This year marks the first time Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys will attend the Emmys together as nominees for different projects: Between Russell’s morally conflicted ambassador on “The Diplomat” and Rhys’ small-island mayor on “Widow’s Bay” and his psychopathic real estate scion on “The Beast in Me” — plus executive producer nominations for both — the pair have racked up five nominations.
Couples have been Emmy-nominated in the same year before: Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon, Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. But fans may feel a special tie to Russell and Rhys because of how witty and charming they were the last time they attended the Emmys together as nominees, back when they starred on “The Americans.” After that show’s final season in 2018, when Rhys won best actor in a drama, he quipped in his speech that if he proposed onstage, Russell had promised to punch him “clean in the mouth.”
Why had she said that? “Well, do you remember that guy?” Rhys asks as the two reminisce about the night, and he retells the story: Prior to Rhys’ win, Glenn Weiss, accepting an award for directing that year’s Oscars telecast, proposed to his then girlfriend, dropping to one knee after bringing her onstage.
Twisting his lilting Welsh accent into a pinched American one, Rhys says, “Why shit on that guy’s moment? I was like, ‘Because we were all given 45 seconds, and that guy got eight minutes.’ You know what I’m saying?”
“Do it on your own time, man! For me to have to do anything public is horrifying,” Russell says. Had Rhys proposed, “I would die. I would say no. Good night!”
Rhys imagines her response: “Get off the stage! Take your little award the fuck offstage!”
In fact, the pair still haven’t gotten engaged eight years later, on national TV or otherwise: Russell tends to call Matthew “my guy.” Whatever work to define the relationship the pair have done, after 13 years, has happened off-screen — and that’s the way Russell and Rhys, at 50 and 51, want it. But they’ve decided to give a rare joint interview at the upstate New York hotel they use as an escape from their Brooklyn home, to decompress with the friends they call their “Mountain Family.”
I tried to visit them a couple days earlier, but floods had wiped out the roads between Brooklyn and their retreat. Instead, I’m now crashing the final day of their vacation, a break between wrapping Season 4 of “The Diplomat” in late June and a return to normal life. They’re clearly wistful about their pending reentry into reality. A hotel employee they seem to know well asks Russell if she wants lunch; she declines, saying she’s saving room for “our last Mountain Family dinner,” and performs a keening cry that comes close to a wolf’s howl.
This trip has followed a particularly charmed period for them professionally: Rhys’ “Widow’s Bay,” a horror-comedy from Apple TV about an isolated community whose mayor refuses to acknowledge the town’s malign forces, has become a surprise zeitgeist hit and Emmys overperformer, earning the most nominations of any new series this year. “The Beast in Me,” a Netflix limited series in which Rhys gleamed with malevolence as a suspected murderer, debuted atop the streamer’s viewership charts. And Russell — facing off against Zendaya of “Euphoria” and Rhea Seehorn of “Pluribus,” among others — may be the night’s most overdue nominee, given that she’s been anchoring TV hits since the college soap “Felicity,” which premiered when she was 22, yet has never won. This year, 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.
Most actors will say they don’t care about awards attention. But Emmys night seems especially far away in our rustic setting, as Russell picks at a small charcuterie plate and Rhys tells dishy stories about his early career. They’re recognizably in vacation mode: Ten minutes after the early-afternoon interview is slated to begin, Russell finds Rhys and me in our out-of-the-way attic lodge, beer in hand. (“I love the fish. It has a little iridescence on it,” she says, showing me the logo on the can. “Isn’t that cool?”) He’s in a beat-up white tee, hair long and unkempt; she’s in a denim jumpsuit and scuffed white Keds. It’s a whole vibe. Russell and Rhys are relentlessly self-deprecating, and when they aren’t actually completing each other’s sentences, they’re certainly yes-and-ing them in short order.
Whether it’s how scarcely they’re on the record as a couple or due to the tractor beam of their respective styles of charisma — she’s amiably blunt, while his soft-spokenness invites one to lean in — much of what they say feels like a secret told in confidence. Sometimes, that’s literally true. As Rhys talks about wanting each new role to feel like a departure from the one that came before, Russell’s eyes gleam. She wants to gossip.
“Tell the job that you just got offered,” she says.
“That’s OK — who cares? The one that you literally just got offered today. It’s so funny!”
“The high-profile writer could very well read Variety and say, ‘Oh, he’s mocking me in the fucking news.’”
“We’re not mocking him, it’s just hilarious!” Russell insists that she has to tell me, and does so off the record.
