[The following story contains spoilers from the first four episodes of The Diplomat season four, through “Pagliacci.”]
Rory Kinnear couldn’t leave The Diplomat without one more surprise.
The actor, who has spent the past four seasons playing wild-card British prime minister Nicol Trowbridge, resigns midway through the Netflix political thriller’s latest season, announcing the move in a shocking moment at the end of episode four. Trowbridge steps down after an unusually surreal episode for The Diplomat, in which he imagines that former adviser Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie), who dies early in season three, is still alive and chiming in on his latest actions. He also hallucinates that the U.S. officials with whom he’s meeting are laughing at and mocking him and sings an aria as he thinks of himself as both a king and a clown (donning both costumes).
Despite the trippy scenes leading up to Kinnear’s final scene, which comes just one episode after viewers learn that U.K. foreign secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) has died in a helicopter crash, Diplomat showrunner Debora Cahn says there were grounded, real-life reasons for this season’s shake-up in the British government.
“By the time we got to this season, Rory had been prime minister for a period of time where the actual U.K. had like five different people at 10 Downing Street,” Cahn tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And it felt like there was this essential part of being a diplomat, which is that you’re always learning the cast of characters from scratch. You either outlast the people that you’re working with, or you’re sent to a different country. And I wanted to see our team going through the struggle of just when you think you know where the ground is under your feet, it completely changes. You’ve built all these relationships, and suddenly you have nothing.”
Cahn was also interested in showing what it would mean for Keri Russell‘s American ambassador to the U.K. to no longer have to work with someone like Trowbridge.
“I also really wanted to play with the dynamic of like, you think you’re working with somebody who’s difficult and they’re the problem, and then they leave, and it turns out you were the problem or both of you were the problem,” she says.
Cahn gave Kinnear a heads-up that his character would be resigning at some point in season four, but the specifics around his departure didn’t emerge until the actor received an unusual request while he was boarding a flight to Lithuania.
“I got a message from Deb saying, ‘Do you think you’d be able to sing this?’ And she sent me the aria,” Kinnear recalls. “And I thought, ‘Why on earth would I be required to do that?’ And I said, ‘I think I could, but how did you know I could sing?’ And she said, “Do you remember it? I think it was at the beginning of season two, there was a funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, and the whole congregation was asked to sing a hymn and I could hear your voice.’ I thought, ‘Interesting.’ And she’d obviously held on to that for two and a half seasons and brought it back. So I thought, ‘OK, how does that fit into why he might be resigning?'”
Trowbridge’s resignation is immediately preceded by Russell’s Kate blackmailing him by telling the newly appointed British foreign secretary Robyn Palmer (Abigail Marlowe), as Trowbridge looks on, about Roylin’s involvement in the carrier ship attack that kicked off the series and how Trowbridge “tried to kill” Roylin when he learned what she’d done.
The risky move is, unsurprisingly, Hal’s (Rufus Sewell) idea and though Kate initially resists his “mafioso”-like approach to foreign policy, she ends up doing what he suggested.
“I just think [Trowbridge] makes her crazy. I think he pushed her buttons,” Russell says of why Kate threatens him after he said, in part, that she and Hal won’t be invited to Dennison’s funeral. “He knew how to get her riled up and make it personal, and it’s too fresh. She’s doing something she doesn’t want to do anyway. She doesn’t believe in it, and then he’s attacking her when she hasn’t processed something.”
The shake-up also meant Gyasi and Kinnear would be leaving the Netflix series on which they’d been central castmembers for the past few years, a disappointing development for Cahn and the show’s remaining cast.
“We wanted to keep Dave Gyasi and Rory Kinnear forever,” Cahn says. “I wish I could see them every day. It’s a bummer when the company shifts in some way. We’ve had the luxury of bringing a lot of people in, and sometimes the story is ejecting people out on the other end, and it sucks.”
Sewell adds that Dennison’s death and Trowbridge resigning are “tremendously shocking.”
For Kate, though, Russell says the loss of Dennison, with whom she had a close relationship (the show teased the possibility of a romance early on, culminating in a passionate kiss in season three) is “really hard.”
“I think what that does to Kate is really hard, especially at this moment when her morals are being put to the test because he was such a moral character, so I think that fuels all of those doubts,” she says. “And then you have Hal on the other line going, ‘This is what you got to do. You got to do this.’ It’s an enormous loss for the show, for a lot of people who loved him, too. But it’s good storytelling ultimately.”
Kinnear, while sad that he won’t get to keep working with his Diplomat colleagues, is confident the bonds he’s forged with them will continue after he’s left the show. And he’d be happy to return in a guest capacity.
