemon Andersen’s powerful one-man show about growing up rough near Greenwood Cemetery. After thinking about it for a moment, Danes realized that she never gets much farther into Brooklyn than Dumbo. “That’s terrible. I sound terrible,” she said. Husband Hugh Dancy chimed in: “Basically, you’re speaking to the most politely pro-Manhattanite person that you’ve ever met, right here,” he said.

Dancy says that as a newly minted New Yorker, he’s still trying to get his bearings within the three-block radius of his home, never mind the outer boroughs. If the couple were to ever consider moving to Brooklyn, we wondered, which area would suit them? Danes remained silent, and Dancy ventured, “By the, uh, what’s the park?” Prospect Park, we guessed? “Prospect Park, yeah. That’s literally how much I know Brooklyn; I know there’s a big patch of grass somewhere there,” the Brit said with a laugh. “Yeah,” added Danes. “The prospect of our moving there is obviously not so good.”

They didn’t have any fun stories about drunken evenings on Bedford Avenue, but attending a Lubavitch wedding was one of Danes’s most memorable Brooklyn evenings. “It was outside of a Lubavitch apartment, on the sidewalk, and it was in February, and it was really cold and very, um, stripped down, the ceremony,” she recalled. “And then we went to some rec hall afterwards and celebrated, but the women and the men celebrated in separate rooms, and the women were not allowed to drink, and it was quite sad.” Danes says she came to be at the wedding through a friend of a friend. “Shiksa did not belong, but shiksa was there,” she said, laughing.

Source: New York Magazine

View photos from this event in our gallery. These are also the first photos of Hugh and Claire as a married couple.

• 08 x October 12th: The Public Theater Presents The Opening Of “County Of Kings”