The point Russell is making is that it’s easy to get pigeonholed, to be asked to do the same thing again and again. Coming off the six-season run of FX’s “The Americans,” on which they played Soviet spies embedded in the U.S. during the Cold War, this phenomenon felt especially fraught. Rhys, asked about what I’d thought was his first post-“Americans” TV job, HBO’s “Perry Mason,” reminds me that he actually did the BBC limited series “Death and Nightingales” in Ireland right after he wrapped “The Americans.”
“You’re not as picky about things,” Russell says. “You’re like, ‘Great, I’ll do it.’ It was scary for me.” Five years passed after “The Americans” before Russell appeared as a TV lead again.
For her, the arrival of the script for “The Diplomat” answered the question of what might be her next great role. But it also presented a problem. The show, whose central character is the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., was to shoot in London. Russell, who’d built a life in New York and worked there on “The Americans,” was faced with the idea of leaving what she loved.
“I do like my life — my quiet little life,” Russell says. “I like pitter-pattering around the house and doing my little laundry, and putting everything in its order. Lately, the type of jobs we take, we tend to be one of the main characters. So that’s full-on. You have to be willing to do that and only that. So it’s a negotiation with yourself. It was a big leap for the family to go.”
Debora Cahn, the creator of “The Diplomat,” tells the story of Russell’s ambivalence. “She was not in the market for something like this,” she says. “It was very clear in my mind that if she wasn’t having a great experience, it wasn’t going to happen again. If it didn’t work out for her life and for her family, there wasn’t going to be a Season 2.”
The role came to fit Russell, in part because Cahn, the more she got to know her star, wove the actress’s own tendencies into the character. “We all see this incredible, breathtaking beauty and poise,” Cahn says. “And she seems to think that she’s constantly falling apart at the seams, held together with spit and duct tape. Anybody who meets her says, ‘Oh, that’s not really how the rest of the world is perceiving you.’”
The character of Kate Wyler, too, is publicly immaculate while privately plagued by insecurities. Her marriage, to Rufus Sewell’s high-powered statesman, who in Season 3 becomes vice president, is riddled with resentments and hurt feelings. Both have at times felt they’ve put their career on hold for the other. Now, they are attempting to be the highest-powered versions of themselves, even as that means living an ocean apart and subverting one another for the attention of the president, played by Allison Janney.
We couldn’t be farther from the Mountain Family version of Russell. And yet certain themes resonate. “It is a show about marriage,” she says. “It’s about the negotiations of work, the competition, the negotiations of geography.” Russell quotes a Cahn idea about long-term relationships: “You suddenly wake up, and you can’t stand the sound of them breathing.” After spending Season 3 broken up in all but name, though, the cliff-hanger finale sees the pair newly committed to making it work. “I’m not saying their relationship is for everybody,” Russell says, but the show “is really rooting for marriage.”
Russell watches “The Diplomat”: She feels a responsibility as EP to investigate “the through line of it all.” And she’s watching “Widow’s Bay,” slowly, with her middle child. (Russell and Rhys share a son, age 10, and she has two older children from a previous relationship.) Rhys has more complicated feelings about watching himself — “There’s some hard wincing,” he says, as he evaluates his choices — but he found himself in the room as his family watched him, and managed to stand it. “Of any show you could watch, this is such a fun departure that it would be easiest,” Russell says.
The departure lies in part in the show’s unusual, tricky tone, as crafted by creator Katie Dippold and director Hiro Murai. “Widow’s Bay” careens between dry human comedy and grotesque gore. It’s a show where Rhys’ delicate, witty portrayal of a man in denial exists alongside evil spirits and magic spells.
Rhys’ Mayor Tom Loftis wants to preserve his island town’s prospects as a tourist destination to rival Martha’s Vineyard. But there are other reasons he avoids confronting the bizarre reality of the curse of Widow’s Bay: He’s also terrified for his son, Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick), who, given the supernatural circumstances around his birth and the death of his mother, is under very real threat. Rhys held on to this fear, and let it guide his work. “His ultimate objective is to see his son bloom,” he says. “It immediately grounds you, in a way. You go, ‘I need my fucking son to flourish, and I will ignore the madness around me because I will stay this course.’ That does something to me. It grounds everything in a real place.”
There’s pathos, and shrewd irony, underpinning his performance. “It’s such a treat to have this person who’s so funny, but will give you the most emotionally devastating scene you could imagine,” Dippold says. “You see everything in his eyes. There’s a version of this character that’s just the fool, and you’re disconnected from him, but Matthew takes you on a journey with this character. You feel everything he’s feeling.”
