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Keri Russell Teases ‘The Diplomat’ Season 4 as Emmy Buzz Builds

It’s almost 1 a.m. in Florence, Italy, where Keri Russell is nearing the end of filming for season four of The Diplomat, Netflix’s savvy political drama created by TV vet Debora Cahn. It’s been a hectic few days of night shoots across the Atlantic, but as she hops on our call, an ebullient Russell is eager to gab. “I just got home, I’ve wolfed down two bites of pasta and I’m sipping a glass of wine,” she says. “I’m ready for you.”

The Diplomat asks a lot of Russell, from intricate emotional shifts to the dense jargon of top-secret international relations, but just as she does on camera, she carries it all with a disarming ease after a long day’s work. Russell has settled into the role of Kate Wyler, a diplomat who’s been thrust to the center of a high-stakes global crisis while navigating her turbulent marriage to fellow insider Hal (Rufus Sewell) and her even more complex relationship to her own ambitions.

“There is something that you can’t manufacture when you have years of experience with people,” Russell says. “It’s like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. That’s the benefit of good series work.” Russell is familiar with this trajectory, which is the goal whenever embarking on a new continuing TV show. Her breakout on college drama Felicity won her a Golden Globe and lasted four seasons; before jumping into The Diplomat, she’d finished a critically lauded six-season run on FX’s Emmy-winning spy drama The Americans, where she also met her romantic partner, co-star Matthew Rhys.

Like The Americans, The Diplomat stages hefty geopolitical drama within the context of a fraught marriage. “That’s the most monumental relationship in your life, where you grow, you fail, you fuck up — for all of those exciting moments in life, those are the highs and lows,” Russell says. “I love a longform show that can explore that because you get to grow with that couple.” In The Diplomat, Kate weathers the wily Hal’s repeated betrayals while grappling with his improbable rise — at the beginning of season three, he leapfrogs her to assume the job of vice president, to Allison Janney’s hard-wired POTUS Grace Penn. By season’s end, they are separated — and the biggest secret that Hal has ever kept from her is suddenly out in the open. Continue reading Keri Russell Teases ‘The Diplomat’ Season 4 as Emmy Buzz Builds

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The Minds Behind the Shows

In the third season of the drama series, which stars Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell as an adversarial political power couple, Cahn brought in Bradley Whitford to play the husband of Allison Janney’s POTUS. The shift from one dysfunctional couple to two opened the door to a delicious dynamic between the duos, vividly captured in the scene where Whitford’s Todd cuts his hand while preparing oysters and bleeds all over them. (Marriage is a blood sport.)

From day one, Cahn has been writing sharply drawn characters that give the gifted actors plenty to play with. (In March, Russell won an Actor Award for her high-wire work as shrewd ambassador to the U.K. Kate Wyler.) And she knows just when to throw in a plot twist, as in the Season 3 finale.

“I work in a candy store,” Cahn said. “It’s wildly fun. We’re always somehow in over our heads, but we have to remind ourselves that we chose to dive into the deep end. We’re choosing to do a lot. So it’s a constant, like, stay focused but keep your peripheral vision way open, and allow yourself to take in the new ideas as they present themselves. I’m not telling the story alone. We’ve put together a company that’s telling the story. Keri and Rufus are so good, and it was great to be able to bring in actors (Janney and Whitford) who can come in at the sprint that Keri and Rufus are at. It was an absolute career peak, a dream come true.” —LS

– Photoshoots from 2026 The Wrap Show runners And Creators Issue – 2026

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Netflix’s “The Diplomat” ATAS Event

Keri attended Netflix’s FYSEE LA Presents “The Diplomat” at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on May 03, 2026 in Beverly Hills.

– Events in 2026 Netflix’s “The Diplomat” ATAS Event – May 3 2026

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SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations Presents “The Diplomat”

Keri attended the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations Presents “The Diplomat” event at The Meryl Streep Center for Performing Artists on May 03 2026 in Los Angeles.