Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys will likely be adding some new decor objects to their stunning Brooklyn Heights brownstone after Sunday’s Emmy Awards.
The pair are both in the running for some prestigious hardware as they’re nominated for a total of five awards, making them the unofficial prom king and queen of the night.
After meeting playing husband and wife on the FX hit “The Americans” in 2012, while Russellwas still married, they went on to become an offscreen duo.
They’ve now been together for more than a decade, have built an idyllic Brooklyn life together and become TV’s de facto power couple.
Russell, 50, is nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Netflix’s “The Diplomat,” on which she plays feisty ambassador Kate Wyler. She’s also picked up an executive producer nomination for the show.
Meanwhile, Rhys, 51, is nominated twice for individual acting performances — as a small-island mayor in Apple TV’s horror-comedy “Widow’s Bay” and for playing a superrich mogul who is suspected of killing his wife in Netflix’s “The Beast in Me.” He also picked up an executive producer nomination for “Widow’s Bay.”
Amidst all of the acclaim, the two have remained remarkably down-to-earth.
“Doing awards shows is unnatural,” Russell told Varietylast month. “This year I was like, ‘Should I get a beta blocker? Would that actually help, or would I do something really embarrassing?’
“Am I going to try Xanax?” Rhys added. “We do say this every year: ‘Let’s enjoy this, because it —’”
“ ‘Could be the last,’ ” Russell continued.
“I still get very nervous going to them every time,” Rhys said. “It’s not comfortable. And as much as we say, ‘Let’s enjoy this,’ I never enjoy it, because I’m always scared and worried and anxious.”
Although they’ll be making a very public outing, the couple have always conducted their relationship away from prying eyes.
Back in early 2014, I was watching rugby with a few pals in the famed Red Lion on Bleeker Street in NYC’s West Village when we bumped into Rhys.
The beers were flowing and we quickly started chatting away.
Was Rhys dating anyone, I teased him after Page Six had reported he’d been spotted out with his on-screen wife.
“I’m seeing someone,” the Welsh actor replied with a cheeky grin. “She’s in the costume department.”
The pair have never detailed when they actually got together, but during an 2017 appearance on “Watch What Happen Live,” when Andy Cohen asked Rhys if they fell in love on the show, he replied, “Yes, absolutely.”
Asked if Russell had fallen for Rhys while she was still married, an industry source told Page Six, “Absolutely.
“It’s never been quite reported that she left her husband for Matthew,” said another source who knows the pair. “But all I can say is the timeline makes sense.”
Now the pair live with Russell’s kids, son River, 19, and daughter Willa, 15, from her marriage to contractor Shane Deary, and their son Sam, 10, in a stunning brownstone they renovated.
Rhys admitted he can’t believe his luck, telling Page Sixin 2025 that Russell was out of his league. “I still wonder how I’m getting away with it,” he joked.
It wasn’t, however, necessarily love at first sight for the two.
In 2017, they recalled their first encounter on “WWHL” with Cohen. Rhys explained he initially asked Russell out after a kickball game in 2002.
“I very drunkenly asked for her number,” he recalled.
Rhys said he left Russell a boozy message — and she didn’t return the call.
Russell, meanwhile, forgot all about the encounter until they started filming “The Americans” in 2012.
“You said, ‘You know, we’ve met before, I said, ‘No, we haven’t.’ You said, ‘Yeah, 10 years ago at a kickball party.’ As soon as you said that, I went, ‘Of course I remember that!’ ” she told Rhys and Cohen.
Ultimately, it wasn’t kickball but playing two KGB spies living in the Washington, DC, suburbs on “The Americans” that brought them together. The show started shooting in early 2012. In December 2013, it was announced that Russell and Deary had split, with her rep saying they’d separated over the summer.
Russell and Rhys kept their romance under wraps before tacitly confirming they were dating in March 2014 when they were spotted holding hands on a date at The Public Theater in New York City, where they saw Steven Soderbergh’s play, “The Library.”
Now they are homebodies in brownstone Brooklyn, regularly spotted at local coffee shops and farmers markets.
“They’ve become kind of fixtures of the neighborhood,” said the source who knows them, noting that Rhys has frequently been the auctioneer and host for the annual Brooklyn Bridge Park Gala, supporting the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy.
“They’re so friendly and normal,” the source added. “They seem to be very into each other, you see them walking around like any other couple.”
Russell — facing off against Zendaya of “Euphoria” and Rhea Seehorn of “Pluribus,” as well as Carrie Coon for “The Gilded Age” and Chase Infiniti in “The Testaments” — may be the Emmys most overdue nominee.
She’s been on TV since she was 15 — she was cast on the “All New Mickey Mouse Club” alongside future superstars Britney Spears, Ryan Gosling and Christina Aguilera — and has received six Emmy nominations but never won.
Her breakout role came at age 22, starring as a doe-eyed, wild-maned NYU student on J.J. Abrams’s “Felicity.” The show ran from 1998 to 2002 and made her, and her curly hair, something of a ’90s icon.
By the time “Felicity” came to an end, Russell was spent. “I didn’t want to do it anymore,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 of acting, and she decided to step away from the business, possibly forever.
She moved to New York and tried to live as normal a life as possible — a hiatus that “saved me,” she said — before ultimately wading back into the business in the 2004 Neil LaBute play “Fat Pig.” But it was “The Americans” that brought her officially back into the spotlight.
This March, she received the Actor Award for “The Diplomat,” which, along with the Netflix political drama earning its highest Emmy nomination tally for its third season, makes her the night’s dark horse.
Rhys, meanwhile, is something of a favorite. “Widow’s Bay” could well sweep the Emmys, nabbing him a Lead Actor in a Comedy trophy.
He’s also a strong contender for Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for his work on “The Beast in Me.” If he wins both, it would be a rare occurrence. The only male actor ever to nab two acting Emmys in a single year is James Earl Jones, who pulled off the double win in 1991.
No matter what happens, the two have won at love.
Russell lovingly refers to Rhys as “my Welsh guy.” While accepting the award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for “The Americans,” in September 2018, he praised his longtime partner as “the woman who truly got me this award, who just stands in front of me every day and just puts up with me.”
The two have never married, and if and when they ever do, don’t count on any public proposals.
Rhys has joked that if he were to propose on a public stage, she would “punch [him] clean in the mouth.”
“Do it on your own time, man! For me to have to do anything public is horrifying,” Russell recently told Variety. “I would die. I would say no. Good night!”
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