And plenty of fans now are — but during the production in Boston, the sheer oddity of the show seemed potentially limiting. “Everyone was nervous as to how it was going to be received,” Rhys says. “We all kept asking, ‘Did we get the tone right? What is this tone?’ It’s this great relief that people want this original programming, these risks.”
“But it’s also such a delightful departure from the shit that we’re in,” Russell adds. “Do you know what I mean? There is not a mention in the show so far for me about what’s happening — the destruction of our country.” She laughs mordantly. “Right?”
“Well, there is,” Rhys says. Russell expresses shock at having missed it. “In the crawlspace. That’s Trump.” (On the show, the creature in the crawlspace is a Pennywise-style killer clown who skitters after Tom like a spider.) Russell is dismayed until Rhys assures her he is joking. She’s right that the town’s monsters exist outside the framework of our politics.
“It’s such a delightful departure to just enjoy,” she concludes. “And that’s unique.” Although perhaps not entirely so: “The Diplomat,” set in a world of high-stakes international intrigue, depicts statecraft as we imagine it being practiced in a pre-MAGA era. It can feel as if no time has passed since “The West Wing” or “Homeland,” both of which Cahn wrote for. And the show is as tightly focused on the interior world of Kate as it is on the transatlantic special relationship. Kate is often on the verge of triumph just before it’s seized from her, whether she’s losing face in front of the president, or her husband, or prospective sexual conquests outside her marriage. This flopping is a note Russell loves to play.
“You always want to be losing,” she says. “You don’t ever want to be, like, She’s the best surgeon in the entire Northeast.” She learned this on one of her first jobs, the one that made her a household name. “Before I really knew what acting was, on ‘Felicity,’ I would watch the girls.” Guest actresses would cycle through, dressed far sexier than Felicity ever would be. ”I was like, ‘Oh, right, I don’t have to do any of that.’ I didn’t wear makeup and wore big, baggy sweaters, and there’s a real freedom to that. You get to be funny; you get to be loose. It’s hard to do the other stuff.”
Russell’s four seasons on “Felicity,” beginning in 1998, followed a formative time on a Disney Channel franchise that also brought us Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling.
“I have zero training, unless …” Russell trails off, deciding how to describe her earliest work. She settles on an evenness of tone that anyone who’s been watching Russell as Kate — hypercompetent at all things, including the use of sarcasm as a shiv — would recognize. “I mean, ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ was formidable.”
She’s kidding, but Rhys and I agree with her premise — she needed to learn the ropes of hitting her marks on camera on the 1990s revival of the 1950s kids-TV staple. “Oh, yeah, incredible, guys,” she says brusquely. “But Matthew’s a trained actor. They didn’t train us in, to use a really lame term, your instrument. He’s a trained, meticulous actor, and I don’t have any of that.” (Rhys studied at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.) “I can do something instinctually, naturally, but I don’t have the other stuff.”
“First of all, you have a dance background,” Rhys says.
“Oh, yeah,” Russell says, the sarcasm reentering her voice.
“No, no — wait,” Rhys says. “If you notice, at the end of ‘The Americans,’ she was always doing the fighting. Because she needed no rehearsal time. So your physical awareness is — what’s the right superlative? — without equal, without peer.”
“Oh! Mmm!” Russell says, as if considering how seriously to take the compliment.
“And I do think ‘The Mickey Mouse’ is formidable training,” Rhys says. “I do.”
On “Felicity,” created by J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, Russell played a young woman who, in the pilot, ditches plans to study premed at Stanford to follow her crush to a fictionalized version of NYU. The show won Russell a Golden Globe, earned her notoriety for the long curls she chopped off early in Season 2 — her hair, today, is elegantly wavy — and made her a star, a label she wore loosely. “Back then, network TV was 22 episodes, which was a life-arresting grind,” she says. “On summers off, I would get opportunities to audition for movies, and I was like, I don’t want to do that. I want to go to my friend’s lake house in Muskoka. And that’s what I did. Of course, my goal was to be able to pay my rent, and be a real person.”
She’d had a relentless schedule as a teenager too. At one point, she was flying across the country to complete two Disney projects simultaneously. On “The All-New Mickey Mouse Club,” she danced and performed in comedy sketches. And in 1992’s “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,” she played a babysitter who’s placed in the pocket of a scientifically enlarged toddler as he goes on a kaiju-style rampage.
