Count me one of the multitudes who adore the Netflix limited series “The Diplomat,” commandeered by “The West Wing” and “Homeland” alumnus Debra Cahn, which just launched Season 2 last week. I gulped down the six episodes as fast as I could.
The delicious center of her series is not the behind-the-scenes diplomacy engaged by two experienced U.S. envoys, Kate Wyler, the current U.S. Ambassador to England (Keri Russell) and her adoring husband Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) — it’s their relationship, from bathroom and bedroom banter to all-out physical warfare, often followed by passionate sex. This married couple play out fascinating male-female power dynamics.
Russell and Sewell display a convincing intimacy that is great fun to watch. I spoke to Sewell on Zoom, and learned a few things you may or may not know about him and the show.
1. He is a respected British stage and television actor. In “The Diplomat,” he deploys a perfect American accent. He lives in Los Angeles now, but he was nurtured back in the day by Judi Dench. “When we were at drama school at Central School of Speech and Drama, or Central School of Screech and Drama, as we called it at the time,” he said on Zoom, “she directed The Scottish Play, and I played the porter. That got me my start, because she, unbeknownst to me, got her agent to come and see me, and she even got me my first job.”
He got his start playing a Franciscan friar in “The Royal Heart of the Sun,” and a crazed skinhead stand-up comedian in “Comedians.” “I played a Scottish heroin addict,” he said. “I played a Dublin Bus driver with Albert Finney, very working class. After a few years of playing out there parts and and feeling that that was my niche, I played someone who was supposed to be the young guy, the young buck. And it was a struggle for me, because I wasn’t used to not having a mask to liberate me. I did play Will Ladislaw in ‘Middlemarch.’ It changed the way I was seen. It took me a long time to be able to just get the idea of how people saw me out of my head. That’s why I love my career now, because it feels like as I’m getting older, I’m able to go back to the parts I did before that and still have the benefit of actually being able to play the dude sometimes.”
2. Americans see Sewell differently than Brits. He plays a mature dude in “The Diplomat.” “I don’t think I would have got this role in a British production,” said Sewell, “[unless] it had been an upper-class part, some remote Lord or some wanker on a horse. But this role came via the Americans, who don’t have the same ideas of types of actors, kind of class, etc. I’m actually coming from quite a poor background, but because of those jobs, I read as quite posh, which meant that for a long time, I haven’t got near a lot of parts that I could do. I feel like I’m getting closer. It’s about being allowed to do parts that I probably wouldn’t like. It’s the same with playing Prince Andrew [Netflix’s “Scoop”]. It was so liberating in so many ways. It’s posh, but It was less of a challenge, weirdly enough, than the things that people think are second nature for me.”
Over the last couple of years, Sewell said, “every major significant job that I’ve got has come from the theater work that I did 15, 20, years ago, like “Arcadia” with Tom Stoppard, that gave rise to “The Father” for me, and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” And this job: people saw me actually in my more natural habitat, playing a much more quirky character.”
3. He played Alexander Hamilton in “John Adams” (HBO), “in the version where he was a relatively one-note villain,” he said. “I made the mistake of reading Ron Chernow’s book about Alexander Hamilton, which is so rich and there’s so much there, and I was promised there’d be so much more in it. I’ve always had a little bit of envy about the Alexander Hamilton that emerged afterwards. Absolutely.”
4. He recorded 11 James Bond audiobooks on 36 CDs. “The real fun of that was not just the Bond part,” he said. “It was freeing for me, because I got to do what I was good at, which is, play all the assorted strange characters around him. So on one page, there might be a short, stout, aged Italian. There might be someone from the Bronx. There’d be an extremely camp golf caddy from Scotland. Being able to jump and inhabit these things is a chance to play.”
5. “The DIplomat” Season 3 is shooting now in New York. “This is a little bit in New York, a little bit in Washington, a little bit in London.” he said. “So we’ve done two months in London, July and August. What a great gig. And a couple of weeks off, and now we’re in Brooklyn for a few months. I’m not going to give too much away.”
