Allison Janney Modeled Her Character from ‘The Diplomat’ on Hillary Clinton

Over drinks just before The Diplomat’s season-one premiere, creator Debora Cahn bristled at a suggestion from Jinny Howe, Netflix’s vice president of scripted series and a champion for the savvy political drama. Howe wanted Cahn to consider a big-name guest star to play a new character in season two (hitting Netflix on October 31). “I go on to give her the most condescending lecture about stunt casting that you can imagine, and how terrible it is, and how everybody’s just watching the actor and not watching the character,” Cahn says. Then Howe revealed that the name she had in mind was Allison Janney. “At which point,” Cahn continues, “I literally slid myself under the table.”

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Cahn got an Emmy nomination for her longtime work as a writer and producer on The West Wing, where Janney’s C.J. Cregg emerged as an instant, beloved fan favorite. The prospect of luring Janney back to (fictional) DC proved too enticing to deny, especially once the actor herself came enthusiastically on board. “Writing for her was terrifying,” Cahn says. “I wanted to do her justice.”

The creator had a perfectly major role ready to cast in Grace Penn, the oft-mentioned, never-seen vice president of a White House embroiled in scandal. The Diplomat’s first season builds to the revelation that our protagonist, newly appointed UK ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), is being groomed to step in for Penn amid the swirling drama. The show’s second season culminates with the two brilliant if very different women meeting face-to-face in London—leading to some twisty fallout.

“She knows that her position is in danger and that there are some people that are in line to replace her. And Kate Wyler is one of them,” Janney says in her first interview about The Diplomat. “She’s suffered a lot by being an ambitious woman, where men didn’t like her and women didn’t like her. Her journey to where she is now was not an easy one, with lots of land mines, and she survived it.”

In that sense, Janney’s Grace fits The Diplomat like a glove. The series sharply and boldly examines how powerful women in politics fare under the likability microscope. “From the get-go, I’ve had a lot of feelings about women leaders and who we think is electable and who we think is brilliant—do those things intersect?” Cahn says. In a pivotal initial scene between Grace and Kate, we see the adversarial pair negotiate that question in real time. (You can watch a clip above.) Grace sees a rival who may also be her successor. She judges Kate’s methods, her presentation, while also considering the best way forward for them.

The scene includes Grace making a specific dig at Kate’s messy hair, which viewers expressed all kinds of opinions about during season one. “People comment on Kate Wyler’s hair a lot more than we imagined that they would,” Cahn says. “This was a really great opportunity to talk about what Kate thinks she’s doing, which Grace very clearly points out: ‘You’re trying to show that you’re working so hard that you don’t have time. That’s not what’s reading.’”

Grace, meanwhile, lands in The Diplomat with a steely blonde bob—a look that wasn’t chosen by Cahn and co. so much as handed to them, since it’s how Janney showed up to set. (Cahn’s reaction: “Fantastic!”) The actor’s template for her character? Hillary Clinton. “It’s unbelievable, the experience that woman has and how incredibly smart she is, yet she’s still polarizing—she’s respected, she’s admired, she’s hated,” Janney says of Clinton. “One of the things that Hillary faced in her campaign is that she wasn’t warm or friendly enough. She didn’t smile. Grace suffers from that a little bit—she’s not a particularly fuzzy character.”

Janney leaned into this particular detail as a way to differentiate Grace from The West Wing’s C.J.. She gets giddy when asked about returning to the world of TV politics. “I watch all the MSNBC shows—I love to listen to people talk about politics, but I don’t enjoy talking about it myself,” Janney says. “Now I get to be in that arena again.” She can’t say too much, given where the season ends, but Grace’s positioning within the world of The Diplomat only gets more intriguing over time. (The show has already been renewed for a third season.) After reading the end of season two, “I got chills and I threw the script across the room and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’” Janney says. “It was the best moment I’ve ever had reading a script.”

The Diplomat’s first season opens with an international tragedy. Season two, by contrast, unpacks the grave geopolitical mistakes being made right here at home. Cahn maintains The West Wing’s famed belief in politicians who are doing their best, but spins it toward more dramatic—and less optimistic—ends. “Let’s take away the easy answer of ‘a bad guy did that’ and say, ‘No, a bunch of really good people did that. And how the fuck does that go down? How did we get here with the good guys?’” she says. That complexity informs the dynamic between Kate, who’s trying to stop the stream of bad decisions, and Grace, her figurehead for those diplomatic mistakes.

“I’m okay with saying to the world, ‘Okay, here is somebody that Kate Wyler, who we know and love, hates and blames for an evil act. And then [she] learns a little bit about what happened and realizes, ‘Oh no: She did something really smart, really strategic, really brave, and it went wrong like things go wrong,’” Cahn teases. “The basis on which we judge leaders can be so flimsy.”

Cahn wrote and shot The Diplomat’s second season when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, with Vice President Kamala Harris very much in mind while devising Grace as a character. “How the smartest and most experienced and most capable women wind up shuttled out the side door was very, very important for me to think about,” Cahn says. But The Diplomat will arrive on Netflix a mere five days before an election that may see Harris becoming the president herself. “It’s a little bit scary,” Cahn says of the timing. “We did not see this coming.”

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