In the twenty-first episode of Season 2 of “Felicity,” a sweet, slightly loopy television series about college life which débuted on the WB in 1998, the dreamy but unreliable Ben Covington, played by Scott Speedman, shows up at the Manhattan coffee shop where his ex-girlfriend, Felicity Porter, works, hoping to woo her back. Felicity, played by Keri Russell, looks a bit wary, her hair in short, meringue-stiff curls, the residue of a post-heartbreak haircut.
Ben says, in a husky whisper, “I tried to think, What was the one moment, the sort of turning point, where I blew it?” He’s found the answer: a movie date they had planned, months earlier, in Bryant Park.
“ ‘The Gold Rush,’ Charlie Chaplin,” Felicity says, both amused and stung. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I didn’t show up,” he adds.
“Yeah, I remember that, too,” she says, but this time she locks eyes with him and smiles. As he spools out his feelings (there are a lot of them!), she listens closely, and then she opens up an apology present he has brought for her—a flat, round package wrapped in crinkly brown paper.
“You know what that is?” Ben asks.
“Yeah, it’s a film cannister,” Felicity says, with a laugh.
“Nah—it’s a time machine,” he says. Russell’s eyes soften; the corners of her mouth curl upward. It’s the moment when Felicity forgives Ben—or maybe she already had. The way Russell plays the scene, it’s not about arch soap-opera drama but about the quiet bliss of first love, a subject the show treated with unusual gravity.
A quarter century later, the exchange still feels romantic, even when viewed in a grainy YouTube clip on a thirteen-inch laptop, with all the great pop songs that originally scored the series (in this episode, Sarah McLachlan’s “Ice Cream”) replaced by gluey soundalikes, because the network let the rights lapse. The clip is its own sort of time machine, taking viewers back to an era when television was becoming, to quote the “Felicity” theme song, a new version of itself. Once upon a time, serious actors looked down on TV. Then, in the nineties, the medium began to crackle, producing, among other things, warm, sophisticated shows about relationships, such as “My So-Called Life.” In the two-thousands, cable was dominant, full of rule-breaking antihero dramas (you know the ones). When streaming emerged, seasons got shorter and slicker, and over time “comfort TV” became the standard. Russell has been a steady presence throughout these shakeups, with a key role in each era: first, the warmhearted Felicity; then, a decade later, the cold-eyed Soviet spy Elizabeth Jennings, in FX’s “The Americans”; and, most recently, the high-strung, messy-haired, questionably hygienic foreign-affairs expert Kate Wyler, on the Netflix political thriller “The Diplomat.” Television, an intimate medium that rewards emotional transparency, made Russell a star.
On a steamy day in June, Russell biked to her favorite restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, near the brownstone where she lives with her family, and locked her retro Dutch eight-speed to a lamppost. (She doesn’t own a car.) The waitress led us to a discreet table in the corner, but Russell suggested that we decamp to some stools facing the window, right next to the bar. Customers sitting there shot us curious, guarded glances, discreetly confirming the identity of the small woman in huge tortoiseshell glasses with her telltale hair in a bun, like an elegant Clark Kent. She ordered a beer, an empty wineglass, and a glass of ice, announcing that she planned to follow the beer with a few rounds of extra-chilled Sancerre.
Russell had recently finished filming Season 3 of “The Diplomat” in London and New York, and she was in an ebullient mood, looking forward to a “monumental summer,” the type of break she hadn’t had in ages. Next year, she would turn fifty. Her son River had just graduated from St. Ann’s School and was heading off to college; he is the eldest of her three kids, two of whom she had with her ex-husband, Shane Deary, a carpenter and contractor, the third with her partner, Matthew Rhys, who was also her co-star on “The Americans.” She was planning to head to Oregon with a friend to attend an off-the-grid event celebrating the “divine feminine”; she would spend weekends upstate with Rhys, who was filming a horror-comedy series in Boston during the week. Then she’d spend time on Martha’s Vineyard.
She had just attended a series of graduation parties, where she’d marvelled at her son’s friends, who struck her as gentler, and more mature, than the teen boys with whom she’d grown up. She imitated River throwing his arm around her in celebration: “I never did that with my parents, ever.” On prom night, she had waited behind a tree, paparazzo style, to snap a photograph of the boys walking down a leafy street. “Like a creep,” she joked.
Russell, who spent her teen years in Colorado, hadn’t gone to her own prom. “No—because I kind of . . . left high school,” she said, taking a sip of her first Sancerre.
