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The Cold War may be drawing to a close on The Americans… but it’s getting awfully chilly in Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage.

As FX’s Reagan-era spy drama enters its sixth and final season — debuting this Wednesday at 10/9c — the action jumps forward three years to 1987, just when diplomatic relations between America and the Soviets were beginning to mend. But as star Matthew Rhys hints, while there’s “this great thaw between the U.S. and the Soviet Union… the ice age is settling in” between the married Russian spies at the show’s center. (And even their vast array of wigs can’t keep them warm.)

The Americans Season 6 Premiere Elizabeth PhilipTVLine sat down with Rhys and Keri Russell — the real-life spouses and Emmy nominees who play Philip and Elizabeth — for a preview of The Americans‘ final season, which kicks off with Philip trading the spy game for a corporate yuppie existence (he even has a car phone!), while Elizabeth is left to pick up the espionage slack. And that’s caused a serious rift between the formerly happy couple. While the two aren’t “at war with each other,” Russell says, they’re in “almost a sadder place, where you’re just so far from each other. To get back there seems so insurmountable and lonely, and that’s kind of where we start.”
Continue reading The Americans Preview: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys Talk Wigs, Marital Rifts and the ‘Bittersweet’ Final Season

“It’s just been a hard thing for the marriage to deal with; she’s just gotten exhausted and worn down, and in a way is sort of wilting under that burden,” says co-creator Joe Weisberg. “On top of it, now (Mikhail) Gorbachev has been leading the Soviet Union for two years, and glasnost and perestroika have really started to come into their own, and this is something Philip and Elizabeth are not on the same page about. So history and politics have thrown another wedge into their relationship.”

While The Americans is a spy thriller, at its heart it’s about the marriage of Philip and Elizabeth, and the costs of their jobs to their family.

“Its strength is this very intricate, complicated marriage,” Russell says. “The spy element of it is such a great backdrop; it pushes and pulls the relationship in so many different ways. You’re sleeping with other people, and there’s massive trust issues, and you’re killing people.”

A further strain: Their daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), once oblivious to the family business, has been recruited into it, against Philip’s wishes. (Son Henry, now a hockey star at boarding school, remains blissfully unaware.)

“When I was at the CIA,” says Weisberg, a former officer, “one of the things that interested me most was the story of parents who had to figure out when to tell their kids, ‘Hey, this is what I really do.’ Even in all of espionage, it seemed like the most interesting thing.”

Continue reading The Americans: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys on ‘crazy intimacy’ of their Russian spies

You know it’s weird times when at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the president was making headlines for congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on a victory in what’s been called a “sham” election, and elsewhere in Washington, multiple investigations were looking into the nefarious doings of our former Cold War enemy on our shores — and meanwhile, smack dab in the middle, there was a red-carpet screening of a TV show that was supposed to be just a stylish drama about 1980s Russian spycraft in the nation’s capital that feels … well, maybe just a little too close to home.

Joe Weisberg, the show’s creator and executive producer (and a former CIA officer, so he knows of what he writes), was strolling the gantlet of reporters and photographers lined up to capture the Tuesday night premiere of the sixth and final season of FX’s “The Americans,” and he was clearly not thrilled that his show’s carefully crafted story lines were colliding with chaotic cable-news chyrons.

“This,” he said of the prospect of running a show about Russian interference in the United States at the very moment when America is focused on Russian interference in the United States, “was not the plan.” Continue reading The Americans previews new season in Washington, where Russia drama is already on TV

On a drizzly night in February, Keri Russell and Holly Taylor walked down a hilly block in Upper Manhattan that was doubling for Reagan-era Washington in a scene from the final season of FX’s spy thriller “The Americans.”

Russell, in character as Elizabeth Jennings, a KGB agent living undercover in the United States in the waning days of the Cold War, was dispensing some tough love to her daughter, Paige (Taylor) a college student sympathetic to the Soviet cause.

“You’re going to have to make a decision: to commit to this life or get out, because sometimes this is what we have to do,” said Russell as Elizabeth. “Are you willing to give up friends and relationships — your life, if you have to?”

The tension between the personal and the political is at the heart of “The Americans,” which returnsfor its final 10-episode season March 28 and centers on Elizabeth and her husband, Philip (Matthew Rhys), a pair of seemingly mild-mannered travel agents and suburban parents who carry out deadly covert missions on behalf of the motherland. Continue reading The Americans prepares to take a final bow on FX

“We’re making a f—ing TV show here!”

Matthew Rhys’ booming stage voice, imbued with Welsh-accented gravitas, fills the commuter train sitting at the edge of the platform at a station in Tuckahoe, N.Y., about 18 miles north of Manhattan. “The Americans,” the beloved FX drama series starring Rhys and Keri Russell, is filming a pivotal scene for its series finale under extremely cramped conditions on a chilly March morning.

The train, borrowed from New York’s Metro-North Railroad, will move back and forth 2,000 feet for three-plus hours while “Americans” director-executive producer Chris Long and his team gather the shots they need.

Rhys, Russell and the rest of the crew are charged up to deliver a powerful conclusion to the six-season saga of the Soviet spy couple masquerading as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, embedded as a typical 1980s suburban Washington, D.C., married couple with two kids, Paige and Henry. The critical adoration showered on the show has raised the stakes for Team Americans, led by showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, to stick the landing with the final season that bows March 28.
Continue reading The Americans: Inside Its Six-Season Journey to Critical Stardom and TV History

Goodbyes are hard. Us Weekly chatted with Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys at the red carpet event for FX’s The Americans in New York City on Friday, March 16, where they dished on filming the final scene of the show — and their responses may surprise you.

When asked if filming the was emotional, the 41-year-old actress quipped: “We were mostly just cold. I’m going to be honest.” Her on-and-off screen beau, 43, added, “It was a bad night here. It was freezing. It was snowing. Everyone was like, ‘We just want to get it finished. We don’t care about crying anymore.’”

Though Rhys reveals that “it wasn’t this heroic last scene everyone was expecting,” the duo thinks fans will enjoy. “You hope [fans will love it.] It was always going to be a hard show to tie up, I think,” he told Us. “There are various ways they could have gone with it. They did it incredibly well. I was incredibly satisfied with the way we wrapped it off.”

The two also explained how they’ll definitely miss the folks they worked with daily for the past six seasons. “It was tough. We had a number of [cast and crew] with us for [all] six seasons — saying bye to [them was hard],” Rhys told Us. “It’s a cliche, but it’s true — especially those who had slightly more personal relationship — the boom guys, the camera guys, the focus guys — the grips. You work with them on a physical level. You dance with them a bit. They’re as much a part of it as anything else.”

Russell added: “I think [it’ll be hard to say goodbye to] the crew. We do become sort of a family. Everyone moves on and scatters and does other things. Especially this series – we shoot a lot outside, in New York winter. It’s hard. It’s different than shooting on a stage. You get closer to people. I will miss our camera guys and our grips.”

But the couple, who play spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, won’t have to worry about missing each other following the shows end. Russell and Rhys — who have been dating since 2013 — welcomed son Sam in May 2016. “The glory is we will be with each other every day,” Rhys told Us in June 2017.

The Americans airs on FX Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET.

Source: https://www.usmagazine.com/