As the lead in Netflix’s high-stakes political dramedy The Diplomat, Keri Russell has nailed it again. She tells C about her real-life power couple, girls’ trips, and a new friend in the State Department
Words by RICHARD GODWIN
Photography by JACK WATERLOT
Styling by EMMA JADE MORRISON
Every fall, Keri Russell leaves her husband in charge of the children for a short spell and takes herself on a little solo vacation. “I’ll fly into San Francisco, drive down to Big Sur — those giant redwoods are so California to me,” says the award-winning actress, 48. “It’s mostly, you know, romantic couples. But my romance is just with my book and myself. I use it as a time to think and regroup and be quiet.” A couple of years ago, she was thinking harder than usual. The screenwriter Debora Cahn had sent her a script for a show called The Diplomat. She had Russell in mind for the title role. The trouble was, the script was “really good.” Even worse, Russell really liked Cahn when they met.
This was a problem because Russell, mother of three, didn’t want to take on another huge TV series. She’d done a couple of those and knew what was involved: 18-hour days and six-day weeks in the case of the college drama Felicity, which dominated her early 20s. What’s more, the timing didn’t work. Russell and her husband, the Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, take turns, and it was his time. “Matthew was away working, and it was my turn to be home and do the laundry and make lunch and stuff,” she says. “But I thought, ‘I have to do this show.’”
It’s fair to say that Russell — and Rhys — made the right call. The Diplomat, which premiered on Netflix in spring 2023, is a huge hit. Season two drops on Halloween, and season three is already in production. Russell loves it. “The character Debora created is such a mess,” she says. “She’s so bossy, she’s so single-minded and focused on things, and then she has this extraordinarily messy relationship with her husband. I don’t want to play the beautiful girl, I want to play the person who’s a mess.”
As one critic wrote of Russell’s performance: “She’s so deft you wish she had the job in real life.” Indeed, Russell is almost outrageously watchable as Kate Wyler, a career diplomat who has cut her teeth in the fractious world of Middle East politics and is abruptly dropped into the U.S. Embassy in London as the series begins, charged with safeguarding the special relationship following a terror attack on a British warship. To do so, she must grapple with Iranian agents, Russian mercenaries, and worst of all, British politicians. As a rare female ambassador, she is also being scrutinized and patronized and manipulated by her semi-estranged husband, Hal, another ambitious former ambassador. So, like Ginger Rogers, she must do the job backward and in heels.
Russell is a delight to talk to, even over Zoom: She is warm, candid, and funny, with a worldly wisdom that comes from balancing a long career with ordinary family life (she has River, 17, and Willa, 13, from a previous marriage, and Sam, 8, with Rhys). As we’re talking, Willa is in the middle of a group chat that keeps popping up on Russell’s computer. “How do I turn it off?” she asks. “Those little jerks!” She has quite sensibly denied her younger children smartphones: “The 13-year-old is like, ‘Mom, this is crazy — I need a phone,’ and I’m like, ‘No, you don’t.’” But any antagonism seems affectionate and, crucially, mutual. Her children’s nickname for Russell and her friends is “Moms Gone Wild.”
But back to The Diplomat. Kate is clearly a gift of a role, and Russell read widely while researching. Paul Richter’s book The Ambassadors gave her a strong sense of the kind of diplomat Kate would be. “She wouldn’t be doing the fancy jobs in London or Paris or Rome. She’d be in the Middle East. It would be a bit more rough and tumble. She’d speak different languages and know a lot more about the culture and the people and the different factions and tribes.” The show itself clearly has its rewards, not least because it is filmed on location in the UK. “London in the summer is just amazing,” she says. “The parks. Everyone’s spilling out onto the street from pubs, staying out so late at night.”
Russell has also secured some fancy dinner invites from her real-life counterpart, Ambassador Jane Hartley. “She is actually only the second woman American ambassador to the UK. Isn’t that ridiculous? But she is amazing and fabulous and has become a friend. Through her I’ve met all sorts of people within the British government.” And how did she find those guys? “Everyone’s nice at a dinner party. I’m sitting at a table with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Samantha Power [head of the U.S. Agency for International Development]. Actors are the clowns, you know? I’m not doing important things for the world. So it’s incredible to get to be with those people and hear about their world.”