At fifteen, on a whim, Russell, a pretty jock with a mane of wild, honey-blond curls, passionate about her after-school dance classes but with no particular dreams about show business, had tagged along with some friends to a Disney open casting call at the Colorado Convention Center. She didn’t sing; she’d never acted. Even so, she got plucked from the crowd, then offered a role in the ensemble of “The All New Mickey Mouse Club.” For the rest of high school, Russell spent months at a time in Orlando, Florida, the cool older girl to a cast of tweens that included Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling, and Justin Timberlake. She lived in a nearby apartment complex with her mother and dated another cast member, Tony Lucca, who came from the Midwest. (“My Michigan boyfriend,” she called him fondly.) In the years that followed, Russell played a babysitter in the movie “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid”; she starred in a soap opera, “Emerald Cove,” in which Lucca played her boyfriend and Russell’s best friend in the “All New Mickey Mouse Club” cast, Ilana Miller, played the best friend. It was stardom lite, nineties style: there was no internet to track her every move, but she was huge with teens.
When Russell was seventeen, Disney let her go: it seemed like the company dropped girls when they got too sexy, although the boys could stay on. (There was a running joke that anyone who flirted with Lucca got fired, another Mouseketeer told me.) That year, Russell moved, on her own, to Los Angeles, first couch-surfing, then renting a place in the Pacific Palisades. She was already professional, with a devoted manager; she never waited tables. But the nineties television market was a lurid one for teen actresses, saturated with jailbait fantasies: Russell played a high-school student groomed by a psychopath in “The Babysitter’s Seduction,” on Lifetime; a hair-tossing homewrecker in a Jon Bon Jovi video; a dim-witted hottie in a Dudley Moore sitcom; and a rich (but hot!) virgin in Aaron Spelling’s “Malibu Shores.” In the fascinatingly rank sex-comedy film “Eight Days a Week,” the nerd hero delivered a breathless semiotic aria about Russell’s breasts as the lens hovered above her neon-pink bikini like a salacious hummingbird.
In her early twenties, Russell scored her first breakthrough role—and was met with a blast of It Girl publicity that nearly knocked her over. The part of Felicity, a dorky Palo Alto premed student who follows her high-school crush to the “University of New York,” struck skeptical observers—among them, her co-star Speedman, whom she wound up dating—as an unlikely match for the babe from “Malibu Shores.” But Russell’s performance was a beam of pure light, burning off any condescension. Like many smart teen shows of the period, the series—the first created by J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves—got some patronizing coverage, particularly after that Season 2 haircut. Loyal viewers knew better. In a world of posers, Russell was a spontaneous presence, sensitive enough to capture the inner life of an emotionally intense “good girl” without making her cloying.
It took a decade for her to find a role as complex as that again: that of the Soviet spy Elizabeth Jennings. Yet, even after anchoring “The Americans,” the best drama of the post-“Sopranos” television renaissance, Russell never quite dropped a nagging sense of herself as a gun-shy performer, an accidental actress who still found it embarrassing that she earned her living playing make-believe. “It’s so creepy,” she told me, then muttered, “I shouldn’t say that.” Did she mean acting or celebrity? “Both,” she said, laughing.
Every time we met, Russell spoke to me about how grateful she was, which is the tax that famous people are required to pay journalists. But she had zero nostalgia for the model of network production that she’d grown up with, during a period she summed up, with a grimace, as “the old days—the life-arresting days.” At the turn of the century, starring in a television drama meant filming about twenty hour-long episodes per year. Russell drove to the show’s Los Angeles set at 5 a.m. every morning, filmed until late at night, then ran lines. Her free time was frequently eaten up by publicity, which made her so anxious that she began sweating through her silk blouses. (A hypnotherapist told her, unhelpfully, that she was too self-conscious.) She told me that she much preferred the medium’s “modern template,” which involved an intense, disciplined “uphill sprint” rather than a marathon: thirteen episodes per season for “The Americans”—a perfect length, because “you can really build a story”—and just eight for “The Diplomat.”
“And then for six months you do laundry!” she told me, gleefully. “Save enough money, hopefully, that you can take those months off. Put it back into your life, or your relationship, or your kids, or your hobby.” Other actors stacked up projects like poker chips, supplementing TV work with movies, theatre gigs, or branding deals, feverishly hedging against the risks of a shrinking industry. Russell prided herself on her discipline, on doing a job right; she also had no interest in making work her whole life.
Three Sancerres in, we spoke about the complexities of her blended family. “I think one person has to be the punching bag, a little bit—you have to, for the kids,” she said, of the aftermath of her separation from Deary. Since then, things had grown easier: she, Deary, and Rhys sometimes went on vacation together with their kids. Her two older children, River, eighteen, and Willa, thirteen, moved between their parents’ places every Friday. She and Rhys had never married; they were still “boyfriend and girlfriend,” she said, waggling her eyebrows like Groucho Marx. There were multiple reasons for that—she preferred to keep her finances separate, for one thing. For another, she thought of her female friends as emotional mainstays as important as any romantic partner. She’d also seen the ways that marriage had affected the women around her—the things they talked themselves into, or into being. “I enjoy the freedom of it,” she said, of the ring she didn’t have on her finger.
