Ballerina relishes role on ‘Americans’ At a glance

“The Americans” is shown at 10 p.m. Tuesdays on FX.

There’s a ballet dancer on the TV show “The Americans,” but she doesn’t dance one step. And that makes for a happy ballerina.

Irina Dvorovenko, a former principal with American Ballet Theater, has been forging a second career as an actress since she left the company in 2013. The same month that she retired from Ballet Theater, she triumphed as Vera Baronova in the Encores! production of “On Your Toes” at City Center. Her success was a surprise — even to her.

She was hooked. Acting turned into a passion, just as ballet had once been.

Since then, her most prominent role had been as a drug-addicted ballerina on the Starz series “Flesh and Bone.” But with this season of FX’s “The Americans,” on which she plays Soviet emigre Evgheniya Morozova, the game has changed.

“It’s a different character for me,” she said during a recent interview at Cafe Fiorello near Lincoln Center. “I really want to be seen as a different person and to show an absolutely different side of me. Nothing related to dance.”

On “The Americans,” which stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as undercover Soviet spies in the United States during the Cold War, Dvorovenko plays a forlorn, isolated woman with a depressed son and a husband who has embraced his new country. Dvorovenko is somewhat unrecognizable in the role: sallow and drawn.

It’s not the biggest stretch.

“It’s my childhood,” she said.

Dvorovenko, born in 1973, grew up in Ukraine with dancer parents and studied gymnastics before entering ballet school at 10. For her, the show’s time period has brought back a flood of memories.