“Disney would find these kids in the middle of America — in my case, Colorado — whose parents knew nothing about business, and they sign you to this overall deal,” Russell says. “They own it all. I would work all week in L.A. on the film and then take the red-eye and film ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’ on a Saturday.”
Rhys says he’s seen “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,” even though the two have never discussed it. “Her!” he bellows, imagining his younger self encountering Russell’s character. “She will be my wife!”
Russell seems to prefer to leave her early career behind. For Rhys, memories of early work are easier to access. While Russell was on “Felicity,” he was an emerging star on the London theater scene. After working with various classical theater companies there, he got a big break: the lead in a 2000 West End stage production of “The Graduate,” opposite Kathleen Turner, who notoriously appeared nude onstage as Mrs. Robinson.
“I’d never experienced the thing whereby famous people just go and see famous people after the show,” Rhys recalls. “She’d always very graciously invite me down to have a glass of Champagne with whoever was in, and I’d always say, ‘Did you know that person?’ She’s like, ‘No, never met them.’”
“You’re famous, I’m famous, let’s talk,” Rhys says. “The roll call that came through was just eye-watering. And then Dustin Hoffman came, and he didn’t come back.”
In Mike Nichols’ 1967 comedy of disaffection, Hoffman originated the role that Rhys played onstage, so the snub was startling. “We don’t think he liked it,” Rhys says. “Probably. I don’t know. Maybe he’s just shy. Who knows!”
Russell can relate. One of her greatest roles between “Felicity” and “The Americans” was as a pie-baking restaurant server in “Waitress,” the 2007 film that was adapted into a beloved musical, debuting on Broadway in 2016. Russell says she just can’t see it.
“It just feels weird,” she says. “It’s weird to think about this character that you did, and suddenly they’re like —” She bursts into song. “And now I’m making a pie …”
Rhys can’t help egging her on, chanting: “Pie, pie, pie-pie-pie!”
On “Felicity” and in “Waitress,” Russell had a certain winsomeness. That made her right, in an upside-down way, for a secret agent driven to bring the U.S. to its knees. FX chief John Landgraf chose Russell to lead “The Americans,” she says: “There was a list, and he’s like, ‘That’s who it should be. It should be someone that you don’t expect.’” Who might have guessed that America’s college sweetheart had such a hard edge?
Beneath the rage Elizabeth directed at anyone who stood in her way, there was a character who felt things deeply, who’d been badly wounded. “There was a softness to you,” Rhys tells Russell. “As much as people go, ‘Oh, Elizabeth’s a bitch’ — when you look at your performance, you didn’t play that.”
Rhys got cast after a lucky break: He had been planning to move back to London after a spell in Los Angeles, but ended up filling in after Cillian Murphy dropped out of a play in New York. Rhys got the pilot script, and ran lines with his onstage castmate Adam Driver, with Driver playing the Russell part.
Rhys was coming off five seasons of “Brothers & Sisters,” on which he played Kevin Walker, the high-achieving gay attorney son of a wealthy Los Angeles family led by Sally Field’s matriarch Nora. “My education was Sally Field,” he says. “I’ve never seen a No. 1 on the call sheet lead like that: This is how you conduct yourself on set. This is the professional standard. This is what you should be, coming to set every day, and taking note of the lighting and understanding every crew member’s job. She’s second to none at that. She said, you need to show up and be this prepared, because it’s a very privileged position. Don’t mistreat it.”
He compares Field to Russell, and to Claire Danes, his co-star on “The Beast in Me”: Danes was “a very forward-leaning No. 1. Comes with immaculate preparation, and demands it out of everyone else.”
“As you get older, you just want to work with nice — maybe ‘nice’ is not the right word,” Russell observes. “Stable. Professional. I don’t need any new best friends. I have great friends. I have a partner. But I just don’t want to put up with people’s bullshit anymore. Figure that shit out. Go do that on your own time. Don’t bring it to work. I just want to work with professionals.”
Work, for Russell and Rhys, is an expression of passion. But all the stuff that comes along with it is trickier. “We had to do the photo shoot yesterday,” Russell recounts. “It was, still, nerve-racking. Yeah, I definitely had beers.” She has become known for bringing beer to interviews, a little treat to help her let down her guard, despite how strange it can be to open up to a stranger. She reminisces that when she taped a Variety “Actors on Actors” segment last year with “Felicity” co-star Scott Speedman, he brought beer to the studio to make sure she was stocked up.