She had a similar hesitation when it came to fame. Late in the evening, she held up her phone to show me a funny photograph she’d taken at the Emmys in 2017, a year when she and Rhys were seated in the front row, the industry’s Gold Coast. It was a surreptitious selfie: Russell’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates, reacting to the presence of Dolly Parton, who was visible just over her left shoulder. Sofia Vergara had been seated nearby, too. “She said, ‘Hallo, bella’! ” Russell recalled, giddily. “She had this golden diamond bracelet. She took it off in the middle of the show and unscrewed a jaguar’s head or something—and there was tequila inside.”
Russell giggled, awed by her fellow-star’s vivacity, her easy embrace of glamour. People who knew Russell well kept telling me that Kate Wyler, the war-zone veteran Russell plays on “The Diplomat,” bore some resemblance to the actress: she was an introvert in an extrovert’s profession, darkly funny but too itchy for public life, and prone to self-sabotage. In the series’ most famous scene, Wyler, who has reluctantly accepted the role of Ambassador to the United Kingdom, is read, drag style, by Vice-President Grace Penn, played by Allison Janney. “It’s a visual world,” Penn tells Wyler, clarifying the job of a female diplomat. Nobody would ever look at Wyler’s policy papers, but everyone would see her portrait: “Blond bob, red lipstick, pins like Albright, collars like R.B.G. Glasses—a shorthand so people see what you stand for. And little girls dress like you for Halloween!”
It was a speech with a meta ping, delivered to an actress who had spent years reduced to a hair style. Shortly before Russell biked home from the restaurant, she told me that she’d had a similar showdown with Nora Ephron in 2007, while auditioning for the role in “Julie & Julia” that ultimately went to Amy Adams. Russell, who had recently given birth to River, had bragged to Ephron about how well she was handling new motherhood: she didn’t have a nanny, or even a washer-dryer, just a sling and the confidence to wing it. “She just cut through all of that,” Russell recalled. “She looked at me in a dead stare and said, ‘You need to take yourself more seriously.’ ” It had stung at the time. “But I knew exactly what she meant: ‘Knock it off.’ ”
Russell and I didn’t meet again for a month—she was on her trip out West, then getting her younger kids packed up for camp. During that time, I spoke to some of the female friends whom she had talked about with enormous warmth, starting with two “Mickey Mouse Club” veterans. Ilana Miller, her “Emerald Cove” co-star, had left acting and become a corporate lawyer in New York, where she now worked for a nonprofit. Lindsey Alley, a brassy theatre kid from Florida, had struggled to find roles, eventually pouring her frustration into a witty one-woman show. In 2002, the year that “Felicity” ended, both Miller and Alley were living in Manhattan. Russell—toying with the idea of quitting acting for good—jumped coasts. “We found each other again as twentysomethings,” Alley said. She’d watched Russell on “Felicity” while she was in college herself, studying acting at the University of Missouri. “We had this history together.”
At the time, Russell was newly single, having ended her messy, on-and-off romance with Speedman, which had, at times, been reflected in the show’s scripts. She was exhausted, worn out by the hours and, especially, by the press. She’d socked away enough money to buy herself a second adolescence, this one out of the spotlight. She rented a one-bedroom apartment on Horatio Street, in the far West Village, then went on a kind of rumspringa with her friends—an experience that would bond the women for life.
It wasn’t exactly a drug spree: Russell spent most of her days doing a grand total of nothing, sleeping in and piling up books in her apartment. She read “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” at the coffee shop Doma; she floated through the Whitney Museum, killing time, deliciously, while Alley did shifts at restaurants and Miller, who had just graduated from N.Y.U., was gearing up to apply to law school. New York seemed to her to be a more elevated place than Los Angeles, down to its artistic heroes: one day, in Central Park, she was thrilled to spot Wes Anderson, wearing corduroy. A few nights a week, the three Disney vets would meet up, joined by their friend Sarah Stringer, a nonactor who worked in advertising and, they joked, had “had a good audition.” On Wednesdays, they headed to the Upper East Side, where Alley had lucked into a free sublet from some elderly snowbirds, to eat takeout Thai and watch “The Bachelorette.” On Thursdays, they dressed up for Eighties Night at the bar Don Hill’s, getting happily trashed and dancing until 3 a.m., hooking up, and dishing afterward. “Between the four of us, someone was always laughing hysterically or crying,” Stringer said, recalling that Russell—a fan of the Hemingway novel “The Sun Also Rises”—called this era her “Lady Brett Ashley summer of fun.”
