How The Beast in Me Built Its Skin-Crawling Score, Straight From the Composers

The Beast In Me Composer Interview - Sean Callery And Sara Barone

Picture Credits: Getty Images and Netflix

The Beast in Me was one of the great dramas of 2025. It’s a psychological cat-and-mouse game between author Aggie Wilkes (Claire Danes) and the rich, potentially murderous Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys). It’s two towering actors and characters delivering visceral and thematic goods, scene after scene, in the Gabe Rotter-created series.

Scoring the two-header: Sean Callery, Tim Callobre, and Sara Barone. The trio unnerve audiences with elegance – a less is more approach to the drama and suspense. Musically, they pay respect to the characters and audiences.

Recently, Callery and Barone spoke with What’s On Netflix about scoring the hit drama and how they wanted the score to get underneath the skin of Aggie Wilkes and Nile Jarvis.

Where’d you two begin in discussing themes for Aggie?

Sara: Even before we saw Claire Danes’s wonderful performance, it was still very clear in the script the nature of that character. We started writing themes and ideas at that stage, even before we saw a picture, which was a nice luxury.

Sean: I like this thing where you think of the character — what are the words that come up? And in the very earliest discussions, the word brittle came up. Brittle and stuck. What would be the sound of brittle and stuck?

And our third compatriot, [composer] Tim Callobre — he was an equal musketeer in this process as well. It was just one of those shows that needed three different artistries to weave together. It became its own unique sound, in my view.

So how’d you achieve brittle and stuck for Aggie?

Sean: We did a lot of organic acoustic instruments — solo instruments. We did a lot with solo cello. Tim is a great string player and solo violinist. As well as percussion, very percussive sounds made from strings and woodwinds too, to create that brittle, anxious, and up-close sound. It was all very intimate.

We had to be careful not to make it too unpleasant because she’s already kind of unlikable — she’s cranky and she’s a hermit. Even villains, you have to fall in love with even an awful person. You have to be interested, otherwise you won’t watch the show. But underneath, there was a wounded person that we always loved when we had the opportunity to let her heart come out a little bit. So you had her, and then you had the Nile sound, which I thought was actually, in my opinion, much harder to figure out. And then there’s the dynamic of them together.

Why was Nile so tricky?

Sara: We didn’t want him to feel overtly bad and evil. We didn’t want a heavy-handed sound for him. I found it fun to find a sound for the dynamic between the two characters. Because there’s a little bit of fun between them, a little bit of intrigue, and curiosity. They connect on certain levels, even though they’re very different. A lot of darkness in the show and a lot of highly stressful music, but there was also intrigue, which was a challenge to balance but very cool.

Sean: We had to experiment a lot with that.

What were some of those experiments, where did they take you?

Sean: I don’t know how many times we worked on — where when we first met Nile, his view from the stairs — what is the sound of him as we see him? Do we have music there at all? To Sara’s point, I was surprised that we could have a little bit of that quirkiness, playfulness for him. I don’t know if we were picking that up out of a conscious choice, because if you hit pause on any of his scenes, he almost looks a little clownish.

We’ve never had the privilege of scoring to Matthew Rhys. I have had the privilege of scoring Ms. Danes on Homeland. I scored her for eight years, and then this show. She was just magnificent. If anything, I think one of our challenges was: please don’t let the music get in the way of this.

And so with Nile, we experimented with different colors going up the stairs. In the end, it turned out to be a cue that we collaborated on that had a beautiful sense of unease, but not danger. And that was a threaded needle. In the opening scene, we must’ve done nine or ten versions between you, me, and Tim. We were all working on various versions in terms of how it all came out in the end.

Sara, how’d you want to stay away from overtly villainous cues for Nile?

Sara: We were avoiding certain harmonies that were overly minor, kind of keeping – harmonically – things a bit open. But the sonic quality of the sound we used, the processed organic instruments, was a little off-kilter. We would process them in ways that felt a little unusual but not overtly dark.