Russell has been thinking about what, other than beer, might relax her before the Emmys in September. Both partners feel odd about the ceremony. It’s not that the recognition is unwelcome — it’s just funny to perform happiness. “Doing awards shows is unnatural,” Russell says. “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 says, echoing her. “We do say this every year: ‘Let’s enjoy this, because it —’”
“I still get very nervous going to them every time,” Rhys continues. “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.”
Working isn’t stressful in the same way: When I remark that it must have been hard inhabiting the madman he plays on “The Beast in Me,” Rhys says, “I’ve always been quite good at the switch — it usually happens when they say, ‘Cut.’” And meeting the public isn’t hard in the same way either: Stephen Root, Rhys’ co-star on “Widow’s Bay” and “Perry Mason,” tells me a story about Rhys greeting tour buses on his way to the set of the latter series, a dark detective drama, chipperly asking, “Do you remember me from ‘The Americans’?” But Russell hides her nerves — if not thoroughly, then charmingly: She appeared genuinely stunned by her win at the Actor Awards, bestowed by her peers in SAG-AFTRA, where she praised her castmates and wished “Happy St. David’s Day to my Welsh guy.”
Russell can’t admit that she gave a nice speech. “He’s very good at it,” she says.
“You’re very good at it,” Rhys fires back. “You were very, very good. Because you were heartfelt and sincere and funny.”
Onstage, Russell felt the pressures of our tense national moment: “The political climate right now is just so tricky and heavy, and that makes me nervous too.” Her voice begins to crescendo. “Like, you say one fucking wrong word …”
“And also,” Rhys jumps in, “you’re on a show about politics.”
“So that is a stress point,” Russell says. “Politicians choose to be in that space, and I don’t want to choose to speak for anybody. I can barely speak for myself. I don’t want to speak for anyone else. We’re in a tricky time where there’s not a lot of room for mistakes.”
The idea of working together again comes up, and Russell, the choosier one, wouldn’t want to do just anything. “It would have to be the right thing for many reasons,” she says. But the idea excites her. “There’s a real electricity that happens between people when it goes well — and that was such a part of our formative experience together.”
Rhys’ passion project, though, is what he calls “Welsh ‘Braveheart’” — so much so that when Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart” came out in 1995, a young Rhys felt heartsick that someone had told a story of rebellion in the British Isles before he did. He’s gotten Welsh director Gareth Evans, of “The Raid,” attached to his project, and is planning to redevelop the script with a writer.
“I think because we’re such a small country, it makes you louder and prouder and more fervent,” he says. “Because the Scots and the Irish have done very well. You know, culturally — in literature, in film, in music — they’re the muscular Celts, and then Wales is the little engine that could.”
How would Rhys and Russell describe Welsh culture?
“I would say passionate,” Rhys says. He notes that an ancient description of the Celts was “high-spirited and quick to battle. And I think that was accurate.”
“The whole culture is incredibly artistic,” Russell says. “It’s steeped in the arts and storytelling. But I would say less quick to battle and more melancholy.”
“That’s because we lost all the battles,” Rhys says. “If melancholy were an Olympic sport, the Welsh would podium every time.”
On “The Diplomat,” Russell’s Kate finds herself negotiating the cultural differences between can-do, forthright Americans and Brits who speak in enigmatic shades of meaning. Her partnership with Rhys, though, feels like a happy meeting in the middle. Russell speaks more brightly and Rhys more pensively in the sentences they’re finishing for one another. But, you know, they are finishing each other’s sentences.
So how do two regular awards show attendees who met in the glamour and intrigue of a fictional spy game stay so seemingly … normal?
“We’ve been through so many highs and lows careerwise where you are very grateful for the times you do work, but you also know it’s part of the roller coaster,” Rhys says. “You have very little control. So it makes you grateful and aware of its fragility.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Russell is less philosophical, more realpolitik, in her analysis. “The majority of our friends are not actors,” she says, “and we’re not that famous.” Not that famous? Russell continues, undeterred. “People don’t really care about us — in a great way. Some people in our neighborhood are very famous, and their life is very different. And it seems so hard.”
Russell doesn’t face those challenges — luckily for her. “I love the level of our life,” she says. “I love having a job. I like occasionally getting into a restaurant when I can’t.” Russell says that she sometimes buys her own clothes for awards shows. “I sometimes can’t get a dress, because I am not, you know, someone famous. But that’s the reality of our station. And I think it’s perfect.”
“Yeah,” Rhys says. “It is the perfect balance.”