Infiltrate ‘The Americans’ with Russell and Rhys
NEW YORK – It’s a snowy day in February, but there’s fire inside a studio on an industrial, dead-end block of Brooklyn. Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), the spy and fervent loyalist to Mother Russia who’s at the center of FX’s acclaimed series The Americans, is engaged in a final confrontation with Claudia (Margo Martindale), her steely handler, in a scene near the end of this final season (Wednesday, 10 ET/PT). “The damage you’ve done is indescribable,” says one of them to the other. (To say more would be a spoiler.)
There’s more strife everywhere, as the last batch of episodes jumps forward about three years, to 1987, and a more liberal atmosphere in the Soviet Union. Elizabeth and her husband, Philip (Matthew Rhys), posing as Washington suburbanites, are at odds: Always circumspect about their profession, he’s out of the spy game, and now a full-time travel agent, their onetime cover. Fiercely loyal, she’s soldiering on, but clearly stressed.
“It’s just been a hard thing for the marriage to deal with; she’s just gotten exhausted and worn down, and in a way is sort of wilting under that burden,” says co-creator Joe Weisberg. “On top of it, now (Mikhail) Gorbachev has been leading the Soviet Union for two years, and glasnost and perestroika have really started to come into their own, and this is something Philip and Elizabeth are not on the same page about. So history and politics have thrown another wedge into their relationship.”
While The Americans is a spy thriller, at its heart it’s about the marriage of Philip and Elizabeth, and the costs of their jobs to their family.
“Its strength is this very intricate, complicated marriage,” Russell says. “The spy element of it is such a great backdrop; it pushes and pulls the relationship in so many different ways.”
Producers are often asked if real life seeps into their scripts. But “I’m beginning to worry about the opposite,” jokes co-creator and executive producer Joel Fields, “that someone over there is watching the show and getting ideas,” he says. “We did an entire season about bioweapons, and then they go and (poison) this guy with a bioweapon. I’m looking forward to the day the audience can experience the show with bemused nostalgia instead of creepy familiarity.”