Keri was on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night to promot Season 3 of The Diplomat.
– TalkshowsThe Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Stills – October 6 2025
Added scans from The New Yorker October issue.
– Scans from 2025 The New Yorker – October 13 2025
– Photoshoots from 2025 The New Yorker – October 13 2025
Season 3 will follow ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) after accusing Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) of hatching a terrorist plot and admitting she’s after the VP’s job. But after the death of the president, it’s revealed that Kate’s husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) may have inadvertently killed him. Kate will have to step into a role she never wanted, with a freedom she never expected, an increasingly complicated friendship with Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), and an unnerving bond with First Gentleman Todd Penn (Bradley Whitford).
– Events from 2025 77th Primetime Emmy Awards – September 14 2025
“The win is getting to go to the award show, but not winning, so you never have to speak. That’s the secret,” Keri Russell confesses to me as a late summer darkness descends on our evening video call. Russell, fresh off her FLAUNT shoot, is not being facetious. She’s a pragmatic person, an actor that’s been a part of our collective viewing consciousness since she turned 15, so her insider secrets are worth some weight.
Russell is, of course, in on the joke: in order to “never have to speak at the award show,” one must be part of a class of elite artists, and must have delivered a performance so outstanding that it was isolated from a sea of media content released in the entire year. Keri Russell knows that the real win is in the work.
Russell, who made her mark as Felicity in the eponymous early 2000s rom-com series created by J.J. Abrams, has become known for the signature brand of warmth and onscreen charm she brings to her breadth of work. And, truly, Russell’s face is ubiquitous: she’s in action and fantasy franchises (Mission: Impossible III [2006], Dawn of the Planet of the Apes [2014], Star Wars Episode IX- The Rise of Skywalker [2019]. She’s in long-running television shows (The aforementioned Felicity; FX’s The Americans, and Running Wilde). She was in the riotous Cocaine Bear [2023]. She voiced a fantasy video game (Open Roads). She’s had guest spots on some of the most prominent series of the last three decades (Scrubs, Arrested Development, Sesame Street, Boy Meets World, et. al). All of these have earned the California-born actor a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and helped secure a permanent place in her viewers’ hearts (as well as a multitude of Emmy and Critics Choice nominations, with a Golden Globe win.) Continue reading Keri for Flaunt magazine
Soon Keri Russell will dip back into work mode. Up first are the Emmy Awards on Sept. 14, for which she is nominated for a second time for her role as Kate Wyler in Netflix’s “The Diplomat.” The nomination is her seventh for the show, joining one SAG, two Golden Globe and two Critics Choice nods. In the weeks that follow she’ll begin promotion of the show’s third season, out Oct 16. By November, they’ll return to set for the filming of Season Four.
For now, though, Russell is enjoying the last bits of summer, having just moved her oldest son River into college.
“For better or worse, the nature of our jobs is we travel a lot, so I think my kids are used to coming and going and going to a new place and dealing with airports and moving your stuff and knowing how to live,” Russell, who shares two children with ex-husband Shane Deary and one with partner Matthew Rhys, says of the college drop-off. “So in a way, it’s easier than families who have maybe never experienced that, have never been separated. So River, my oldest kid, he’s had practice, so I feel like he was OK. The younger siblings, I think it was emotional because they’re like, ‘oh my gosh, now it’s just us.’ There were some tears from the younger siblings.” Continue reading Keri Russell Talks ‘The Diplomat,’ Fashion — and Balancing Hollywood and Real Life
“I’m interested in those moments where you feel like a line has been breached and then you decide the line should move,” showrunner Debora Cahn says.
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.” Continue reading The Diplomat boss, Keri Russell talk season 3
Six actresses at the absolute top of their game — Parker Posey (The White Lotus) and Keri Russell (The Diplomat) among them — aimed to diagnose the issue over the course of an hour during a raucous conversation that dug into everything from their most formative audition experiences to the humor and humiliation of filming a sex scene … only for it to land on the cutting-room floor.
The complete interview can be read over at The Hollywood Reporter.
– Photoshoots from 2025 The Hollywood Reporter – May 30 2025
– Scans from 2025 The Hollywood Reporter – May 30 2025