6. Hal Wyler’s goal is to ensure Kate’s success. Having had a top diplomatic career of his own, sidelined, Wyler is now navigating his wife’s rising fortunes. As Sewell sees it, “the success that she has is something that he has been behind the scenes trying to instigate. All of his back-room machinations are in the service of putting her up where he believes — and she does not — that she belongs, which is at the top. So the fantastic thing about the dynamic is that when he’s at his most sneaky, it is in service of her and in the service of everything that they both believe is good and and that is the saving grace. He has always been her biggest advocate and supporter, to the extent that early on any decision that she would have wanted to take, which would have put their relationship ahead of her career, he would be very much against. He played backup for her the way she has played backup for him. He’s not naturally as shape-changing as he wishes to be, his frame is not the right size naturally to play backup. So it’s a learning process for him.”
7. The couple’s struggles are key to their mutual attraction. “The mischief he’s making is in order to put her forward, which is key,” said Sewell. “So all of those struggles are about his nature and the way he does things which are like oil and water between the two of them, but it’s also a massive part of their attraction. So this is, and always has been, and always will be, their key struggle. All of their dynamic, the entire DNA of their relationship, all of their fights, all of their struggles, are tied up with what they think is sexy about each other. What they can’t get away from is also what makes them want to strangle each other, and that’s what makes it delicious [to have sex], sometimes in the same night or in this bush, who knows?”
8. The relaxed intimate marital scenes are not hard to do. When Sewell first read the script, “in one way, you could recognize it as a comedy of divorce,” he said. “But it’s so well-written. I was so excited by what one is not used to seeing in this kind of format television. The biggest thing was that people recognize the sniffing of each other’s arm pits, and they’re taking a pee whilst talking, and fighting over the crumbs of a croissant, and then, the sex and all of these things going together just made it feel so much more real, with their humor and the dynamic.”
9. It works when it’s funny. “When we go to these places, and when we meet a lot of diplomats, the people in this world, it’s very accurate, that gallows humor,” said Sewell, “that Terminator scan of a room, not only who are the people to wine and dine, who are the people to avoid, but who are the people to kill. Humor is not a thing sprinkled on the top. It’s absolutely integral.”
These are people who do hardcore plotting and political intrigue in bed, “with the munchies and the sex all tied together,” Sewell said. “Like the strap in the bushes in Season 1, which was the North Star in terms of tone, not that the tone should be fighting in the bushes, but the fact it can go from something so serious and real to something so ridiculous and also real, and back again in the way that life can. It was: ‘the parameters are here.’ That feeling of freedom and the ridiculousness of reality is so much fun because it’s funny. You don’t have to fake it. You just make it real. We laugh a lot.”
10. In Season 2 Hal Wyler almost dies. He survives a car bomb explosion, barely, which changes the dynamic between them again, because Kate is nursing her husband back to health.
“It makes all of the immediate concerns and doubts and angers and resentments evaporate seemingly,” said Sewell, “but they never go away. They’re always sneak back. And also the fact is, moments before they were pretty much over, and suddenly they’re in a position where circumstances make it so that he’s probably one of the only people in the world that she can trust. You can have an opinion about the person you live with for 30 years. It’s not necessarily true. You can have an opinion about yourself. They are very different in the way they deal with situations, which is what makes them such a dynamic team. There’s something about the way that Hal is in the world. She thinks it’s fantastic, but it drives her fucking insane. The fact of him and what he is like, the thing that can politically pull off these incredible feats, but also the ability. to see a thing, blind yourself to the possible negative consequences if it goes wrong, and shoot towards it. There is a potential greatness in that derring-do, but there is also blindness to collateral damage, risk that is part of that, and risk which she sees, at worst, as cavalier. And they have both been in situations where they have done amazing things and saved people. There have been times where there have been casualties, and she deep down resents his ability to live with it.”
Late in Season 2, Kate Wyler starts to behave like her husband. “And she suddenly starts to see him in a different way,” said Sewell. “And he resents the fact that she’s going, ‘maybe you’re okay.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, really, maybe that’s not the last word on it.”
“The Diplomat” Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix.
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