Category TV Show

The third episode of The Americans’ third season built toward one of the most excruciatingly brutal scenes in the show’s history: Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) and her husband Philip (Matthew Rhys) in a laundry room, extracting Elizabeth’s damaged tooth without anesthesia. Titled “Open House,” and scripted by Stuart Zicherman, the hour was directed by Thomas Schlamme, a veteran of TV drama and comedy and a regular on The Americans. He spoke to Vulture about the specific challenges of shooting a scene of such intensity.

So are you ever going to go back to the dentist again?
[Laughs] I’ve never liked to go to the dentist to begin with!

When I got Stuart Zicherman’s script, I thought this could be the dentistry scene in Marathon Man, or we could ask, “What is the story, what’s really going on?” You know: Okay, we know this is a gunfight, but are we just gonna shoot a gunfight, or are we going to ask what the gunfight’s about?

Once I read the script quite a few times, I thought about it, and I just thought, you know, I shot a scene last year where they performed a 69 on each other, and I didn’t find it as near as intimate as what I thought this scene really was about. So, I was like, “Oh, great, this is The Americans’ version, this episode, of their sex scene.” Continue reading The Story Behind The Americans’ Excruciating, Beautifully Shot Tooth-Pulling Scene

When I visited the set of “The Americans” in early December, attempts to interview Keri Russell kept being delayed, both by the complicated process of filming parts of four different episodes in a single day, and by Russell’s desire to prep for a physically and emotionally grueling scene (which appeared in tonight’s episode, as I reviewed here) involving the worsening condition of Elizabeth’s injured tooth.

Fortunately, once Russell, Matthew Rhys and director Tommy Schlamme finished shooting the scene, she had a few minutes to talk, and a lighter spirit thanks to a plate of cookies that was being passed around the stage. (There’s a good 90 seconds of my interview recording that’s just her trying to talk me into splitting a cookie with her, including her saying what is now my life motto: “Everyone deserves cookies.”)

Does it feel strange eating a cookie right after on-screen dental work?

Keri Russell: Eating a cookie never feels strange. I don’t care what I’m doing beforehand. I am a big believer in food in general.

So in the range of things you’ve been asked to do, this is a physical part. Where would you say that stacked up?

Keri Russell: Somewhere in between being strapped to Tom Cruise like a backpack and jumping out of a burning building, and doing a threesome with strangers in Staten Island on a Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. Continue reading ‘The Americans’ star Keri Russell: ‘This whole season’s a little hard for me’

Tonight’s episode centers on the Jennings’ pursuit of their latest lead on the CIA’s Afghan Group: His name is Ted Paaswell. He’s the right hand man to the division’s head, Isaac Brelund, and has two things that make him vulnerable: he’s having a hard time selling his house quickly enough, and he’s undergoing a divorce.

Meanwhile, tensions in the Jennings home continue to escalate. When discussing a gift for Paige, it becomes apparent that Phillip is upset with Elizabeth for discussing Paige with Gabriel alone. They go to sleep that night with their backs turned to one another.

The next day, they attend Paaswell’s Open House in order to bug his possessions, and then begin their surveillance of him, tailing his car and listening in as he picks up his teen babysitter… who is uncomfortably flirty.

Unfortunately, they’re being tailed, and after several hours they’re unable to shake them as more and more FBI cars join in on the chase.

I think a lot about Drive when I watch episodes of The Americans like tonight’s. If you’ve never watched that film’s opening sequence, in which Ryan Gosling’s Driver executes a getaway, go watch it now. It’s a brilliant bit of tense visual storytelling that also completely dodges every conventional method of ratcheting up tension. Similarly, The Americans manages to construct incredibly tense scenes that are deceptively plain. There are no quick cuts, no music, no daring or unconventional cinematography. It is refreshingly simple in its suspense: Here are the characters, and here is the web closing around them.