Miller, a child star from Toronto, was feeling the vertigo of abandoning show business. In a mirror-world event, her most famous friend, who had basically played an N.Y.U. student on TV, was suddenly hanging out in Washington Square Park. It wasn’t that Russell never got recognized: on the subway, someone might yell “Felicity!” or make a dumb remark about her hair. “Keri would say, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re so nice here!,’ ” Alley said fondly, remembering her friend’s occasional obliviousness to star treatment. But Russell could also be dryly self-aware: on a trip to Jamaica, some of the girls sneaked into the nude resort Hedonism, where a maître d’ who recognized Russell offered to comp them for the buffet. “You know, one shot from a paparazzi and my career’s over,” Russell joked, sipping her rum-and-coke in a sea of writhing flesh.
One day in Manhattan, Russell went to Film Forum and saw the documentary “Spellbound,” about young spelling-bee champions, which opens with a shot of a teary-eyed boy on a stage, fumbling a guess and murmuring, “Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” as cameras click around him. The movie affected her deeply: these people-pleasing, hyper-disciplined kids, petrified at the prospect of failure, felt intensely familiar. At times, Russell fantasized about applying to Sarah Lawrence and getting a college degree. She could follow a path that her mother—a sweet, New Agey housewife who’d been raised Mormon in California—had never taken. She didn’t do it, though. Instead, she kept delaying, vamping, letting her answering machine fill up.
About eighteen months after moving to New York, she got a phone call from Speedman, with whom she was still friends. “You said you were taking a year off,” he teased her. She started auditioning again; it made little sense to abandon a lucrative career, the one thing she had succeeded at. In the course of the next decade, Russell made a charming indie movie (Adrienne Shelly’s “Waitress”) and a few lesser ones (among them “Goats,” with David Duchovny). She played a mean hot girl in the Neil LaBute play “Fat Pig,” and a likable I.M.F. official in Abrams’s “Mission: Impossible III.” (Her former bosses from “Felicity” still kept her in the mix for popcorn movies they directed, including “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”) She played an idealist in the rom-com “Austenland,” and a do-gooder in the sitcom “Running Wilde.” If Russell was often typecast as a wholesome dream girl, that was just the nature of the job: it was glamorous, but it was gig work. Early in her career, when she turned down a werewolf film she got ambushed by Harvey Weinstein’s bullying brother, Bob, who growled, “Who do you think you are, Meryl Streep?”
On Valentine’s Day, 2007, Russell married her long-term boyfriend, Deary, a carpenter who lived in a Manhattan walkup, far outside the circles she ran with in Hollywood. She was five months pregnant and looking forward to a blissful, attachment-parent experience, having seen Ricki Lake’s natural-childbirth documentary, “The Business of Being Born.” But she also needed to make a living, so in 2006 she signed up for the type of deal she’d always scorned, becoming a face of CoverGirl cosmetics. She’d heard that she was the company’s third choice, cheaper than Drew Barrymore and Jessica Alba, but it was a paycheck. For a year, she posed for print and TV ads, and even filmed an episode of a branded reality series called “The Keri Kronicles,” on MySpace, in which she shopped for baby supplies in the West Village. Then she quit. When I asked her about that proto-influencer project, she slalomed around the topic until I was almost convinced that it had never existed.
Finally, in 2012, Russell got cast in “The Americans,” on FX. By then, big Hollywood stars were taking marquee roles on cable TV; the best shows were more daring, more adult, and more writerly than most of what was in movie theatres. “The Americans,” which was created by the former C.I.A. agent Joe Weisberg and set in the nineteen-eighties, was about Soviet spies who—years into a Potemkin marriage in the Virginia suburbs—unite against their handlers, transforming their fake marriage into the real thing. The match with Rhys was electric. “When you can trust someone, it lets you be better,” Russell said, simply, of how her acting deepened while filming the series.
By the time Season 2 finished shooting, she was separated from Deary and involved with Rhys; when she filmed Season 4, she was pregnant with Sam, who is now nine. (Laundry baskets and other objects hid her belly.) Although “The Americans” had its share of twisty espionage plots, nutty wigs, and bloody murders, it was ultimately a bleak, layered philosophical project about human identity. The show was raw and unsentimental in its exploration of marriage; it was also, in broader terms, about the disguises we all wear in relationships. Philip and Elizabeth Jennings were Soviet spies but also, in their way, trained actors: vulnerable teen recruits who had been groomed by their handlers, before they could fully consent, to become brilliant seducers. Russell played the steely zealot, and Rhys the warm one, full of doubts.
Thomas Schlamme, a veteran television director who brought the “walk and talk” to “The West Wing,” worked on numerous episodes of “The Americans.” He was initially uncertain what to make of the show, whose pilot suggested an action thriller, but when he began to work with Rhys and Russell, three episodes in, it all clicked for him: this was a show about intimate relationships. He compared Russell’s casting to that of James Gandolfini’s in “The Sopranos”—a brilliant choice that elevated and humanized the character. She had an “inner light, an inner soul” that made you feel for Elizabeth, even at her cruellest moments, he said. Russell’s native wariness, and her hesitation to perform, were part of that gift: “It’s never, ‘Ooh, look at me, look what I can do here.’ ”
For Season 3, Schlamme filmed a brutal sequence in which Philip extracts Elizabeth’s tooth without anesthesia. When the actors read the script, they worried that the scene might be gratuitously violent, but Schlamme described it to them as a sex scene in disguise; he cut the dialogue. He told me, “I knew that she could convey this idea—‘I would never let another person on the planet do what I’m allowing you to do.’ To me, that’s what the scene was about.”
