[The following story contains spoilers from the fourth season of Netflix’s The Diplomat.]
When it came time to craft storylines for the fourth season of The Diplomat, showrunner Debora Cahn realized she had to take things in a different direction in order to accurately reflect what U.S. state department employees and international diplomats are dealing with.
“I think we’re seeing authoritarian behavior out of the leaders of a number of Western democracies, and at a certain point, it felt like we weren’t talking about the world that we exist in if we weren’t addressing some of that,” Cahn tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It just felt like we were in a fantasy land, and not in the right way. I want to be in a fantasy land a little bit, but I also want these people grappling with what this generation of diplomats is facing, and so whether or not the behavior you’re seeing is authoritarian or proto-fascist, I think, is a question that a lot of people working in a lot of different governments are asking themselves every day.”
The most-recent eight episode installment of the Netflix series sees U.S. President Grace Penn (Allison Janney), recovering from an early-season assassination attempt, undertake an increasingly aggressive approach to foreign policy, ultimately sending warships to keep Russian vessels out of U.K. waters and threatening to fire on any ships, Russian or British, that get in their way, a threat that, as first gentlemen Todd Penn (Bradley Whitford) puts it could “end NATO” or at least jeopardize the U.S.’ role in the group. At the same time, Grace dismisses anyone who questions her judgment, muzzling Keri Russell‘s American ambassador to the U.K. as she’s unwilling to carry out the president’s orders and appointing Todd, now special envoy to the U.K., to convey her message and, perhaps most chillingly, recalling deputy chief of mission Stuart (Ato Essandoh) after he lodges his disagreement with Grace’s plans via a cable in a State Department dissent channel.
The real-world analogues for Grace’s bold behavior aren’t lost on Janney as she mentions the threat to attack anyone who stands in the way of U.S. foreign policy.
“It’s wild to make decisions like that with your closest ally; I can’t imagine anybody doing that,” Janney knowingly tells THR. “It’s not ripped from the headlines, but I’m sure Debora was influenced by what’s going on in our country right now and decisions that are being made with longtime allies.”
The efforts to suppress dissent also ring true to her.
“That’s similar to what’s going on today too. I mean, anyone who disagrees with you, you’re out. I don’t like the way you cover my administration, you’re out,” Janney says just days after President Trump banned CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the White House. “It’s not a pretty picture of Grace. It shows — I don’t want to say desperation but — [that she] doesn’t want to be made vulnerable by anyone ever again. I think it all comes from the assassination [attempt].”
Cahn concedes that she hadn’t initially envisioned the Grace character as someone who would take this severe of approach to foreign policy, but that shift came out of the work that Janney did as an actress and “unfolded over time.”
“This was not an idea that was in my head from the get go,” Cahn says.
And Janney wonders aloud how much the shooting and possibly sexist concerns about whether Grace is tough enough to get back to work might influence her more aggressive foreign policy.
“She has always been a woman who was very confident in her instincts and loves being having the power, and now it’s new to her being vulnerable. She doesn’t like it, and she doesn’t like the way people are treating her,” she says. “So she’s sort of doubling down on making decisions that people start to question. ‘What is she doing here? Is this because she got shot? Why is she being so?’ She’s extra making some hard-line decisions that the people around her start to question her, and then it of course affects her relationship with Todd because he is someone who knows Grace way before she was in politics. And he is worried about her. And when she looks at him, she sees the worry on his face, and she doesn’t like how that makes her feel, so it puts a real strain on their relationship. She basically sends him across the ocean so she doesn’t have to have him there because he makes her feel even more vulnerable or doubting herself. So it very much changes the whole trajectory of this season. The assassination attempt changes everything.”
In the final minutes of season four, after talk of the bold U.S. strategy ripples through the Italian compound hosting the G7, Penn makes her plans perfectly clear at the beginning of the international summit. Ultimately, Russell’s Kate and a number of other U.S. officials can’t take it anymore. One by one, Kate, chief of staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) and secretary of state Miguel Ganon (Miguel Sandoval) turn in their badges and publicly resign and walk out of the conference. Finally viewers see vice president Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), Kate’s husband, walk out, taking a moral stand as he seemingly gives up his very powerful seat at the table. While it’s not made explicitly clear in the closing minutes of season four, Sewell and Russell see his walkout as a resignation.
“I don’t think you get to walk out and then walk back in again,” Sewell tells THR, as he and Russell joke: “I changed my mind. Actually, sorry, I just want to see how — are you good?”
Both Russell and Janney are moved by the resignations, with Russell seeing it as the kind of tribute to foreign service officers that reminded her of why she initially wanted to star in the series.
“I love the way it ends,” Russell says of the season four finale. “It’s why I signed on to the show. It’s about this world of people that I really respect and this army of people behind the scenes who work and run the foreign service, USAID, all of that. This was meant for them, and where it lands, that’s what I love so much about this show.”
Janney adds, invoking the current U.S. political climate: “Speaking for Debora, I’m thinking that it’s probably wish fulfillment to say, ‘Yes, this is what you do when you disagree with what someone is doing in power.’ You go, ‘No, I will not serve for this administration.’ I mean, how great would that have been to see Republicans standing up against Trump and saying, ‘No, I’m not going to serve.’ That would have been so amazing to see, but it didn’t happen. So we show it happening.”
