It’s almost 1 a.m. in Florence, Italy, where Keri Russell is nearing the end of filming for season four of The Diplomat, Netflix’s savvy political drama created by TV vet Debora Cahn. It’s been a hectic few days of night shoots across the Atlantic, but as she hops on our call, an ebullient Russell is eager to gab. “I just got home, I’ve wolfed down two bites of pasta and I’m sipping a glass of wine,” she says. “I’m ready for you.”
The Diplomat asks a lot of Russell, from intricate emotional shifts to the dense jargon of top-secret international relations, but just as she does on camera, she carries it all with a disarming ease after a long day’s work. Russell has settled into the role of Kate Wyler, a diplomat who’s been thrust to the center of a high-stakes global crisis while navigating her turbulent marriage to fellow insider Hal (Rufus Sewell) and her even more complex relationship to her own ambitions.
“There is something that you can’t manufacture when you have years of experience with people,” Russell says. “It’s like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. That’s the benefit of good series work.” Russell is familiar with this trajectory, which is the goal whenever embarking on a new continuing TV show. Her breakout on college drama Felicity won her a Golden Globe and lasted four seasons; before jumping into The Diplomat, she’d finished a critically lauded six-season run on FX’s Emmy-winning spy drama The Americans, where she also met her romantic partner, co-star Matthew Rhys.
Like The Americans, The Diplomat stages hefty geopolitical drama within the context of a fraught marriage. “That’s the most monumental relationship in your life, where you grow, you fail, you fuck up — for all of those exciting moments in life, those are the highs and lows,” Russell says. “I love a longform show that can explore that because you get to grow with that couple.” In The Diplomat, Kate weathers the wily Hal’s repeated betrayals while grappling with his improbable rise — at the beginning of season three, he leapfrogs her to assume the job of vice president, to Allison Janney’s hard-wired POTUS Grace Penn. By season’s end, they are separated — and the biggest secret that Hal has ever kept from her is suddenly out in the open.
The chemistry between Russell and Sewell has been electric from moment one. “He and I can ride the same wavelength. We don’t have to take care of each other a lot, which is a real gift,” Russell says. “We both came into this at an age where we were already grown-ups, so we already had a firm base in what we liked or what we didn’t like and who we were.” That kind of flow is made possible by experience. The Americans, particularly, pushed her. She emerged from that show a different kind of actor, in no small part thanks to Rhys.
“There was a lot of sexuality in that show, and to do all of that with someone who is as skilled as Matthew and to never feel a hint of oppressive masculinity — he had such a safe way to enter that,” Russell says.
Yet while the steely intensity of The Americans‘ Elizabeth Jennings marked a juicy departure for Russell, The Diplomat provides audiences the sheer pleasure of seeing how fully the star comes through and makes the part her own.
Kate is often the smartest person in the room, her greatest strengths being her ability to listen, observe and react. “There’s a part of this character that has to hold everyone else’s stories at the same time,” Russell says. “I’m a middle child, and that was my job in my family, or maybe that’s my job in this life — I’m a good watcher. Kate has to be the watcher, not necessarily the performer in that moment — she’s the beta to someone’s alpha.”
Her competence is matched by the many other government workers in her orbit. “I don’t know how true this is, but I once heard that after Felicity aired, NYU enrollment went up — and what I hope is that maybe after this show, we’ll have an uptick in Foreign Service applications,” Russell says. “Hopefully people will go, even if it’s fucking fake, ‘Maybe I’ll get a good post. Maybe I’ll get to go to Paris or Italy, or have this hot romance with somebody I’ve never even met from another country.’
“I know our world feels scary and disrupted and uneven,” Russell continues. “But meeting these people who are so good and capable, I have to believe that there are more of those people out there, and they’re all waiting to continue doing the good work.”
Beginning with the pilot, there’s also been an appealing restlessness to Kate, a loose physicality and prideful disregard for glamour. “There’s a freedom there that, when playing women, is not always the case. You often have to be very beautiful or very elegant or very appropriate,” says Russell.
It’s been a decade since her first Emmy nomination for The Americans; she now has five in total. Earlier this year, for The Diplomat‘s third season, Russell won the most significant industry prize of her career, SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Award for best actress in a drama series — meaning she’s well-positioned to take home her first Emmy.
Rest assured, Russell has never been in the business for that — she told The New Yorker last year she hoped to lose at the Emmys, as she ultimately did to Severance‘s Britt Lower, so she could relax for the rest of the night — but she communicates deep pride in The Diplomat nonetheless. She’s committed to praising Cahn in virtually every answer over our chat.
“I rely on her when we’re filming — unlike a lot of writers, she’s there every single day. She is watching and shaping and nudging and pulling and whispering,” Russell says. “You could read something and think, ‘Oh, it’s slapstick-funny.’ And Deb goes, ‘No — this is dead serious.’ Or: ‘I know that we’re talking about this diplomatic thing, but the truth is all you care about is that you’re starving.’ That’s her genius, the specificity or the misdirection of a scene — that’s where she really shines.”
Watch the way Russell plays every one of those scenes, though — she’s bringing something surprising, nuanced and deeply human to it, too.
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Read the full article here
