Alison Wright’s Martha keeps her ‘Americans’ citizenship
Martha! Martha! Martha! Poor, sweet FBI secretary Martha Hanson, shipped off to Moscow in the dead of night last season on The Americans, made a surprise appearance on Tuesday’s episode of FX’s critically acclaimed 1980s spy drama.
Martha, played by British actress Alison Wright, has a Moscow apartment, food and other necessities, all supplied by her Soviet spy hosts. But she struggles with the new language and isn’t making friends.
In the episode, she sits down with an unwelcome house guest, Soviet spymaster Gabriel (Frank Langella), who engineered her hurried departure from the United States after her relationship with “Clark,” the alias of KGB spy Phillip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), started drawing too much inter- est from the FBI.
Gabriel “is the last face she’d want to see. She doesn’t think it’s good news for a second,” Wright tells USA TODAY. “She’s bracing herself for what version of awful is going to come out of his mouth.”
But Martha may be one of the first people Americans fans want to see. Wright received an over- whelmingly positive reaction when Martha, who fans may bond with as their non-spy everywoman, was briefly spotted in a Moscow market earlier this season, proving she was still alive.
“People have been relieved and excited,” she says.
Martha has had time to figure out she was played by Philip, who wooed and eventually wed the lonely secretary as a way to gain access to FBI secrets.
“She’s been there about nine months and I imagine she’s done nothing but ruminate and go over every interaction” with Clark, she says. “She’s been putting all these pieces together.”
The Americans marks Wright’s first big U.S. TV role, and is “an amazing platform for me,” she says, crediting the show for another prime supporting role, studio gal Friday Pauline Jameson in FX’s period drama Feud: Bette
and Joan. “I’m sure it sprang from The Americans.”
Pauline was a composite character in a limited series in which other major roles were based on specific people, including movie legends Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange).
Pauline sees her directing dream quashed by Hollywood sexism, although she later finds success as a documentary filmmaker.
Fictionalizing Pauline enabled
executive producer Ryan Murphy “to represent more than one woman’s experience and what happened to multitudes of women,” Wright says. “The show brings to life how we haven’t come far enough in 50 years.”
Wright, 40, is now on Broadway playing another American: a long-time factory worker who finds her livelihood in jeopardy in Sweat.
“It’s the story of hard-working, blue-collar Americans who have had the American Dream taken away from them,” she says. “I feel like everything I’m doing is weirdly timely.”
Wright, who also has a role on Amazon’s Sneaky Pete, won’t say whether Martha will make any more appearances on The Ameri
cans. (Four episodes remain in this penultimate season, which ends May 30.) Her two stints this season were stealth visits.
“Both times, there was lots of secrecy to keep it a surprise,” she says. “I only told my mom and my dog … and my agent.”