[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for major plot developments of Season 4, Episodes 1 and 2 of “The Diplomat,” now streaming on Netflix.]
Over its first three seasons, “The Diplomat” — Netflix’s riveting drama about Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom — has been no stranger to shocking plot twists: bombings, false flag operations, clandestine affairs, the death of the president of the United States, and the appointment of Kate’s husband, Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), to vice president, just to name a few.
The fourth season, which premieres on the streamer on October 15, launches with one of the show’s most astonishing developments yet: In the final seconds of “Windsor,” the season premiere, President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) is shot in the abdomen by a sniper as she, Kate, Hal, and the First Gentleman, Todd Penn (Bradley Whitford), are about to leave Windsor Castle.
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“I wanted something that could reset the relationship — really all the relationships, but particularly the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K., which had been a little bit ragged in Season 3,” creator and showrunner Debora Cahn told IndieWire.
Indeed, at the beginning of the Season 4 premiere — written by Cahn and Anna Hagen, and directed by Alex Graves — Kate is still reeling from the revelation that capped off Season 3: Hal conspired with Grace to covertly recover a doomsday nuclear weapon from a Russian submarine that’s sunk off the coast of the U.K., while convincing the U.K. government that the weapon remains trapped on the sub. Meanwhile, the U.K. is still rocked by nationwide protests after Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) revealed at a joint press conference with Grace that her predecessor authorized a deadly terrorist attack on a British aircraft carrier. (The attack was actually directed by Grace when she was vice president — another bombshell secret Kate and Hal have been trying to contain since Season 2.)
With all that swirling around them, the presidential motorcade meant to bring Kate, Hal, Grace, and Todd back to Air Force One gets waylaid by protesters blocking the entrance to Heathrow airport. So the entire operation makes a pit stop at Windsor Castle at the invitation of the (absent) King of England, until the perimeter around Air Force One can be cleared.
After the a formal presentation of arms by the King’s Guard on the front lawn of the castle, Kate spends the next few hours trying — and failing — to get the president to tell the truth to the Brits about the Russian sub. She’s marginally more successful in her fight to reclaim her tattered marriage to Hal, first by ending her relationship with British intelligence agent Callum Ellis (Aidan Turner), then by bringing Hal into the castle’s chapel to restate her vows to him.
The episode ends with everyone back on the front lawn for a formal farewell. As Grace and Todd approach the president’s limo, a small spark can be seen glancing off of the front of the car. Grace looks down and sees blood pooling across her blouse. Kate screams “Down!” and pushes Hal to the ground as the Secret Service swarm around the president and cover her body.
Episode 2, “Redcoats” — written by Cahn and directed by Graves — picks up the action immediately, in an eerily hushed sequence as the King’s Guard springs into action to secure the perimeter. The Secret Service pulls Grace into the president’s car, and then she, Todd, and chief of staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) peel away to transport the president to an American aircraft carrier nearby. Hal and Kate, meanwhile, are pulled back into the basement of Windsor castle for safety.
The rest of the episode deals with the fallout from the assassination attempt: Trowbridge is notified and launches a nationwide manhunt; Grace goes into surgery and temporarily transfers presidential power to Hal; Todd waits anxiously on the carrier until Grace emerges safely from surgery.
Cahn explained to IndieWire why Grace getting shot helped to keep the show from getting “too navel-gazing with itself,” how the show’s many consultants helped to shape the sequence, what the writers and producers learned from studying other real-life assassinations — including, most recently, the death of Charlie Kirk — and why she has avoided including the royal family on “The Diplomat” for so long.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
IndieWire: How did you arrive at the decision to have President Penn shot at the end of the season premiere?
Debora Cahn: I wanted something that could reset the relationship — really all the relationships, but particularly the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K., which had been a little bit ragged in Season 3. But then the president gets shot on your home turf. Boy, does that entire country feel bad, and boy, do we suddenly have all the goodwill in the world from the U.K. We couldn’t possibly squander it, could we? And the same with Kate and Hal — everybody loves her, wants to be on her side in that moment, and then we move forward from there.
How did you want to differentiate this event from the pantheon of presidential assassinations, both real and fictional?
The really fucked up thing about doing this was that we’ve all now seen so many of them. We talked a lot about how quiet the bullet is. I remember watching — it’s so horrible — the Charlie Kirk assassination, and being struck by how it’s not like a big bang bang. It’s just a little pop pop. It’s not this massive announcement of a horrific event. It’s almost like a whisper. You see this suspended moment in time where the characters don’t know. Even Grace herself doesn’t know yet what happened. And the way that the information ripples through a crowd — again, something we’ve horribly now seen a number of times ourselves. We were really looking to hone in on those little things that are different in reality than they are depicted usually on TV.
I thought the bullet glancing off of the car before it hits Grace, as our first indication that something’s wrong, was a nice touch. How did you land on doing that?
The brilliant Alex Graves was like, “Something has to grab our attention so that we’re looking in the right place and focused in the right way right before the moment happens.” Particularly because she doesn’t act like a person who was shot. She doesn’t collapse. She doesn’t fall over. Much of this was taken from the Reagan assassination [attempt], this period of time where your body produces enough adrenaline to keep you going past the moment of impact. We were looking to present it in a way where nobody sees it, so how is the audience going to see it?
So Alex was like, “The audience doesn’t necessarily have to clock why a little spark comes off the car, but it just grabs the attention enough that you’re focused in the right place.” When we were in post production, Alex kept saying the spark needs to be smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, so it just barely grabs your attention. It’s not a big, windshield shatters thing.