Sean: We met Matthew Rhys on the red carpet. We said, “Thanks for making our job easy. You’re very — you’re a complex character to score.” And he goes, “Oh, let me guess. A lot of minor chords.” Oh, that was so funny.

What developed, not immediately in my view, was this idea that the beast in me, the character is — the longer sort of transcendent message has something to do with that. There’s a bit of aggression in all of us that can be turned in a very, very violent and destructive way.

Aggression in and of itself isn’t necessarily a human problem, but when it’s applied toward the harming of others, it could be a problem. And so, we developed this growing sound that over the course of the episode emerged. I kind of love the idea of this gurgling, emerging violence that when it finally did reveal itself, we had earned the moment a bit. It didn’t come out of nowhere.

Sara: It’s this brewing sound that feels like it’s being suppressed. Then let it unleash.

The Beast in Me really works as a psychological drama. You just mentioned a great example of this, but how’d you want the music to speak to the audience’s subconscious?

Sean: I love making scoring choices that are subtextual and that are having effects on people that they don’t even know they’re affected by. That can be in the form of motifs and melody and things that are just sneaking in.

I think it’s fair to say the score was very economical. It was not a very thick seniority of a score. Sometimes it was when finally he comes out and blasts away with violence. But before then, it was like a volcano — the earth was rising and falling — and then finally there’s an eruption.

Sara: Let’s make sure every instrument has a real purpose and is really heard. As you said, the cues got more complex when needed and for bigger moments, but we were trying very purposeful with every sound.

Did you want to keep Aggie and Nile, musically, separate? Did you want their themes to ever overlap, to connect in any way?

Sara: We kept them pretty distinct in terms of the instruments used. We were saying that Aggie used a lot of those brittle, anxious instruments always on the verge of having a panic attack. And that was sort of the sense we were trying to create with her.

Whereas with Nile, there was more of this kind of brewing beast. At any moment they could both lose it is kind of something I was thinking about.

Sean: I personally thought the two hardest scenes for me in the show — one of the two more difficult moments — happened early on and we were all involved with them. One was the kitchen scene after eating the chicken, and she comes in to make the pitch about the book. They’re kind of jousting a little bit, and they’re getting to know each other.

Musically, I don’t want the audience to be somehow picking up a tell on how to feel in this scene from the music. That was one of those moments where we wanted the music to contain the moment, provide a good space for them to go back and forth. I just remember that kitchen scene being complicated. And the other one was afterwards when they’re getting drunk and come over for a nightcap in episode five — just them sort of quasi-flirting, but also there being a lot of suspicion and so forth.

Those are some of the hardest things to work on rather than a violent killing scene, which requires a lot of skill and texture and focus and obviously power. But the delicacy of those moments between the characters was the biggest hat-trick challenge that we had as composers. It’s probably why we needed three people. I’ve never had this kind of interaction on a show before where it was so interactive. It was really a lot of fun, a lot of great work, a lot of hard work.

Let’s talk about when Nile finally reveals himself and drops his mask in the finale to Nina Jarvis (Brittany Snow). How’d you want to contrast or turn up the madness Matthew Rhys brings to that scene?

Sean: Sara and I and Tim all had different moments where we had to handle that football. We deduced — and this has something to do with the writing, and certainly Mr. Rotter’s delivery — it was the less is more kind of thing. When we put more horror or weirdness on top of it, it was a hat on top of a hat.

There was this one section that I kind of went for some sort of catharsis after he’s screaming. Then we went back to some really dark, grungy cues. Sara had worked on something really beautiful that they kind of tracked in and we had added to.

Sara, please add to this — but except for the violence scenes, they’re very minimal.

Sara: We sort of stuck to that mentality of being economical with every instrument. But yes, the instruments were more aggressive than we were earlier.

Sean, as you said, there’s something kind of clownish about Nile’s smile. Did you both know the show would end with The Kinks’ “Death of a Clown?”

Sean: No, we didn’t. My only lament is that, if I’m not mistaken, on Netflix you can skip ahead after 13 seconds [in the credits]. And if you’re going to spend that money for those kinds of songs, make us watch it.