Cahn is more circumspect on whether such dramatic resignations are the right thing to do, but she wanted to explore the decision to take a stand (and whether that involves leaving or staying).
“A lot of individuals have resigned and, in the State Department and all over the government, a lot of people have resigned in protest and retired in protest, and obviously hundreds of 1,000s of people have been forced out, fired,” Cahn says. “From a distance, it seems really easy to make the call: ‘Well, if I was there, I would, I would put a stop to all this,’ And that’s hard to do. And there are like hundreds of 1,000s of really good people who work for our government who aren’t toppling it. So kind of pulling apart a decision to take a stand and speak out against something that a head of government is doing, I really wanted to tease out what does that feel like from the inside.”
And in making their decisions to leave, both Kate and Hal are weighing the trade-off between access and ideals.
“It’s something we keep talking about, especially for these two characters, to be so close to why you started all of this, so close to what you wanted,” Russell says.”They both wanted to be in that room, and they’re the closest they’ve ever been to that. And yes, there are compromises along the way, and you just tell yourself, ‘I know, but once I get in that room, I’ll be able to do the right thing. I’ll be able to affect the change that I want to see, influence the right people.'”
For Hal, Sewell says, “It’s a similar story in terms of his belief that access outweighs almost everything. You have your principles. You have the things that you want to do, and sometimes you might need to whittle down the visible aspects of those principles in order to get into the room in order to have access. And he’s gone as far as he possibly can. He has his reservations. He’s noticed the same things. But his belief is that to be beside her with a minuscule chance of arresting her behavior is the best chance. But the problem is he’s so used to living in this gray world, he doesn’t get to see where it warps, and he’s compromised too much. He loses his grounding a little bit, and it takes [Kate] to give him that extra nudge.”
Of Grace’s foreign policy approach, Sewell adds, “I think he thinks it’s very dangerous. And I personally think he thinks she’s veering off course. She’s making reckless decisions. I think she’s decided on an attitude which has lost some of the nuance. And he thinks if he says too much about that, then he will be sidelined, and his ability to affect the outcome will be taken away, and he’ll be replaced by someone way more dangerous.”
Still, Hal walks out, joining his wife in protest, but neither Sewell nor Russell see his move as a romantic gesture aimed at their spouse.
“What’s romantic about it is he’s taken a moral stand,” Sewell says. “But he did the right thing for himself. I think where we’re at in that story and in this place in our lives has nothing to do with their romantic relationship at that point.”
Though Hal does walk out, Todd does not, seemingly standing by his wife.
“I think there may be a big part of Todd that would love to walk out. But I think his devotion to her sees [people leaving] as a wildly inappropriate betrayal, and I think Todd’s love and respect for Grace, no matter what his concerns are about her, is banking on the possibility that there is something Todd doesn’t know that maybe they don’t know, that maybe Grace is is playing a much longer game here,” Whitford says. “So I think it’s a mixture of the sort of dog park loyalty and true devotion, and I think in the moments when they stand up and do this publicly, I think it’s wildly disrespectful and inappropriate. I remember sitting there going, like, if you’re going to do this, do it in the back room. Don’t have a little piece of theater here at my wife’s expense.”
Cahn highlights how Todd and Hal “have very different agendas.”
“They each have a kind of a prime directive of their own, and they aren’t the same,” she says. “Todd is there to be the president’s spouse, and that’s his job. He’s a guy who took an oath to her. Kate and Hal took oaths to the Constitution. Those are different.”
And while Janney indicates Grace is heartened by Todd’s support, she says her character feels “shamed” by the resignations.
“When we shot that scene, it was really hard not to feel embarrassed or shamed. And I think at first she was trying to [act] like, no, it’s just someone who’s not well and good riddance. And then the more and more people come, I think she’s there just trying to hold her power in the face of all of this dissent. It’s a very hard moment,” Janney recalls. “When Rufus finally goes out, you wonder what’s happening in the G7. I know that she looks at Todd, and I think Todd is there for her and is not going to leave her. It felt like you were being shamed, and it was not fun.”
It’s unclear what the fallout from those resignations will be as the screen fades to black when Hal begins to address a group of reporters assembled outside of the G7.
While The Diplomat has yet to be renewed for another fifth season, Janney, Russell and Sewell hope they get to find out what’s next for their characters.
“What’s the culmination of this behavior and what she’s doing?,” Janney wonders aloud of Grace. “Is she going to resign? What does she do? What the hell is going to happen if we get to another season?”
As for Kate and Hal, it’s unclear what their futures will look like after spending their entire careers in diplomatic posts. But Russell and Sewell have some ideas of presumably less stressful endeavors, including “running a tiki bar.”
“The idea of a downgrade is fantastic,” Sewell jokes, adding of the tiki-bar hope, “Location-wise, these are our ambitions.”
All episodes of The Diplomat are now streaming on Netflix. Read all of THR‘s Diplomat coverage, including an interview with Rory Kinnear about leaving his role as U.K. prime minister Nicol Trowbridge.