During filming, Schlamme told Russell to grab Rhys, tight; she gripped her partner’s arm, hovering below him. The director captured an extreme closeup of one of her eyes, isolated and watering up. “I don’t think the show ever did that kind of closeup again, but it was so important to me because I knew that was the entrance into her,” he said. “She pulled off one tear—it was kind of extraordinary. To me, it summed up her ability, when she wants, to have enormous and immersive trust, to just give in to it completely, in a performance.”
In early July, Russell and I met again, in a lovely, old-fashioned hotel in upstate New York, near a summer house that she and Rhys began renting during the pandemic. Rhys, who was joining us, showed up first, a bit weary after a week of shooting his new show. (The couple tries to alternate jobs when possible, but in practice it isn’t easy.) Unlike Russell, Rhys, a Welshman, is a natural extrovert; he told me that he was eternally aiming to channel the spirit of David Niven. But he shares Russell’s humility about their craft. Rhys’s parents were teachers, and he trained in an élite theatre program. Early on, he scored major stage roles. But in Hollywood he hit a wall for many years, travelling constantly between London and Los Angeles, unable to secure a steady livelihood. Now, in his fifties, he views acting as more mystical, more “elusive,” than ever. “When I was young, it was the full De Niro—pushups before the take! Have to feel every minute! Which is kind of great, because you’re so myopic,” he told me, wistfully. He recalled a line by Peter O’Toole: “You’re just a vessel. And it’s up to the gods whom they fill on what night.”
The actors did multiple chemistry reads before booking their roles on “The Americans,” but it wasn’t until they’d been cast that Rhys reminded Russell they’d met a decade earlier. A couple of weeks before Russell left Los Angeles for the West Village, they had been the final two people at a kickball party hosted by the actress Jennifer Grey. Rhys had asked for Russell’s number, then left a drunk message on her answering machine; she hadn’t called him back. When he reminded her, her eyes widened. “I remember you,” she said, aghast. This had become Rhys’s narrative, at least in interviews: Russell was a prize, and he was a lucky man.
Russell arrived, wearing an extremely cute rust-colored summer outfit that looked as if several napkins had been bewitched by a tailor. I told her we had been discussing the idea that, unlike Rhys, she was a reluctant performer who had become an actress by accident.
“Tell the truth!” Rhys said to her, flashing a white grin like a scythe. “It was your life dream. Her life goal! She’s in character now. That’s how Method she is! She doesn’t come out of character until the—”
“The makeup comes off,” Russell said, smiling.
“No, until the DVD comes out,” he said.
When I asked Rhys to describe what kind of actress she was, Russell joked, “A bad one. A lazy one.”
“No, she’s the antithesis of lazy,” Rhys said, heatedly. “Impeccable in her detail. And rarely, rarely places a foot wrong.” He spun into a rhapsody, praising her as unusually capable of performing the twin roles required of anyone cast as the lead on a major television show: both the main character and the star who established the mood on set. (Former crew members on “The Americans” still called her No. 1, for her place atop the call sheet.)
Rhys described Russell’s bookishness as the key to her craft, citing her ability to pinpoint a character’s arc within a narrative, whereas he more frequently got “lost in the weeds.” After they’d filmed the show’s pilot, he recalled, she handed him a copy of David Benioff’s “City of Thieves,” set in Leningrad. “And you can emote in a fly’s wink,” Rhys concluded, grandly. For the wrenching final episode of the series, in which the Jenningses glimpse their daughter standing on a train platform as they head to Russia without her, Rhys got four takes. But, because the shoot was cut short, Russell got only one.
“I’m not even sure I remember that,” Russell said, sipping a beer.
Too late: Rhys was already reliving the conflict. “I was outraged at the time,” he said. “I was, like, ‘That is disgusting! This is the fucking culmination of six years of work! You can’t do that to her!’ She was, like, ‘It’s O.K., that’s fine.’ Because she’s prepared and then she kind of . . . does it.”
“You’re making me sound very professional,” Russell said, amused.
“No, no, no. I’m just recounting what happened on set. And then I saw it, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, fucking hell, how did she do that?’ ”
“But the writing was really great,” Russell said.
Rhys turned toward me, then whispered, “And the quick deflection.”
I asked how their romance started. “Oh, we just sort of started having sex,” Russell said. “No, I’m kidding. I don’t know.” She turned to Rhys: “How did we get together?” He told me that he’d had his share of on-set romances, and knew the pitfalls: “So, I would say, slowly. With a lot of, kind of, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t. Oh, this is terrible, we shouldn’t!’ . . . Inevitably, a bottle of red wine would be opened.”