“I’d be fascinated to see where Trowbridge does end up,” he says. “There are so many different roles that a retired politician finds themselves in, and I’m sure he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life lying low.”
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Kinnear opens up about why Trowbridge resigns; how his character feels about Dennison’s death, as the two had a complicated relationship; and the experience of filming his final episode.
What was your reaction when you found out that this is what would be unfolding for your character?
I got a heads up from Deb that at some point during the series, Trowbridge will be resigning, and I’ve already felt pretty lucky to have stayed on for as long as I have, given the nature of British politics over the last six or seven years. To finally receive the script, to see, as is typical of Debora’s writing, the psychological acuity she was going to bring to it, and how much she wanted to explore his inner life at the point of his greatest crisis. I sort of knew then that it was going to be a real gift for me as as an actor to be able to to bring that to life.
How do you feel about about having to leave the show and the people that you were working with for a number of seasons?
Well, luckily, when you do a job for as long as this has been — a lot of the time we were hosting our American friends in London, and then luckily they got to return the favor when we were filming in New York — we’re in and out of each other’s lives to such an extent that we knew that we had formed these lifelong friendships. So while it’s obviously sad that I won’t be able to get to go to work with them. I know that I’ll still be able to hang out with them whenever they’re in town or I’m in their town. To have been able to be part of a series that is so smart, so funny, so dramatic, so psychologically aware and so incredibly well-written and -cast is one thing. But to have left with a load of lifelong friends is far too great.
What was it like filming that very surreal episode in which Trowbridge resigns, with the Margaret Roylin hallucinations? That’s such a different approach for this show.
What was exciting about it was that you knew that it was a new flavor. Shows like this, they constantly have to reinvent themselves or show new aspects of themselves, and a character that has loomed as large as Trowbridge has over the four seasons, to be able to get into what really sort of drives him, what makes him tick and to see what what it meant to him to be prime minister, to see what losing that meant to him, what destruction it wreaked him, and how he thought he might be seen both as a king and as a clown and that he’d sort of straddled both roles in his prime ministership, and that we get to see them played out for for real, as it were, within this kind of wild dream life.
We never really get a concrete explanation from Trowbridge about why he resigned. How much do you think Kate’s blackmail threat prompted his resignation? What do you think it was really due to?
Well, I mean, I do think that most politicians have a sort of self-awareness about how they how they can present themselves or how they can operate and what constitutes a line in the sand for something they wouldn’t be able to to go on with. And I think knowing how compromised he would be, particularly in his relationship with America, and how complicated he had been with that, with this new information in their hands, I think he knew: There’s nothing I can do without feeling I’ll be limping on. I won’t be able to do it with the gusto that I feel like I’ve been able to operate for as long as he has been prime minister. I also think events catch up with people, and it caught up with him what happened with Roylin and at the very beginning of season one, and sometimes people’s appetite goes for the the hurly burly of politics, and I think everyone knows that you’re a long time retired and resigned once you leave it so you keep on going, keep on going because there’s nothing quite like it in terms of the status that you’re afforded, in terms of the decisions you get to make, in terms of just the day-to-day excitement of it, but when it’s time to to step away, it must be sort of crashingly obvious, and I think that’s why he leaps to resignation.
We also find out at the end of the previous episode that Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) has died. How does Trowbridge feel about that? He and Dennison had a complicated relationship.
That’s, I think, definitely another reason that pushes him towards the resignation. They had come up together. They had been adversaries together, but they had found a use for each other as well in the highest echelons of politics. So, to have lost Roylin, to then lose Dennison. Those were the good cop and bad cop on his shoulder, or the devil and the angel on his shoulder, throughout his time. So, I think he felt completely settled as to where he would turn. Lydia obviously provides some support, ballast and encouragement, determination for him. But without Dennison and without Roylin, there was there was an instability to how he saw himself.
Do you have a favorite memory or scene from playing Nicol Trowbridge in The Diplomat?
Driving up in that Jag outside the big country house, in the first [season], you thought, oh yeah, this is going to be fun. This show’s got something about it. Getting to film in St Paul’s Cathedral, getting to film in all those amazing locations. We’re up in the foreign office, and there were times where you felt — I see why people in the top echelons of power try and cling on because traveling in big motorcades or helicopters, all the ceremony of it, you can see how it can go to people’s heads and become quite addicted. I’ve made sure that I kept my feet on the ground, but you could see, particularly with a Netflix-style budget affording you. I’m sure it’s not all as quite as grand and as glamorous, being prime minister, but it certainly felt it at times. And I always remember turning the corner dressed in full crown and coronation robes and singing an aria straight down the camera, and I don’t think the crew had any idea what was going on or why I was doing that or dressed like that.