Category The Diplomat

This year marks the first time Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys will attend the Emmys together as nominees for different projects: Between Russell’s morally conflicted ambassador on “The Diplomat” and Rhys’ small-island mayor on “Widow’s Bay” and his psychopathic real estate scion on “The Beast in Me” — plus executive producer nominations for both — the pair have racked up five nominations.

Couples have been Emmy-nominated in the same year before: Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon, Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. But fans may feel a special tie to Russell and Rhys because of how witty and charming they were the last time they attended the Emmys together as nominees, back when they starred on “The Americans.” After that show’s final season in 2018, when Rhys won best actor in a drama, he quipped in his speech that if he proposed onstage, Russell had promised to punch him “clean in the mouth.”

Continue reading Spies in the Woods: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys on Their Emmy Nominations, Watching ‘Widow’s Bay’ and That ‘Diplomat’ Cliffhanger

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