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. Continue reading Keri Russell Teases ‘The Diplomat’ Season 4 as Emmy Buzz Builds
