Category Articles & Interviews

“I’m just going to lay down here because I’m so fucking tired,” said Keri Russell, flopping down on a bed covered in paper and plastic. It was a 20-something-degree polar-vortex-ed February afternoon in Brooklyn; she still had several hours to go filming an episode of her FX Cold War Russian-spy drama The Americans on set; and she’d already been up for hours at the beck and call of her other bosses, her 6-year-old son and 14-month-old daughter. “It started at 6 a.m. with two children,” she said. “With a baby going, ‘Mo-om. Mo-om!’ She can’t even talk, but she can bark ‘mom’ at me.” Now, as if the car service that takes her to work were also a time machine, this season focuses on her character Elizabeth’s exhausting relationship with a newly rebelling teenage daughter. She finds their scenes even more tiring than the life-or-death, sex-and-bullet-filled missions that are de rigueur for Elizabeth, who, unbeknownst to her kid, is an undercover KGB operative. Russell nestled further into the uncomfy set bed. “I just like to lay amongst the bubble wrap,” she said, her voice trailing off.

The mother-daughter tension is a major through line of The Americans’ second season (which kicks off tonight at 10 p.m.). Last season, teenage Paige seemed an innocent, her biggest worry (well, other than pervy guys picking her and her brother up on the side of the road) was that her parents might be splitting up for good. But while the first season ended with Elizabeth and arranged husband/spy partner Phillip Jennings reconciling and nurturing true feelings for each other, Paige’s adolescence is made more complicated by her suspicions about her parents’ secret laundry room meetings and her newfound interest in organized religion, which, to a pair of devoted Communists, is a truly objectionable wholesome passion. Executive producer Joe Weisberg, who studied Soviet history at Yale, explained later that this was the equivalent of a drug addiction. “It would be like joining a cult,” he said. “It would make them insane.” Continue reading Sex, Murder, and Parenting on the Set of The Americans

The undercover Russian spies of The Americans returns to FX on Wednesday for its sophomore season, and this time around, the whole family is in for a wild — and potentially deadly — ride.

At the season two premiere of The Americans at New York City’s Paris Theater on Monday night, Keri Russell told reporters that the critically-acclaimed Cold War spy drama’s new season zooms in on the various suburban family dynamics within the Jennings unit, rather than solely between the married Soviet KGB agents. “I think the main thing is it’s less oppositional between us, and more of the family against the world, protecting the family,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, noting that her character becomes much more vulnerable as a mother. “The opposition is from the scary guys who are out there trying to kill us, basically.”

Added Matthew Rhys, “With the unification of the two, other elements of their mandates and jobs puts a greater stress on their new relationship — the honey trapping, the information, my other marriage with Martha. As things become very real, they’re no longer two separate entities within a marriage. On a human level, it’s like an extreme version of envy and jealousy that other relationships have to deal with.” Continue reading ‘The Americans’: Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys Tease Season 2 Marriage and Espionage Twists

It’s 1982, the Cold War is raging, and Keri Russell is posing as a married suburban mom as a cover for her real identity; a badass Soviet secret agent in the FX drama The Americans. Things get even juicier in the second season, beginning tonight at 10, as Russell’s Elizabeth Jennings faces exposure threats from not only the FBI guy neighbor but moles, KGB leaks and her own increasingly suspicious teenage daughter. So naturally, she lies, schemes and seduces her targets. We asked her about a character that’s the furthest thing from Felicity—and her upcoming Apes flick.

How would you characterize Elizabeth as this season begins?
More exposed. I find the power and steely strength that Elizabeth has is very grounding. I enjoy the vulnerability and sexuality of her and I’m continually interested in the mining and uncovering of the relationships. It’s so interesting to me that it can be tender and loyal and devious and thrilling all at once.

She has to share her husband with his pretend wife, Martha the mole.
It definitely plays a part this season in a way that it did not before because of her emotional engagement. Elizabeth is now re-engaged with her husband and family in way that she was not before. Not only is she physically shaken from the stabbing at the end of last season, she’s more vulnerable emotionally because of this new engagement and it’s very scary to her and that puts her very off center. So it’s heartbreaking for her when he has to go [to Martha] sometimes when she needs him. There are some interesting scenes that come up about midway through that will answer some questions.

Married or not, she’s still using sex as an espionage tool.
The good thing about the sexuality in the show, at least where I’m coming at it from, is it’s not this big sweeping romantic movie where you have to be so in love and so beautiful and so sexy. You’re usually using the sexuality, at least in the spy end of it, to get something. There is kind of a freedom in that.

When did you find time to do Dawn of the Planet of the Apes?
During my break. God, I wanted a break, but when someone you adore and love and respect so much like Matt Reeves calls and says ‘Come and do this with me….’ I said, ‘Matt I’m so tired.’ And he said, ‘The first month will be hard but the next month and a half will be easy, you’ll get all these days off.’ But it was all fucking hard! It was cold and it rained all day and there were so many times when I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ But working with Andy Serkis was incredible, the locations we shot in, it’s huge. It’s really kind of mythic.