Their bosses found out in stages. Season 2’s opening episode includes a sequence in which the Jenningses’ daughter walks in on her parents having oral sex, 69 style. Schlamme told me that, though he loved emotional risk-taking on set, he had always been “stunningly uncomfortable” shooting literal sex scenes, which could feel invasive. Not this time: “They were so comfortable! It was like we were filming a scene about eating Cheerios. And they had jokes. Matthew kept saying, ‘Hey, Keri, could you do me a favor? When she opens the door, could you jerk your head back really far, so it looks like I have a huge penis?’ ” When the scene was done, Schlamme walked over to the script supervisor and said, quietly, “Those two people are fucking.”
Soon afterward, thieves broke into Russell’s house, in Brooklyn, while she and Rhys were asleep in a garden-level bedroom. (Her kids were at Deary’s place.) After hearing noises, the couple barrelled up into the living room, naked, with Rhys brandishing a poker from the fireplace. The thieves ran off with items that they stuffed into Rhys’s backpack. (In Rhys’s telling, he feared having a “Force Majeure”-style failure of nerve in front of his girlfriend; Russell laughed when she heard this account and reminded me that he was a storyteller, saying, “He’s not Irish, but he might as well be.”)
The police arrested the thieves; the district attorney, hoping for a nice news story involving a star, arranged to have the stolen merchandise returned to Russell on set. That’s when a crew member blew the couple’s cover by yelling, in front of the entire production, “Wait, that’s not Keri’s backpack—it’s Matthew’s.”
At the upstate hotel, Russell’s friends Mollie, a retired nonprofit executive, and Andrea, a coder, arrived for a planned hike in the mountains. The actress’s weekly drinking buddies and frequent travel companions, they were fellow-parents at St. Ann’s School—their kids had nicknamed the trio the Moms Gone Wild. We climbed to a high-up shelter, where four chunky stone seats faced a clearing with a dramatic view of the mountains. The previous day, there had been a tragedy in Texas, in which young girls at a summer camp had drowned in a flash flood. The women talked about the event in quiet tones, trading stories of their own near-misses when their children were small—the sorts of scary stories that become funny anecdotes after nothing bad happens, like the time Mollie’s baby fell off a sled on the way home from Fort Greene Park.
Did Russell’s kids want to act? She winced, as if she’d tasted sour milk. “They can do it when they’re older,” she said. “I think it’s Creep City.”
She had recently read Sarah Polley’s memoir, “Run Towards the Danger,” in which the director and actress described, among other things, her misery as a child star on Canadian TV, starring in “Road to Avonlea.” When Polley was nine, she’d been pressured into running through live explosives during the filming of the movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen”; in her teens, she was paralyzed by stage fright while playing Alice in Wonderland. Russell knew that Miller, her lawyer friend, who had recommended the book to her, had started to question whether children should work as professional actors at all.
Russell sympathized with Miller’s thinking. But when she thought back on her early years, she was struck less by moments of danger than by what she described as “adultification”—being exposed early to enormous responsibility. She explained, “The second you start getting paid like an adult, you’re expected—it doesn’t matter what people say!—to act like an adult.” Russell hadn’t been victimized sexually, she noted, although as a young actress she’d had her share of sketchy moments. (Later, she told me, in broadly comic terms, about the time a married producer—“an ogre”—had tried to play footsie with her under the table.) Like every actress of her era, she’d had an “all-around” meeting with Harvey Weinstein. Hers took place in a room at the Peninsula Hotel, in Beverly Hills; because Russell’s manager insisted on chaperoning her, nothing unusual happened, unless you count her and Weinstein bonding over their shared love of Leon Uris novels.
But there were other types of harm. Russell’s mother and her father—a Vietnam vet who worked at a Nissan warehouse, then became a regional sales rep for the automaker—were hardly stage parents, she emphasized. They were unworldly people who had signed Russell’s Disney contract without grasping what it meant, other than a major opportunity. Still, becoming the family’s big earner had been a warping experience that Russell didn’t fully comprehend until she was older. She understood that there were powerful works of art that couldn’t exist without child actors. But that type of sensitivity was a precious substance, one the world was too eager to tap.
“There is money on the line, there are hundreds of people on set, and you can’t have a bad day—you can’t fail,” she said, gazing at the pine trees in the distance, sounding a bit rattled. Regular kids got the chance to screw up, she went on: “And then it’s, like, ‘You’re a kid!’ And you just get to go to bed.”
