Category Articles & Interviews

WALTER SCOTT ASKS … Keri Russell

The actress, 36, stars as an undercover KGB spy in the 1980s-set drama The Americans (FX, Wednesdays).

You play a spy in the days before the Internet and mobile phones. Could you survive a week without technology?
Definitely! I’m never on my cell phone. I don’t even know why I have one. It’s been fun to go back to this period of time. The actors who play my kids had never seen a rotary phone before!

You’ve taken breaks throughout your career. Why has that been important to you?
I like working hard, but my life outside of my career is equally important to me. Maybe I’m not ambitious enough, but I’m just as interested in my friends and my relationship with my family.

What has been the best change in your life since becoming a mother? [Russell and her husband, Shane Deary, are parents to son River, 5, and daughter Willa, 1.]
You instantly become less selfish. You can’t be the biggest person in the world anymore—they are. It really grounds you.

How do you like to spend your free time?
With my girlfriends, adult beverages, and delicious food!


Online Extra: The star discusses the impact of her hit series Felicity.
It was a really sweet, heartfelt show and it’s funny because the creators were both men in their thirties when they wrote it. I think what people really related to was that time in your life when everything is possible. College is such a monumental time when your path in life is being decided, and it can go so many different ways, and every relationship you’re forming can affect that and I think the show just really captured that.

Source: http://www.parade.com/

So how long did it take you to buy into the premise of The Americans, the new FX show that premiered on Wednesday night? I’m honestly not sure I still accept — that is, can watch without an occasional snort of disbelief — Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as suburban parents/KGB agents, and I’ve seen more than one episode of the thing. But, for sure, I want to keep watching, because this series will either turn into something very special, or descend into the sort of muted, dignified camp that characterizes some would-be classy cable fare.

Russell and Rhys portray Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, Russians who’ve successfully embedded themselves as sleeper agents in a suburb of Washington, D.C. It’s 1981, President Ronald Reagan has declared the USSR an “evil empire,” and one of the Jennings’ two kids needs a training bra and wants her ears pierced. As Reagan’s reelection campaign would soon say, it’s morning in America. Continue reading ‘The Americans’ premiere review: Are you rooting for these Russians?

Tonight, FX premieres The Americans (10 p.m. ET), starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as a pair of Russian spies posing as married travel agents living in suburban Virginia in the year 1981.

The Cold War-era series presents an interesting challenge for costume designer Jenny Gering, who joined the show after the pilot episode (where we see Russell wearing a pair of Guess mom jeans).

“Yes, we want to create a sense of place and time and feel like we’re there, but we don’t want to have crazy clichés running around that will take you out of the story,” Gering says. Something that helps: This is the transitional early ’80s. “It’s a completely opposite silhouette to what people consider to be ‘the ’80s.’ In most people’s heads, it’s big and boxy on top and slim on the bottom, and the ’70s are more slim on top and fuller on the bottom. It was just a chance to really show women’s figures and beautiful tailoring. Everything’s very tactual — there’s a lot of leather and suede. And the palette is lovely — there’s very little black and grey, it’s very autumnal.” Continue reading ‘The Americans’ costume designer on Keri Russell’s and Matthew Rhys’ cool Cold War style

FX’s latest drama, “The Americans” (premieres tonight, Wed., Jan. 30 at 10 p.m. EST), stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, Cold War-era Russian spies who have lived, worked and raised a family in America for 15 years as part of a covert mission to gather intel on the Reagan administration’s plans against the Soviet Union.

The Jennings’ lives are further complicated by the defection of another K.G.B. operative, which could jeopardize every undercover agent’s identity; Phillip’s growing affection for American culture; and the unnervingly curious FBI agent (Noah Emmerich), who has just become their neighbor.