The elaborate maneuvers that the Jennings have to pull off in order to get away aren’t daring or jaw-dropping, they’re calculated and deliberate. Phillip tucks and rolls his way out of the moving car when a parked car obstructs the pursuer’s view, and places a coded call to the Centre for backup before making his way home. At the agreed-upon rendezvous point, another agent tosses a radio into Elizabeth’s car, where she receives directions to an intersection where yet another agent stages a hit-and-run, providing enough distraction for her to ditch her car and make it into a getaway vehicle.

Back at the Jennings home, the couple embrace after such a close call—but then Elizabeth’s jaw injury becomes a problem. She’s been nursing it since the premiere, but never got it checked out, knowing full well that the FBI would be investigating any instance of a woman of her physical description seeing a dentist for an injury like hers. So Phillip takes her down to the basement to handle it himself. Continue reading ‘Open House’ TV Recaps

This season, the KGB agents will don punk rock garb. It’s a shocking ensemble for Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, even though the pair of Russian spies have worn a milieu disguises on The Americans, the acclaimed FX espionage series set in Washington at the height of the Cold War.

“We’ve gone on a lot of missions dressed as bureaucrats and business people, who often look mainstream and a bit boring,” Keri Russell, who stars as Elizabeth Jennings on the hit drama, tells Paste. She adds that The Americans’ third season (which premiered on January 28), features some more extravagant getups, especially during one scene in which Philip and Elizabeth infiltrate a college campus. She laughs, adding, “Our marks are young people and we have this rocker look, just like Sid Vicious and Nancy. It required Matthew and I to use very similar eye liner.”

Russell is referring, of course, to co-star Matthew Rhys, who plays her husband and KGB cohort Philip (the two actors are also an item off set). Rhys tells us that he and Russell frequently come up with their own small narratives to go with the disguises, before describing the backstory for his most frequent alter ego—a moustached, ponytailed hitman named Fernando.

“I have him coming from Spain. He was a flamenco dance teacher in Pasadena, before becoming a professional hitman. So that tends to inform his walk, and the boots he wears,” Rhys says drolly, his real life Welsh brogue making him sound entirely different from his character. Rhys adds that he and Russell have, on occasion, spent many hours in makeup and hair chairs on set, as their disguises were finessed. “So, to keep ourselves occupied we gave these alter egos little biographies, more than anything, just to make ourselves laugh.” Continue reading Keri Russell And Matthew Rhys Talk Subtlety and Disguise on Season Three of The Americans

No one who watches The Americans can claim Philip and Elizabeth Jennings — Soviet spies posing as married American suburbanites in the 1980s — are a perfect couple. They have crippling trust issues due to the secretive nature of their work. They routinely have sex with other people as part of their jobs. And they’re not above killing innocent people to maintain their cover.

But just because they’re bad people doesn’t mean they’re a bad couple. If you look beyond all their homicidal cloak and dagger honey trapping, and their frequent lies to their children (who have no idea what their parents do for a living), you’ll see Philip and Elizabeth, “Philizabeth,” possesses many admirable couple qualities. Heck, if Walt and Skyler were this functional during their own suburban criminal activity, Breaking Bad would have ended much differently.

So without endorsing murder, spying, child neglect, and serial infidelity, we submit that Philip and Elizabeth from The Americans are one of the best couples on TV — and they can teach us a lot about marriage. Here are 10 lessons we’ve learned:

1. Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to.
Both Elizabeth and Philip frequently have sex with their intelligence assets to pry information from them (Philip has even married one of his sources — Martha, a naive FBI secretary who thinks Philip’s name is “Clark”). Both are fully aware of the other’s extracurricular activities in the service of Mother Russia, but they talk about it only when necessary. In last month’s season premiere, Philip… er, “Clark” spends the night practicing the Kama Sutra with his other wife. After he returns the next morning, Elizabeth simply asks him if he got any usable intel. Philip responds with a simple “no,” and they move on. So the next time you’re tempted to, say, quiz your significant other about her exes, or ask him which one of your friends he’d “Shag, Marry, Kill,” think of Elizabeth and Philip, who know it’s OK to keep some matters on a need-to-know basis. Continue reading 10 Things We Learned About Marriage From ‘The Americans’