Source: http://www.mademan.com/

It’s 1982, and the pair of KGB spies posing as a married couple in the Washington suburbs is about to send a colleague on a mission, one that doesn’t end well.

The Americans, returning for a second season Wednesday (10 p.m. ET/PT) on FX, is filming its finale on a raw, rainy day in Queens, where a pay phone under a bridge provides a handy period prop for Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), sporting one of his signature disguises, a ponytailed wig and mustache.

It’s not the first time the couple has faced danger: Elizabeth (Keri Russell) was shot late last season, and as the new one picks up a few months later, her wounds are finally repaired — and so is her arranged marriage.

But trouble looms, and it’s not just from the FBI, whose so-far-unsuspecting agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) is a friendly neighbor trysting with Nina, a Russian double agent. The couple’s own teenage daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) is growing suspicious of her parents.

For Elizabeth, being “more engaged within the marriage and the family makes her much more vulnerable and complicates her work,” says Russell, sitting with Rhys in the back seat of a 1979 Ford Granada used in the scene. “Things get messier. She’s not that efficient of a soldier.” Continue reading ‘The Americans’ aims for better work-life balance

If the only images you have of Keri Russell are as the sweet young entertainer who went from the “The Mickey Mouse Club” to “Felicity,” you’ve not seen her FX channel series, “The Americans.” Russell’s traded her good-girl image for that of a hardened Communist spy who will use any weapon — ANY weapon — to get what she wants.

The second season of the FX series, starting Wednesday, throws Russell back into action as it picks up in the early 1980s during the Cold War. Russell and Matthew Rhys play two KGB spies who live the American dream as a typical suburban Washington, D.C., couple. Their lives bounce between parent-teacher conferences and deadly espionage encounters.

The role is a major divergence than anything Russell has played before, but she doesn’t think of the series in those terms.

“I guess I’m not thinking about it being different, but it is interesting,” said Russell, who wore a pair of white pants so tight she looked like an extra for a remake of “Grease II.” “I find myself with this role being more exposed. I enjoy the vulnerability and sexuality of her and continually interested in mining the relationships. It’s all very fun.”

These spies engage in a lot of sex, not so much for pleasure but as part of the job. Season two kicks off with sexual activity that breaks new ground for basic cable television. Russell is more comfortable with this disconnected form of sex than the more romantic variety played out in TV and films.

“The good thing about the sexuality in the show, at least where I’m coming at it from, is there is a gift in it not having to be this big sweeping romantic movie where you have to be so in love and so beautiful and so sexy. You’re usually using the sexuality, at least in the spy end of it, to get something,” Russell said. “So there is kind of a freedom in that, because it’s kind of messier or more direct than that.”

Russell looks at her role on “The Americans” as just another credit in a growing résumé. She admitted that because of the role — and maybe the fact that she’s a 37-year-old mother of two — she’s feeling a lot more grown up these days.

Playing a sexually charged, butt-kicking spy hasn’t changed the kind of jobs Russell’s being offered. But the way she feels about acting jobs is different.

“It’s changed my career because it’s interesting to me,” Russell said. “This second season will add to that because of the relationship with her family because she wants to be with them and engage with them. She’s going to be off-center this year and that’s interesting to play.”

The first season show averaged 3.4 million viewers, tying “Justified” as the most-watched first season of any FX drama series. Critics also loved the show, which received four Critics’ Choice Television Award nominations — the most of any first-year drama series.

In addition to the nomination for Best Drama Series, “The Americans” scored acting nods for Russell and Rhys, along with a supporting actor nod for Noah Emmerich.

Source: http://www.honolulupulse.com

Keri Russell surprised and impressed last year and turned her Felicity-crafted image on its head, as the tough as nails, intense Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans. The more hardline of the two undercover KGB agents at the center of the spy series, Elizabeth proved she would go as far as she had to in order to complete her mission, while we also saw her vulnerabilities and her confusion over the bizarre situation she and her husband Philip are in.

IGN TV: When we left off, Elizabeth and Philip had reconciled. As the season begins, are they doing well, or are this still some bumps there because they had so much trouble to work through last season?
Keri Russell: I think the main step forward is they are no longer questioning if they should be together as a couple. So they are a unified front decidedly now. But I think, for me, is what I loved most about last season was that it was sort of, at its best, a study of a marriage and the metaphor of marriage and I think this season is the study of a family embedded in this spy world to heighten the stakes. So they are a unified front, but now, for the first time, they are realizing — Elizabeth especially, because Phillip always had it — the threat of outside forces and the threat to their family, just [in terms of] violence. She’s seeing how fragile it all is for the first time, maybe naively. Again, like I did last year for the relationship and the marriage, I think those are such universal themes: fear for your children, sometimes they’re completely ungrounded, sometimes they are real, the influence of outside forces on your kids growing up, and the influence of outside forces on your relationship too. To me, the sense that I get is that it’s really a season about the family and keeping the family safe. Continue reading Keri Russell Talks The Americans: Season 2 – ”The Circle is Tightening Around Them”