Keri Russell is having trouble remembering the timeline because it’s all so insane.
Season 2 of “The Diplomat,” her Netflix show about career foreign-service officers and their political machinations that lead all the way up to the presidency, came out on October 16, 2024. Two weeks later, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States for the second time. When Season 3 came out exactly a year later, 10 months after Trump’s inauguration, he’d already dismantled much of the diplomatic corps.
And now here she was, calling in from Europe, where she was finishing up shooting Season 4, and we were at war with Iran. It’s the kind of scenario her character, Kate Wyler, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, is constantly trying to avoid at all costs.
Was Trump’s inauguration really just a year and a half ago? “God, we’re, like, 80 years old now!” she cried out, laughing.
Series creator Debora Cahn, who cut her teeth writing for “The West Wing” and “Homeland,” based Russell’s character on Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Obama who also ran USAID for the entirety of the Biden administration. By the time the actress finally met the diplomat in April 2024, the agency that Power had run for four years was just…gone.
“I’ve definitely paid more attention to politics, that’s for sure, in a way that I didn’t necessarily before,” Russell said. “I mean, I’m really attuned now to the subtlety of public messaging in statements that world leaders make, and the finesse and delicate nature of that wording — contrary to the messaging our country seems to be giving the world these days!”
It’s hard for Russell to ignore that impact when she’s standing in line at the grocery store or the airport and people come up to her saying they were in the foreign service for 30 years or spent time as a war correspondent in Iraq.
“My impression is that it’s fun for them to be watching some of the behind-the-curtains stuff that was kind of private in their world, that is now being talked about on a glossy television show,” she said. “I hope they feel that it’s fun.”
She views the show more and more as the cast and crew’s “love letter” to people who dedicate their lives to foreign service. In particular, she said, she delights in “all the worker bees in all the little tiny hotel rooms who are, like, staying up till three in the morning and getting drunk with each other and maybe having sex sometimes.”
And she’s really feeling for them now, as they watch the work they’re devoted to disappear because someone new got elected. Before every season, Cahn and the cast talk to real people in government — and this time, a lot of them said that they didn’t think there was anything to be done, that they just had to watch their profession burn down and then wait for it to be rebuilt from the ground up.
“Some of the people I spoke to were watching their whole departments, thousands of people, lose their jobs — people who had given their lives in service to help people they don’t even know, just to be told to within an hour to get their shit out of there in a box,” she said. “That stuff definitely affected how we walked into Season 4 and how we played it.”
If Season 3 was about Kate and her more unscrupulous foreign-officer husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), appearing as husband and wife in public while consciously uncoupling behind the scenes, Season 4 is about Kate attempting to recommit to Hal as he dives into being vice president to Allison Janney’s POTUS, Grace Penn, and finding herself completely on the back burner.
“She’s trying really hard to be what, in her mind, is the good wife that people want her to be,” Russell said. “Maybe a little less loud, maybe a little less bossy. Obviously, she’s going to fail!”
Kate always fails at toeing the line because she is simply not someone who can be contained. She believes in her work. “Interestingly, Kate does not have kids, and I love that it’s not even a discussion,” Russell said. “It feels rebellious in some way, because a woman always has to have kids — and if she doesn’t, there has to be some sob story about how she tried and she couldn’t, or she didn’t meet the right person.”
She also enjoys how ridiculous and convoluted Kate and Hal’s relationship was in Season 3. “The fun part was having to define, in awkward public moments, what the marriage was at that point, even though we were separated,” she said.
In one of her favorite scenes, President Penn’s chief of staff asks them what the cadence of Kate’s visits to D.C. will be, and it’s clear they’ve never discussed it. So they hash it out in front of her.
“Obviously, he’s mad because I’m f—ing somebody else. We’re publicly doing that passive-aggressive, snarky thing of like, ‘Oh, I’ll come whenever I can. I mean, I am also busy with a big job.’ I love those scenes where there’s multiple things at once.”
Also entertaining this season? Kate’s reaction to being sidelined, which Russell compares to Holly Hunter’s in “Broadcast News,” “just breaking down every door and letting everyone know her opinions about everything, no matter if they want to hear it or not, including taking her clothes off and jumping in pools to get her point across.”
But this work isn’t as easy as Russell makes it sound. Memorizing scripts with all their diplomatic jargon is definitely a challenge, since Cahn comes from the Aaron Sorkin school of “The West Wing” and believes in long scenes with tons of dialogue and many moving parts. In Season 4, Russell says they did a 16-page scene followed by a 12-page scene and then a nine-page scene, highly unusual in television.
“There’s no system,” she said of her approach to that kind of workload. “I usually just get some young kid on set, like, ‘Hey, come run this with me over and over.’”
Anyway, she’ll happily memorize jargon if it means Cahn can keep writing about people engaged in high-level issues of global importance “in this completely human, ridiculous, fun way. Debra is able to capture what it’s like to do very important things but still be worried about the minutiae of your own life, or the brutality of relationships that you have chosen, and still make it funny.”
For now, she’s having a blast delivering Cahn’s dialogue and hanging out in a beautiful European location. “When [this show] ends, it’s going to be such a f—ing bummer,” she said. “Like, I’ll have to go back to not-smart, not-funny writing and not these amazing locations? What the f—? I’m going to have to just be someone’s girlfriend in an action movie or something!”
She quickly corrected herself, laughing. “I love that I said I’d be the girlfriend. At this point, I’d be the mom.”
This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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