Grace Penn is now president.
In the final moments of The Diplomat’s second season, Hal (Rufus Sewell) shocked everyone by calling President Rayburn (Michael McKean) with the news of Grace’s (Allison Janney) involvement in the attack on the British vessel. He shocked Rayburn so much that the man died. And when season 3 picks up, we’re back in that moment: Grace Penn is president, and she — alongside Kate (Keri Russell) and everyone else — is trying to figure out what just happened.
“What I love is seeing the crazy minutia of, legally, what has to happen to make her president,” Russell tells Entertainment Weekly.
For showrunner Debora Cahn, change was always a given. “It’s such a part of the fabric of working in the foreign service,” Cahn says. “This is a story about coming in, not knowing about a place, getting to know the place, and then as soon as you feel like you have a handle on it, you’re off to someplace else. Or all of the dynamics have shifted.”
And with each change, the characters will have to check in on what matters — both for them, personally, and for the country they’ve promised to serve. “What we’re looking for are situations that change your moral perspective on the picture you’re looking at,” Cahn says. “There’s been an earthquake. You have to take all of your principles and values and see how they need to hopefully not disappear but shift for the new reality. We’re telling a story about people who are used to shifting reality all the time.”
At the center of that shifting dynamic is Grace and, of course, Kate, who had just confronted the then-VP moments before Hal called with the news. That one phone call means the duo will find themselves having to navigate a new sort of relationship. “There are so few women who get to that level, that whether you disagree with them or f—ing hate them, you need it to go well for the good of women,” Russell says. “You want [Grace] to be respected for the good of every woman who’s gonna come after.”
As Cahn adds, “I’m interested in those moments where you feel like a line has been breached and then you decide the line should move. And when is that growth and when is it just selling out your values and becoming somebody that you don’t wanna be?”
With Grace now serving as the acting president, we’ll also meet her husband, Todd, played by Janney’s former West Wing costar Bradley Whitford. “At first it was a joke, like, ‘We should get Brad,'” Cahn, who also wrote on The West Wing, says. “My fear was I don’t want the show to turn into a West Wing cover band.”
But as they saw more of what Janney was doing with Grace — and how different she was from C.J. Cregg — things, well, changed. “I got more confident that we could have the two of them in the same place and it would feel like something new,” Cahn says. “And giving them a relationship that’s so different than the one that they’ve played in the past is really great. What’s been most gratifying for me is that you become exposed to Grace Penn as a three-dimensional person.”
As Russell puts it, seeing someone at this professional level in a relationship shows “a whole other side of a person.” And for Kate, that other side involves Hal, a man who will now forever be linked to the death of a U.S. president. “He is the best character on the show because he thinks he’s such hot s— and he is, sometimes, but he’s just a bull in a china shop,” Russell says with a laugh. “The destruction he leaves in his path is just unbelievable.”
The Diplomat season 3 premieres Oct. 16 on Netflix.
Source: https://ew.com/