At the end of July, Russell, looking breezy in frayed-hem ankle jeans, sat in a small studio in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, preparing to rerecord dialogue for “The Diplomat,” which débuted in 2023. Nearby was Debora Cahn, the showrunner, a former playwright who had made her bones with “The West Wing” and “Homeland.” Russell had told me how deeply she trusted Cahn, a savvy survivor in a shrinking environment for ambitious TV. She had crafted “The Diplomat”—a hugely popular political thriller about a brusque national-security whiz who gets abruptly promoted to American Ambassador to the U.K., then groomed as a potential Vice-President—to be a vessel for debates about American political power. Like “The Americans,” the show spirals around a tricky marriage, albeit a more estranged one that frequently feels less like a love affair than like a NATO negotiation.
Season 2 had ended with a satisfyingly bananas cliffhanger in which the U.S. President dies of a heart attack, making Janney’s Vice-President—a shrewd operator who had been the secret instigator of a false-flag attack on a British warship (she had her reasons!)—the first female President. In Season 3, it was getting hard to keep every plot twist straight, even for the people who had constructed them. Midway through recording, a debate broke out as the team tried to sort out the proper tone for one of Russell’s lines. Was Wyler pretending to learn about another character’s tragic backstory, or was she authentically surprised? Had key information been cut during editing?
“Shit! Balls,” Russell said.
“It’s usually more together than this,” Cahn said, laughing at the chaos.
Russell, spotting the next scene on her monitor, said, “Ugh, I have to cry.”
The sequence took place between Wyler and her mercurial husband, a fellow-diplomat played by Rufus Sewell. Wyler was begging him for some type of reconciliation.
“I’m—so—sorry!” Russell said into the microphone, her voice choked with regret, stumbling over each word. “You have to forgive me.” Afterward, Cahn offered a suggestion: she should try playing that line as a demand, rather than as a plea. On the second take, Russell’s bossy tone rubbed up nicely against the neediness of the moment.
After the session, the three of us grabbed beers from a stand in the recording studio’s lobby. Cahn explained that she had initially been resistant to hiring Russell, who was Netflix’s suggestion for the lead role. She’d never watched “Felicity,” which had aired back when she was an Off Off Broadway playwright who didn’t watch TV, and she imagined Russell as someone balletic, “a volcano of power,” not a neurotic. An introductory Zoom—which took place while Russell was midway through cooking a Christmas dinner for her extended family—convinced Cahn otherwise.
“She’s, like, the hair is up,” Cahn said, imitating a frazzled Russell. “And there was some sort of scratching. I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, she’s itchy and twitchy, this is going to be perfect.’ ” It was not the first time that Russell had scored a nerdy role by figuratively putting on glasses the way other actresses took them off.
Cahn, who had worked in television long enough to know how to play to an actor’s strengths, folded elements of Russell’s personality into Wyler’s. The actress was skilled at physical comedy, so “The Diplomat” featured scenes of Wyler sniffing her armpits before running off to handle the aftermath of a bombing, and struggling to escape from a fancy party dress. Russell’s warmth was an additional gift, Cahn said: “She’s very hard not to like, so she can be a fucking cunt on the page. And she sells it, in a way that doesn’t feel oppressive.” A wry remark by the British Prime Minister in Season 2 also touched on this idea: “You’re disarming. It’s useful.”
A week later, Russell and I met up at Café Luxembourg, the Upper West Side bistro that Keith McNally co-founded. She had been reading McNally’s memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” and told me how much she admired McNally’s acid wit, his willingness to dish about his sex life and his worst mistakes, his portrait of the nineties New York she idolized. He had a candor that, she said, felt risky and refreshing for a public figure.
She had just come from a writers’-room meeting with David Pressman, the former Ambassador to Hungary, who had recently published an op-ed in the Times titled “I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here.” Pressman was “gay, Jewish, super-handsome,” she told me, and also socially at ease in a way that fascinated her. “He’s very naturally—well, it seems natural, but maybe it’s hard work for him, I have no idea—very graceful. Self-possessed. The opposite of me.”
Russell had always enjoyed the access her job gave her to brilliant thinkers, people whose jobs were less “shiny” than her own. She and Rhys had attended one of the final state dinners of the Obama Administration; she’d gone to Gloria Steinem’s eighty-eighth-birthday party, thrilled to be among so many feminist powerhouses. But now, with Donald Trump’s second Presidency taking shape, “The Diplomat,” though never a grittily realistic portrait of public service, was beginning to feel less like “competence porn”—the term for escapist procedurals full of brainiacs in suits—than like science fiction, as it struggled to reflect the political moment. Nearly fifteen hundred counterparts to Kate Wyler had just been terminated in DOGE’s purge of the State Department. The questions the writers had been asking Pressman, Russell said, were all about survival under authoritarianism: “Do you leave? Do you quit? Do you fight?”
Russell’s own struggles felt small to her compared with that. And her career, at least by industry measures, was going great: she’d just been nominated for an Emmy for best actress in a drama series. We’d planned to meet up on the day the nominations were announced, but Russell had rescheduled after a flareup of mouth ulcers—not the first time her immune system had rejected an Emmy nomination, she told me. In 2016, her face had swelled up after she was nominated for “The Americans,” leading her Felicity mentor J. J. Abrams to suggest that she might be allergic to success.