HuffPost TV sat down with Russell and Rhys at the recent Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour to find out more about what motivates their compelling characters, whether Elizabeth and Phillip’s marriage is really just a cover story, why Russell said yes to “The Americans” (since she said, “I always say no to everything”), what “honey trapping” is and much more. Continue reading ‘The Americans’ Premiere: Keri Russell And Matthew Rhys Talk Sex, Spy Games And America Vs. Russia

‘I love the idea of this suburban mom giving some dude a blow job in a hotel room and then packing school lunches’

Now that Abu Nazir is dead and Nicholas Brody is wandering around Quebec at least until September, viewers need some new duplicitous characters to shake up our TV dramas, preferably ones operating on U.S. soil. The Americans, a Homeland-meets-The Wonder Years thriller premiering Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX, gives us Elizabeth Jennings, mom, homemaker – and KGB spy. A resolute Soviet officer living in 1981 Washington, D.C., Elizabeth has so successfully infiltrated Beltway suburbia with her impeccable accent and way around a brownie pan, even her FBI agent neighbor has no idea he’s sleeping one door down from the enemy.

Keri Russell, making a triumphant return to television after a string of successful film credits (Waitress, Mission: Impossible III and the upcoming Austenland, which recently premiered at Sundance), so deftly embodies the ruthless, ice-cold Elizabeth that from her first scene you’ll be going, “Felicity who?” Russell checked in with us recently from Brooklyn, where The Americans is filmed (“We’re about to start episode six”), to chat about going from coed to comrade. Continue reading Q&A: ‘The Americans’ Star Keri Russell on Playing the Spy Next Door

The great hair-chopping fiasco of 1999 has not been easy for Keri Russell to overcome. But you won’t be thinking about Felicity or her worst decision ever when you see Russell in deadly mode in FX’s tense Cold War drama The Americans (premiering tonight at nine). She and Matthew Rhys (Brothers & Sisters) play sleeper KGB agents who’ve been posing as happily married couple Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings for the past fifteen years in suburban Washington D.C. We first meet Elizabeth mid-mission, giving head to a man from whom she needs information. (Deadly and racy!) It’s a bummer for Phillip, who’s fallen in love with both America and his wife. Vulture sat down with Russell to find out if these two crazy Russian kids can make it without being killed, and also talked Running Wilde (her short-lived Fox comedy with Will Arnett) and the eighties. Continue reading Keri Russell on Her Spy Drama The Americans, Will Arnett’s Mania, and TV Blow Jobs

On FX’s The Americans, which begins Wednesday, Keri Russell plays a Soviet sleeper agent in 1980s suburban D.C. Jace Lacob talks with the former Felicity star about Russian spies, secret lives, and being a mom.

In the opening scene of The Americans, Joe Weisberg’s tense new 1980s spy drama, Soviet sleeper agent Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) flirts with a middle-aged stranger in a Washington, D.C., bar.

Donning a blond Pretty Woman-style wig and a short dress, Russell is nearly unrecognizable, convincingly transformed into a barfly who pretends to be turned on by a G-man’s security clearance. Elizabeth and her mark head to a hotel room, where she proceeds to seduce him in order to elicit top-secret information, engaging in a range of sexual contact that’s all recorded and later listened to by Elizabeth’s husband, Phillip (Matthew Rhys).

In other words, this is the anti-Felicity.

“Oh, yeah, blow jobs and push-up bras and wigs,” says Russell, laughing. “It’s certainly a far cry.” Continue reading Keri Russell On ‘The Americans,’ Sleeper Agents, Motherhood & More

Keri Russell gained fame playing a quintessential girl next door type on J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves’ Felicity, which perhaps makes it all the more fun to see her subvert that image in FX’s new series, The Americans. This time, Russell is playing the girl next door… who is secretly a KGB spy working to help defeat America from within in the midst of the Cold War.

Russell stars as Elizabeth Jennings, a suburbanite living with her husband, Phillip (Matthew Rhys) and their two children in 1981 Washington, D.C. But Elizabeth and Phillip are in fact deep cover KGB operatives trained since their youth to play the part of the perfect Americans, while gaining information for their Soviet superiors, in any number of ways one might associate with a spy… All while maintaining their cover as a normal, friendly family to everyone in their life, including their oblivious children.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Russell to discuss her role on The Americans and her approach to this very intriguing character. Note that some spoilers follow for events that occur in the early scenes of The Americans pilot episode. Continue reading The Americans: Keri Russell on Life as a KGB Spy in Suburbia