Overall, she sees the show as a “love letter” to the State Department and the Foreign Service. “It’s like, ‘We think you’re great. We think what you’re doing is incredible, under such duress and with hardly any thanks, and we want to tell stories about it.’” In this sense, it’s not far from Aaron Sorkin’s political fantasy The West Wing, which eased the despair many viewers felt about U.S. leadership when it aired from 1999 to 2006. Russell doesn’t shy away from the parallel. “We’re a cousin to The West Wing,” she says. Many of the creators are veterans of the show, including showrunner Cahn, director Alex Graves, and Allison Janney, who plays the U.S. vice president in season two. Russell is keen to stress that any parallels between the storyline and current events are purely coincidental. “People are going to think that we did this because of what’s going on, but all these stories were written so long ago. When you see it, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
“I’ll fly into San Francisco, drive to Big Sur… but my romance is with my book and myself.”
Keri russell
But the heart of the series is not so much the politics as the romance around the work itself. As in The Americans, in which Russell and Rhys played married Soviet spies living deep undercover in suburban America, The Diplomat is centered on a couple who are obsessed with their work. There are echoes of the Clintons but also, in Rufus Sewell’s portrayal of Hal, of Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who helped broker peace in the Bosnian war in 1995. “They could be fucking, they could be fighting, it’s all the same — they’re always having this conversation about work.”
As for her own workplace romance, it’s still going strong. Russell and Rhys fell in love on the set of The Americans while playing Elizabeth and Philip Jennings. She learned later, however, that they had met 10 years earlier at a party in Rustic Canyon. “We were some of the last to leave. I was moving to New York really soon after that, and I remember he and his friend were trying to get me to stay, saying, ‘We have beer left.’ Matthew got my number and left a drunk message on my machine. But then I moved to New York and forgot all about it.”
Until a decade later, that is, when she was doing fight training for The Americans and Rhys let slip that he had tried it on with her a decade before. It didn’t take long for the romance to blossom. “It just works or it doesn’t, right?” Russell says. “I was just totally in love with him. It’s different being in love in your late 30s than when you’re 21. You know yourself better. You’re so lucky if you get to fall in love with someone at that age. You want different things and you notice different things.” It helped, of course, that The Americans was “such a fun ride.” She says, “It was so well received. The critics liked it. And the whole thing was just heady and fun and sexy. I never understand people in their 40s complaining about their age. The 40s is the best time. I feel like everything is just starting to work… it’s such a relief to not have to be the most beautiful person or the most romantic person anymore.”
Russell has experienced enough fluctuations in her career to appreciate the good times. She was 15 when she started acting. She grew up in Arizona and later Colorado, where she spent much of her teenage years in a dance studio. She was never particularly ambitious, but her whole troupe happened to audition for The Mickey Mouse Club. It was “a stroke of luck” that she was the one who made it through. It was, she reflects, a fun way to spend her teenage years. “When most teenagers were smoking pot and drinking, I was learning choreography to bad R&B,” she says. “I still stand by the fact that kids working is creepy. But it was the best of that world because 19 of us were teenagers, so it was kind of like being in a small performing arts school or something.”
Soon after that came four seasons of Felicity, which was based on New York University but filmed in Culver City. As wonderful as the show was, it left Russell utterly burned out. She was in almost every scene and the demands were huge. “I loved my experience, and I’m still friends with J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves. But I think I was so burned out afterward. I wanted to show up to my friends’ birthday parties and all that. I had saved money because I had no time to spend it. So I just decided to not do it anymore.” So she moved to the real New York and rented an apartment in the West Village with a friend.
“I never understand people in their 40s complaining about their age.”
Keri russell
“I did all the things I wanted to do,” she says. “I went dancing with my girlfriends, went to great restaurants, shared hilarious stories about dates, and just showed up. I got to be a kid wandering around the city, going to museums, reading books all day. It really saved me. It’s the reason I’m still in the business.”
Balance is clearly important to Russell. “It’s an amazing job and I love it and it’s afforded me this incredible life of adventure, but I always think of it like it’s an uphill sprint when you’re doing it. There are no days off. You can’t say, ‘It’s my kid’s birthday; I’m going to skip out early today.’ That’s not the way this job works.”
She offsets it by taking “multiple months off” when she doesn’t do much at all, except for the occasional trips with the Moms Gone Wild to Joshua Tree. “I don’t want to do some cool independent movie on my off time; I want to just go home and fold laundry and be with kids and get drunk with my girlfriends and stare at the wall. I have a friend who always says you can have all those things that you want — a career, a family, friends. But you can’t do them all well at the same time.”
Hair by BRIAN MAGALLONES using Oribe for TraceyMattingly.com.
Makeup by TINA TURNBOW using Testament Beauty.
Manicure by ANGEL MY LINH at A-Frame Agency.
Feature image: PRADA coat, $4,500. BULGARI ring, $3,800.
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of C Magazine.
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