Homeland Season 5 network producer Showtime has announced the espionage thriller season premiere on October 5. Claire Danes and Season 4 romantic interest Rupert Friend have also returned to the show to lead the cast in filming the entire season in Berlin, Germany.
Showtime announced its premiere date on its social media with a poster showing Danes who plays the lead character Carrie Mathison and a new tagline, "The only way out is back in."
Entertainment Weekly scored the teaser poster for not being showing off the show's new setting in Berlin. Homeland is touted as the first television series to film an entire season in Germany.
Showrunner and co-creator Alex Gansa told Hollywood Reporter, "This story is current. With all of the stuff that's going on just south of Berlin in the Middle East and to the east in Russia and Ukraine, it's fascinating. Carrie is out of the intelligence business when the season starts and she finds herself in Berlin. It's a center for dissidence. That's where hacktivists go because German privacy laws are so strict. It's hard to have surveillance on people there."
Homeland Season 5 has been shooting since June at the historic Babelsberg Studio, home base of Nazi propaganda czar Joseph Goebbels during World War II. Gansa says the location move was very labor intensive with the set up of another crew, casting new characters, establishing new relationships, and the creation of an entirely different story.
A promotional video released just before the premiere date announcement shows the former Islamabad station intelligence chief now as a more vulnerable-looking Carrie. She is seen on the video defending her current situation while her former CIA boss Saul Berenson, played by Mandy Patinkin, tries to convince her to return to work for the United States.
The video then ups the tempo and cuts to kidnappings and explosions while showing snippets of Friend, Carrie's romantic interest in the previous season, also in Berlin. Carrie crossing paths with Friend who plays the role of Peter Quinn, the assassin-with-a-heart, will expectedly add to the tumult in Carrie's new-found life.
In an interview with Deadline, Friend spoke of his character's aborted romance with Carrie as a do-over. "If I were to hazard a guess, they wanted to do a reboot of everything and rejig the whole concept of the show away from a kind of will they/won't they Carrie/Brody thing and back into an espionage thriller, and focus on spy craft, which they now seem to be doing pretty much each season really. Certainly this one we're filming now is very much a do-over, again."
The Homeland Season 5 official description puts the storyline taking off 2 years after the season 4 ending with Carrie out of the CIA and now a security chief for a German philanthropist.
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