‘Americans’: Count the Jennings’ kills, conquests, disguises
The Americans’ Philip and Elizabeth Jennings have spent five seasons donning disguises, seducing the opposite sex with “honeytraps” to get intel and carrying out orders from “the Center” to kill inconvenient targets.
Going into the sixth and final season of the FX drama Wednesday (10 ET/PT), have you stopped to wonder how many there were? We have, and we have the answers, exclusively.
Would it surprise you to know that, through the first five seasons, Philip and Elizabeth are in a (ahem) dead heat, with 16 “kills” apiece?
It sure surprised Matthew Rhys, who plays Philip.
“I’m shocked about it, because we’ve always thought you do the killing and I do the crying,” he said to co-star and real-life partner Keri Russell in a joint interview last week.
Elizabeth’s tally includes John and Natalie Granholm, suspected Nazi collaborators in Massachusetts, in Season
5, along with a few randos like Season
4’s “creep in parking lot.” Philip’s conquests include Timoshev, way back in the pilot episode, and last season’s Randy Chilton, a researcher at an Oklahoma entomology lab whom they suspect of poisoning the Soviet grain supply. (His total does not include an entire submarine full of soldiers vanquished in Season 2.)
But Elizabeth has Philip beat when it comes to honeytraps, the practice of se- ducing a partner to glean information. She has sprung seven through five seasons, including a “pasty bureaucrat” in the pilot episode and Don Seong, a scientist with access to bioweapons who’s drugged and made to believe he impregnated Patty, Elizabeth’s alias. Still, sometimes it’s tough to tell them apart: “Who’s Neal?” Russell asks, when shown a list that includes an unfamiliar conquest from Season 3.
Philip has honey-trapped only three women, including the best known, Martha (Alison Wright), an FBI secretary who is later expatriated to Moscow to protect her from prosecution. (His dalliance with teenage Kimberly remains chaste, for now, so it’s merely baited.)
Russell jokes that the disparity reflects the sexes: A single encounter with a man gets you all the information you need, she says, but “with girls, you’re like, you gotta hang out with them, you gotta buy them dinner, you gotta move in.”
Wigs and other disguises are perhaps the best-known feature of The Americans: Elizabeth sports several in the Season 6 premiere alone. But through five seasons, she wore 40 disguises (some more than once) to Philip’s 42.
The show’s makeup artist Lori Hicks has named the disguises, and keeps a detailed “look book” for handy reference. One of Rhys’ early favorites: the mustachioed Fernando, whom he decided was a Latin flamenco dance teacher in his spare time.