“I have a feeling I’ll kind of go into my little world for a little while and read my books and see my kids and take adventures,” says Keri Russell, as we sit down at the offices of The Hollywood Reporter to record an episode of THR‘s ‘Awards Chatter’ podcast, and begin talking about what her life will be like now that The Americans, the massively acclaimed FX drama series on which she has starred since 2013, has come to an end. Russell, who is 42, has been acting almost without interruption since she was just 15, starting out as a child performer on The Disney Channel’s The All-New Mickey Mouse Club, then morphing into a twentysomething fan-favorite on The WB’s Felicity before blossoming, as an adult, into one of the most respected actresses of her generation on The Americans. Her portrayal of Elizabeth Jennings, a Cold War-era Soviet spy posing, like her husband, as an American, has been hailed as “one of the most complex performances ever on television,” and has brought her two Emmy nominations, four Critics’ Choice noms and a Golden Globe nom for best actress in a drama series. Later this month, she will almost certainly receive another Emmy nom, which could put her on the path to her first-ever win. “This was a good one — like, this was a really, really good one,” Russell acknowledges, “so it’s tough to beat.”
* * *
LISTEN: You can hear the entire interview below.
Click here to access all of our 222 episodes, including conversations with Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Lorne Michaels, Gal Gadot, Eddie Murphy, Lady Gaga, Stephen Colbert, Jennifer Lawrence, Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, Snoop Dogg, Jessica Chastain, Jerry Seinfeld, Barbra Streisand, Aaron Sorkin, Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Kate Winslet, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Aziz Ansari, Natalie Portman, Denzel Washington, Nicole Kidman, Warren Beatty, Alicia Vikander, Justin Timberlake, Reese Witherspoon, Tyler Perry, Judi Dench, Tom Hanks, Mandy Moore, Michael B. Jordan, Emilia Clarke, Jimmy Kimmel, Jane Fonda, Bill Maher, Claire Foy, Michael Moore, Amy Schumer, RuPaul, Jennifer Lopez, Robert De Niro, Lena Waithe, Ryan Murphy, Emma Stone, Ricky Gervais, Kris Jenner, Bill Maher, Margot Robbie, J.J. Abrams, Rachel Brosnahan, Timothee Chalamet, Sally Field, Jake Gyllenhaal, Elisabeth Moss & Sting.
* * *
Russell was born in Orange County, Calif., but raised in Arizona and Colorado, to a father who was an executive at Nissan and a mother who was a homemaker. At 13, she landed a scholarship to a dance school, where she spent a considerable amount of time, and where, at 14, she was photographed as a model. A year after that, she, along with some friends, found her way to an audition for the Mickey Mouse Club, and she landed the job of a Mouseketeer, leading her to relocate to Orlando. She appeared on the show — alongside the likes of Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Ryan Gosling — from 1991 through 1994, while also simultaneously making her big-screen debut in the 1992 Disney film Honey I Blew Up the Kid. By the time she was 17, her run with that show came to an end, and she decided to move — alone — to Los Angeles. “I didn’t ever dream of being an actress or being in this business,” she says, “but it was just something that kind of happened and I thought, ‘This is fun. This is better than, I don’t know, going to some office day in and day out.’ Like, ‘I’ll just keep trying.'”
Once Russell was back out west, she landed a manager and an agent, and quickly began working, albeit on projects that slipped under the radar of most in the general public — from a Dudley Moore sitcom to an Aaron Spelling soap opera — until, that is, she auditioned for and won the title role on J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves‘ teen drama Felicity, a show about about a girl who has a crush on a boy and follows him to a college on the other side of the country. She remembers being drawn to the project because it was “so well-written,” “easily relatable” and a “heart-breaker of a story.” The show aired from 1998 through 2002, turning Russell into a star; indeeed, she won a Golden Globe for its first season. Russell enjoyed playing Felicity (“I loved that character and I still love it — it has such a sweetness”), but wasn’t enamored with being a celebrity (“I found it a struggle”). She now is able to laugh about the insane panic that her season two haircut caused — some even suggested that it was the reason the show’s ratings declined — but at the time, things like that were less funny to her.
By the time Felicity came to an end, more or less timed to the character’s graduation, Russell was spent. “I didn’t want to do it anymore,” she says of acting, and she decided to step away from the business, possibly forever. She moved to New York for the next two years and tried to live as normal a life as possible — a hiatus that “saved me,” she says — before ultimately deciding to wade back into the business in the 2004 Neil Labute play Fat Pig, the 2005 limited series Into the West (the most Emmy-nominated program of that year), the 2005 film The Upside of Anger, the 2006 blockbuster Mission: Impossible 3 and the 2007 indies August Rush and Waitress — the latter being but two examples of projects in which she was asked to play nice pregnant girls. “I think there’s something about my face that screams, ‘Nice pregnant girl,'” she cracks.
Then, a call from FX chief John Landgraf changed everything. Landgraf was trying to put together a new drama series about married spies — and, while casting the pilot, thought of Russell for the wife. “It’s so crazy that John would do that,” Russell still insists. “‘I was kinda like, ‘He wants Felicity to be this Cold War, Soviet spy?!'” But she was drawn to the opportunity to play against type; to return to TV at a cable rather than broadcast network (meaning seasons of 10 episodes rather than 22 to 24); and to help bring to life creator Joe Weisberg‘s vision — “The story of the marriage was just fascinating to me,” she recalls. Following a chemistry test to determine her on-screen husband, she was paired with Matthew Rhys — an actor she had met 10 years earlier at a kickball party, after which he had left a drunken message on her answering machine — and, almost immediately, the two became romantically involved in real life, too. (“I just knew,” she says, and they have been a couple ever since.)
For six seasons, The Americans was one of the best-reviewed shows on all of television. However, it largely slipped under the radar of audiences (it generated low ratings throughout its run) and awards voters (for seasons one through five, the show was nominated for best drama series only once, and its stars received lead acting noms only twice). As it arrived at its series finale on May 30, though, more industry figures than ever before seemed to have arrived at the realization that it was something truly unusual and special — in large part because of Russell’s extraordinary work. (Not many people have played even one iconic character on TV, and those who have usually never quite emerge from its shadow; she has now played two.) We will find out in the coming weeks and months whether the TV Academy wants to acknowledge this, as well.
The Americans PGM.createScriptTag("//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6&appId=303838389949803");
Source link