How much did you want to seed the possibility of an assassination attempt in the episode, versus having it arrive as a total shock?
[Thinks in silence for 30 seconds.] Yeah, I don’t know. A lot of Episode 1 is about Season 3. I get a little queasy sometimes when the show is interested in its own mythology — you know, what happened on our fake aircraft carrier and what our fake this did and then who said what to whom. Part of the essential nature of what diplomats are doing is it’s always something so new, you can’t prepare for it. You’re always getting blindsided by massive, earth-shattering events. The second you think that you have a handle on anything, the whole chessboard gets flipped over. I wanted to make sure that we were not too invested in our own little, “You said this, but why didn’t you tell me?” And this person knows, but that person doesn’t know. I don’t want the show to be too navel-gazing with itself.
Part of why I was asking is that during the scene when Kate brings Cal into the chapel, I did think to myself, I wonder where their Secret Service detail is? So I’m curious how much you were concerned about tipping your hand too much.
Yeah, the castle wall was a big deal. It’s not a real wall. It’s VFX. There was a lot of conversation about how much do we need to present this as a secure space so that we can sell the idea that it wasn’t easy to do this? We have to believe it’s a fortress that is, in fact, quite difficult to penetrate. But if the wall is as big as it really would be at Windsor, it just looks so imposing that you’re like, “Oh, who’s coming over the wall?” It just takes over the scene.
This may be a morbid thing to ask, but how did how much did you research how kind of assassination attempt could have been credibly pulled off like it is on the show?
Completely, and we then chose to make it wrong, because we don’t want to make it clear to anybody how something like this could actually happen. One of our consultants was the head of the Queen’s Guard stationed at Windsor, and we were like, OK, you’re giving us really good information. We’re only going to use 50 percent of it, not because we’re not listening, but we don’t want to make a roadmap here.
There are so many dominos that fall after President Penn is shot — taking her to the aircraft carrier, the Prime Minister calling Kate, Kate calling the embassy, the president signing away her powers to Hal. Who else did you consult with to sort out what needs to happen and when?
We have four consultants that read every outline and every script. They’re helping us make decisions about what to do and what not to do. I always say, “If there’s anything that makes you want to throw your shoe at the television, tell us when it’s in the script stage. We can take it out.” And then we will bring people in who are experts in specific things. So we had a Secret Service advisor for this episode, and then we have White House people and State Department people. There’s a bunch of friends of the show who are willing to be bothered on the telephone and answer questions about how does it actually go down. It’s so weird, right, just how those decisions are made. When can Hal come upstairs? Why? Why is it OK now, but it wasn’t OK before? I find those things to be fascinating.
In that process, what were the things that you were pursuing that a consultant was like, “If you do this, I will throw my shoe at the at the TV”?
We wanted to see the redcoats come to life in this way that we don’t experience them. It looks like a costume more than a uniform. We wanted to have this discovery that they’re highly trained, highly armed military personnel. We think they’re just standing there, looking picturesque and photogenic, but that’s some serious weaponry that they’re carrying. We wanted to see that pop to life. And I liked the idea that, at the beginning of Episode 2, Kate comes out of the shock and starts to experience this scene, and like, “Is it 1776?” It looks almost like a period piece, and yet it is completely contemporary. They’re trained to use those guns. We wanted a lot of shooting.
So there were versions of how she would be shot and how an assassin could reach her that were just like: “No.” Windsor Castle is one of the more protected spaces on Earth, so we have actually very, very little latitude in what we could do and how we could do it. In order for the assassination to make sense, it would only work if it was a sniper who was so far away and that [the redcoats] can’t see a target. There’s nobody to shoot at.
We do see some of what you’re describing, though, with the guards springing to action.
It turns into something that we love. We’re not going to have bang, bang, bang, bang, so that tells you something about the [experience] that you didn’t know before, which is that it’s very quiet. Kate’s the only person who screams. All of the security professionals talk in a normal voice to each other. You can hear birds in the background. You can hear wind. Sometimes, it’s a gut punch when you’re setting up this whole thing, and you learn, “No, you cannot have your 50 soldiers shoot their guns.” [Laughs] But then it becomes this defining feature of it.
You obviously couldn’t film at the real Windsor Castle. How does one go about finding a suitable alternative?
It happened on two continents in a total of nine different locations. The yard outside the front is one castle in the U.K., a place called Burley House. Almost every room inside is in a different physical space. The chapel is in Long Island. There’s three different locations that we used in Long Island. “The Gilded Age” found some good locations, so we used some of the spots that they filmed in. And then it took more than one British castle to put that location together.
Finally, this is the first time that “The Diplomat” has engaged with the existence of the U.K.’s royal family. Was that something that you’ve been wanting to do?
It’s actually unrealistic that that the president, that the ambassador, that all of these upper-level dignitaries wouldn’t interact a lot with the royal family, because they would. But I wanted to respect “The Crown’s” territory. I love that show. They did it so well that to scratch at the surface was to me always really, really terrifying.
I also didn’t want to make up, like, Prince Walter and his wife Patrinka. I didn’t want fake royals. I didn’t want people impersonating the real royals. King Charles, if you’re watching, we’d love to have you on the show. We can shoot you out in one day — no, not “shoot.” We can complete your filming in one day.
“The Diplomat” Season 4 premieres Thursday, October 15 on Netflix. All eight episodes will be released at once.