She hadn’t lobbied for the Emmy, she told me, a little stiffly, when I asked about how the process worked. “Well, I’m sure someone lobbies for it,” she added. “I certainly don’t.” She had agreed to appear on a Hollywood Reporter panel that included other best-actress nominees, among them Cristin Milioti, whose performance in “The Penguin” had fascinated her. Russell insisted that the best outcome would be for her to lose; that way, she could attend the glamorous parties but wouldn’t have to make a speech.
This felt like she was taking self-deprecation too far. I loved watching awards speeches, I told her—there was something thrilling about the pageantry of them, the rattled-off thank-yous and the unpredictable meltdowns, the moving bursts of authentic feeling amid the fakery.
We argued about it briefly. Did I want to see people embarrass themselves? she asked, tilting her head. Every time we met, Russell would make fun of how prototypically Gen X she had been when she was younger, so determined not to sell out that she occasionally came off as “a little jerk.” Up on the mountaintop with her Brooklyn friends, she had called herself “young and dumb” for dropping that CoverGirl deal, adding that she’d go for it now. “I was, like, ‘No, no, I think I’ll turn down millions,’ ” she said, in a voice that sounded like a mocking imitation of Felicity’s earnestness. “ ‘I don’t know if this is right.’ ”
At Café Luxembourg, I pulled up an old Los Angeles Times profile, which had come out shortly before “Felicity” débuted. In it, Russell had rolled her eyes at the vapid contents of Seventeen magazine, on whose cover she had just appeared; marvelled that anyone would want to go to the Emmys; and complained, not inaccurately, about nosy female journalists on the hunt for fresh anecdotes. She had also committed the cardinal P.R. sin of talking shit about her peers. “I think living your life is a little more important than being in these crap movies,” she told the reporter, suggesting that Katie Holmes (“a really sweet girl”) might be getting bad career advice from her handlers.
Russell winced, remembering the backlash. She’d called Holmes to apologize. The female-journalist comment had been a response to Jane magazine, whose editors had spun her answer to a question about how she’d lost her virginity into a lurid cover line: “I lost it on the closet floor.” Back then, she’d felt as if she were stuck inside a rock tumbler that was determined to polish her for public display but would ultimately grind her down whether she decided to be frank or coy, to share her true opinions or hide behind the usual clichés.
She’d grown more comfortable with the obligations of celebrity over the years, even as expectations had changed for women in the public eye. These days, everyone seemed to be an influencer, producing their own variation of “The Keri Kronicles.” Russell—who stays largely offline—is impressed by stars, like Naomi Watts, who use TikTok or Instagram to flash eccentric senses of humor that don’t come across in their dramatic roles. Russell respected Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, she told me: an actress building her own beauty empire struck her as a vast improvement on shilling for a big corporation. It made her laugh to think back on those silly TV ads: flacking for CoverGirl’s “gross magenta lipstick, like shellac,” mouthing exaggerated claims about the product lasting for up to ten hours, and then making alternate copy for the Canadian market, where such hyperbole wasn’t allowed. If members of the younger generation were less bothered by these bargains, if they drew less of a distinction between marketing and art, she got it. No profession was pure.
But her Gen X core hadn’t changed; she still preferred to stand a little off to the side. “There’s a thing where everyone is supposed to want more—to be a movie star,” she told me on the night of the Sancerres. “My goal isn’t to go to Cannes.” When people asked her if she wanted to become a director, she quoted a wisecrack she’d once heard: “I like to sit down when I eat my lunch.” When I spoke to Russell’s old friend Alley, she sounded surprised by the idea that her friend had almost quit the business during that gap year in New York; you didn’t make it that far in Hollywood without wanting it, she said. Alley described Russell, with admiration, as “scrappy,” a “go-getter” who “always had something on the boil” but kept her plans close to the vest. Maybe it was that kind of instinctive discretion which had prevented Russell’s life from spilling into chaos, and had kept her from going down the flaming path so many of her It Girl peers had taken, both those who hit it big and those who crashed early.
No time machine could take Russell back to her younger self, the Denver teen-ager who’d fallen down the rabbit hole. She didn’t want to start over, anyway. But she’d been trying to master an internal discipline, what her friend Sarah Stringer described to me as “a sense of self that doesn’t go up and down with your accomplishments.”
Weeks later, I watched Russell in a baroque Armani gown at the Emmys, her hair long and smooth. There were multiple best-actress categories, and Milioti, who won for “The Penguin,” shouted out, “I love acting so much!” In Russell’s category, the winner was Britt Lower, from “Severance.” I watched Russell’s face onscreen when her name wasn’t called: she was tense, and then she was smiling. ♦
