In The Diplomat, actress Keri Russell shows her good side

NEW YORK – Keri Russell paused in a corner of Brooklyn Bridge Park to admire a starling.

The 47-year-old American actress braved the wind in chunky boots and a black puffer jacket. Her hair was tousled. Liner ringed each eye, possibly a souvenir from the previous night’s too many margaritas with friends.

She did not look much like a woman who devoted years of her life to undermining the American democratic project. Or like a woman now charged with safeguarding it.

But Russell has been both of those women – and a lot of other women besides.

At this point in her career, she is probably best known for her six seasons on the FX drama The Americans (2013 to 2018) as Elizabeth Jennings, a Soviet sleeper agent with an ambitious collection of ruses and wigs who earned Russell three Emmy nominations.

Now, Russell has taken on an opposing role: In the new series The Diplomat – available on Netflix – she stars as Kate Wyler, a savvy United States civil servant tasked with upholding America’s reputation abroad.

A veteran ambassador, Kate is about to take up a post in Kabul, Afghanistan, when an international incident shunts her and her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) to London. An English manor house is not a war zone, but Kate behaves otherwise.

Armoured in punishing heels and sleek sheath dresses, she treats even polite conversation as battlefield manoeuvres.

But in a departure from The Americans, Kate’s work is almost entirely aboveboard. She wears no wigs.

As some Canada geese waddled nearby, Russell considered the disparities between these two roles.

“It was fun being a baddie, doing sneaky stuff,” she said.

But The Diplomat also has its pleasures, she insisted. “It’s awesome to be smart and capable and dress people down and be so steady about it,” she said.

If Elizabeth is a baddie, does that make Kate a goody? Russell gave a cagey smile. “We’ll see,” she said.

Russell began her career as a teenage dancer in The Mickey Mouse Club and then starred in the drama Felicity (1998 to 2002) as a capricious college student and the patron saint of dithery girls everywhere.

She did not necessarily expect to spend her mid-career playing hypercompetent women while also showing the uncertainty that undergirds that competence.

In addition to playing Elizabeth and Kate, she has also recently appeared as an indomitable mother in the horror-comedy film Cocaine Bear (2023) and as a cool, if not especially effective, assassin in anthology series Extrapolations (2023).

Felicity would not have excelled at either espionage or high-stakes diplomacy. “Felicity would write a poem about it,” Russell said. But that was 20 years ago.

Russell, who in person is outspoken, unfussy, charmingly profane and so candid that she encourages similar candour in others, has grown up.

She has since become a mother. She has two children aged 16 and 12 with her former contractor-husband Shane Deary, and a seven-year-old son with Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, her partner of nine years and co-star on The Americans.

“Mums are like that,” she said of these recent capable characters. “You’re going to make it happen. A mum can do 37 things in one day.”

It was during the Christmas holiday of 2021, when Russell had volunteered to cook dinner for the children’s three sets of grandparents, that she received the scripts for The Diplomat.

With Rhys, 48, already away for part of the year filming the gloomy HBO period revival of Perry Mason (2020 to present) – “I was already punishing him with guilt for not being home,” she said – she was not looking for another starring role.

Still, something in Kate’s ambition and savvy, as well as the humour of her marital tussles with Hal, called to her.

She agreed to a video call with the show’s creator Debora Cahn, a veteran of political dramas Homeland (2011 to 2020) and The West Wing (1999 to 2006).

Cahn had wanted Russell for the role, trusting that Kate would benefit from the actress’ beauty, grace and ability to convey emotions even in characters who control and repress their feelings.

But Kate was a more neurotic proposition than past Russell characters – gorgeous enough to be the subject of a Vogue spread in the show but also sweaty, squirrelly, with a lot of angst behind the poise.

“There’s a part of Kate that is itchy and twitchy and always uncomfortable in her own skin,” Cahn said in a recent telephone interview.

Russell was a woman of far more poise, Cahn assumed, but she knew that Russell was also a skilled actor. She could perform that discomfort. And yet, as she watched Russell squirm through the video call, she discovered that discomfort was part of the Russell package too.

While Kate is a creature of ambition, Russell has always held her work more lightly, even as she pushes herself to give vivid, committed performances.

“When I’m there, I work hard,” she said. “I want to be good.” But she drew a distinction between herself and Rhys, even though they take on many of the same projects. (He is in Extrapolations and Cocaine Bear too.)

“He likes to be busy,” she said. “I like to never be busy. I like to, like, drift away and roam the park.” NYTIMES

The Diplomat is available on Netflix.