SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for The Diplomat Season 4, now streaming on Netflix.
Being the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom used to be one of the most prestigious posts in the Foreign Service, held by the likes of John Adams and James Monroe, who would both go on to become President of the United States.
These days, the Ambassador has to handle a different set of challenges such as handling the fallout when the boss criticizes the British Prime Minister on social media.
In Netflix’s The Diplomat, Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, is navigating her own frayed relations in the aftermath of an aircraft carrier attack, and now in Season 4, the fallout of an assassination attempt of the U.S President on British soil.
She is also having to deal with all of this as her husband Hal, played by Rufus Sewell, is Vice President of the United States, and starting to charm his boss, President Grace Penn, played by Allison Janney, and worry her husband Todd Penn, First Gentleman of the United States, played by Bradley Whitford.
It’s an awkward situation to say the least.
“I have yet to meet a married couple who doesn’t wither into awkwardness in the public eye, or at least feel like they are. On the inside, it always feels like an utter sh*tshow as a couple out in the world,” creator Debora Cahn tells Deadline.
Kate and Hal and Grace and Todd are struggling to work it all out, as are Stuart Hayford, Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy, played by Ato Essandoh, and Eidra Park, CIA London Station Chief, played by Ali Ahn.
“The idea [of Season 4] was how are these three couples who are all in different phases of a relationship handling similar situations differently? What does it look like when you’re having your first really big fight? Knowing Grace and Todd and Kate and Hal a little bit better, what happens when you shuffle those pairs and kind of create new axes of connection? What does it do to the marriages?,” Cahn adds.
Russell tells Deadline that it’s a “continual power struggle”. “For Kate, I don’t think she’s ever been told quite so succinctly, ‘This is what you’re going to do now, if you want to be in this.’ I don’t think that’s her jam. She’s been like the fun, young, feisty one in the relationship, but now she’s hearing [from Hal], ‘No, I’m in a real position of power, I have to get my shit together and I need you to behave to make this work for me.’ As a couple, they’ve been wanting to be in that room to affect the change they want and so she has to play this game differently than just being the bratty know-it-all, who’s going to keep running into rooms. She still does that a little bit, but she’s trying really hard not to.”
Sewell admits that there’s a “kind of tautness to that arrangement”. “We love constriction in that way, it’s very fun and interesting for us and every season there is a new contortion, a new change in dynamic between us, and we always relish those. That awkwardness, we love that. There’s all kinds of awkwardness. I love the awkwardness with the President, with all of this weird schoolyard bullshit we have to go through. Bring it on,” he adds.
Some of this is down to Hal’s charm, which is described as similar to a drug, and his burgeoning relationship with President Penn.
Russell says Kate warns the President as a “service”. “He’s super persuasive. He’s charming. He’s good looking. This is what happens, everyone believes him, they’re along for the ride. That’s what’s funny about it, she’s telling the President of the United States she’s been charmed by her husband. Men, women, animals, they all love this guy,” she says.
Sewell, on the other hand, tries not to pay too much attention to it. “That’s the kind of thing that would really just freeze me completely, it’s like you’re playing a king and you walk into a room and everyone stands up,” he says. “It’s a great opportunity for me to kind of inhabit someone who just has a kind of confidence that I feel like I should have, but something attacks in reality.”
Season 4 kicks off in the immediate aftermath of Season 3’s ending, where it was revealed that the Americans had retrieved the nuclear Poseidon weapon from the Russian submarine that was in British territorial waters without telling the UK government.
Cahn jokes that she doesn’t know where her obsession with warships came from. “The goal was to see some little things happen and then generations later, we’re dealing with the repercussions of that. I don’t want [The Diplomat] to be a show referencing its own mythology. It does feel honest to say these events are not happening in a vacuum. Something happened 15 years ago that is driving the interaction that we’re looking at today. If you don’t know what that is, you don’t know what you’re watching, you don’t know what you’re looking at in the real world,” she adds.
There are also a number of moments that have seemed eerily similar to the real world such as the attempted assassination of President Penn coming shortly after another attempt on President Trump.
“A couple of the actors have accused me of being a psychic witch, which I wish I was. But we talk to people who know what’s going on inside of this world, and they know what’s coming. We always ask the same question, ‘What are you worried about that I don’t know to be worried about? They can answer that question, and we choose one of those answers. I don’t want anything classified. Don’t tell me anything that I couldn’t find in a newspaper if I just knew where to look for it. It’s all out there and bubbling, and it just takes two years apparently for it to bubble up,” she adds.
This was particularly prescient with the relationship between the U.S. and UK. Earlier this month, British police arrested five men on suspicion of preparing an act of terrorism outside of RAF Fairford, which is operated by the U.S. Air Force and has been used for strikes on Iran.
“One of the very first conversations that we had with our British consultant [former UK Ambassador to the U.S.] Kim Darroch, who has been in the center of the morass for decades. We said what’s the worst thing that happens in U.S. U.K. relationships, and he said there’s always a concern that the U.S. is going to do something, and then the U.K. is going to get hit for it, and so that was a dynamic that we were trying to establish and utilize in the pilot in episode one, and now we’re on the front page of the paper with the American air force base in the UK,” she adds.
“We should get Deb to write something really nice happening,” jokes Sewell. “We should have her writing what we wish,” adds Russell.
The ending of Season 4 is arguably one of its most dramatic. Kate Wyler resigns from her post during the middle of a G7 meeting and walks out of the talks, for now, ending her position as a diplomat, and she is soon joined by others including Vice President Hal Wyler, bringing the pair closer together than they have been for some time.
Cahn says, “I always go into the writers’ room, and I know what the end of the season is going to be and I’m always happy to have the writers’ room beat that for us to come up with something better than that. We have, except for season four. I knew what I wanted to do at the end of the season, and that didn’t change all the way through. It was just a question of how to get there.”
“I think they’re two people who fell in love based on a shared sense of mission and a shared sense of values, and that overlapped completely in the beginning of their relationship. Over time, it’s felt like that slipped, and either it really did slip, or they, in the beginning, had a kind of like the rosy honeymoon glow of liking all the same things, thinking all the same thoughts and finishing each other’s sentences. Over time, you start to realize that it wasn’t as similar as you thought from the get go, and the tyranny of small differences can really wreak havoc in a relationship. We’ve seen that play out over the years that we’ve spent with them as a couple,” adds Cahn. “It was important for me to give them a moment of realizing, this is a situation that we can both recognize is intolerable, and sometimes it takes somebody else standing up for you to kind of recognize and remember what you believe. For Hal and a bunch of people, there’s a tremendous amount of power in seeing her take this stand. The second she walks out of that room, she thinks she’s going to puke, she is overcome with fear and shame and regret and panic that doesn’t dissipate until she turns around and sees somebody else is walking out the door.”
It’s an ending that impressed Russell and Sewell. “How f*cking cool,” says Russell. “How fantastic to blow everything up,” adds Sewell.
Where next for the pair? “They’ll just go somewhere very exotic, trouble in Fiji” jokes Sewell. “A tiki bar,” adds Russell.
Cahn doesn’t hate the idea of a tiki beach bar. She does have a plan where these characters inevitably end up, but she doesn’t know how long the plan is. “I legitimately don’t know, and I don’t know if I’ll stick with that. I knew this season where I wanted to land. But if we find something better, I’m going for that or if we find that these characters have grown into something that isn’t what I anticipated. When I first pitched the series, I want it to be a living document. I want it to be a living organism,” she concludes.