Director Alex Graves on Keri Russell’s Balletic Excellence in Netflix’s Hit Series “The Diplomat”
Keri Russell plays blunt but brilliant U.S. Ambassador Kate Wyler in The Diplomat. She’s often anything but diplomatic in the taut political thriller, loath to dress in fancy clothes or brush her hair, but Kate exhibits invaluable tenacity as she tracks down the perpetrators of a horrendous ship explosion and car bomb attack. The Emmy-nominated Netflix series, which aired its second season last fall, co-stars Rufus Sewell as Kate’s ambitious husband Hal, with David Gyasi as the British Foreign Secretary, Ato Essandoh as her deputy chief of mission, and Rory Kinnear as England’s fiery prime minister. Kate Wyler meets her match at the end of the season when Allison Janney shows up as the wily, tactically brilliant, and ruthless American Vice President Grace Penn.
The show’s mix of witty dialogue and political chicanery brings to mind Aaron Sorkin’s now-iconic political drama The West Wing, which is where Diplomat creator/showrunner Deborah Cahn and executive producer/director Alex Graves met early in their careers. Graves, a Kansas City native, later worked with Cahn on Homeland and, more recently, directed episodes of HBO’s juggernaut Game of Thrones and Apple TV+’s Foundation.
Graves, speaking from his part-time home in Las Vegas, talks to The Credits about why he likes to keep the camera rolling and how grandiose public settings bolster the stakes for its privately anguished characters.
In The Diplomat, you have actors of a very high caliber showing up on set, ready to go. What does that leave you to do as the director when it comes to their performances?
What I spend time doing with the actors is watching. Because a lot of what you do with actors, and certainly on The Diplomat, is, you’re watching what they’re doing, number one, and two, you want to make sure you’re getting the psychological and emotional story. “Is there anything I’m not seeing?” Someone like Rufus Sewell, who’s just brilliant to watch, has already worked out the performance, or he’s riffing off Keri or whatever, and he has a very strong opinion about Hal. [After a take] You might say, “I’m seeing this or I’m not seeing that, let’s go again.” You want to see the insecurities, the pettiness, the little performance details that go right into the lens. It’s a funny experience for me because I’ve done a lot of very large things, science fiction and otherwise, and this show is really about the microscope.
The range of Keri Russell’s performance as Kate is something to behold. She can do funny, heartbroken, fierce, and everything in between. What’s your directing relationship with her?
Keri’s full of energy, thank God, and she comes in totally ready, so we spend a lot of time trying to keep up with her. The thing about Keri is that she gives Kate enormous humanity and the clumsiness and the flaws and the bluntness of the character.
Do you do a lot of takes?
It could be two takes, it could be ten takes. With Keri, a lot of times I won’t cut because whenever you cut, the magic that goes on—and it is a sort of magic—that stops. Keri is a dancer; she has been her whole life, so if you cut, she stops and the whole energy stops. There’s a real value to not cutting. If you say okay, “We’re still rolling,” Keri returns to her number one position, everyone re-sets in the background, and you say “go,” and she rolls right into the scene and maybe goes to another level.
You want to maintain momentum. Can you give an example of shooting multiple takes to achieve a better result?
Season one, episode seven, Keri’s just come back from a humiliating meeting at the White House, her old friend has filled her in on [casualties in] Afghanistan, so when Hal comes in to check on her day, Kate’s kind of a wreck. On take four, Keri just took it to another level, as if she’d never done the scene before. She was really having the experience. Early on, I realized what a great actor she is. She’d hate hearing me say that because Keri doesn’t like compliments, but her mind and her imagination for the character are just a blast to watch.
Keri meshes so well with the mostly British cast members like David Gyasi and Rory Kinnear, who really deliver the goods.
Well, Rory and David are simply two of the best actors out there. In the Season 2 premiere at 10 Downing Street, Rory has a six-page scene doing most of the dialogue [dealing] with the story and the psychology and the plot and I think he did that like 50 times that day because I had to shoot [coverage of] everybody, so he was running the scene. Each take was just as good as the next one.
It’s interesting because Rory Kinnear looks like a regular guy, yet he brings so much intensity to his performance that he almost steals every scene.
I remember the first day I visited the Diplomat set, I was just hypnotized watching Rory act in rehearsals and takes. He’s a titan.
Years ago, you and Deborah Cahn worked together on The West Wing, which gained instant acclaim as one of television’s best political dramas. Like The Diplomat, The West Wing excelled in fast-paced dialogue between brainy characters. What did you learn about directing from that show?
Getting to direct Aaron Sorkin’s work was pure joy and also very intimidating, so there was a lot of learning about how to work with fear! [laughing]. But another big thing I learned, which became very important on both Game of Thrones and Homeland, was learning to communicate the emotional and psychological aspects of what the characters are going through as they throw out all this beautiful technical dialogue about policy and politics and foreign affairs and whatever. On The West Wing, we used to call it, “The script behind the script.” You’d get Aaron’s dialogue and then you’d rehearse with very smart actors and have conversations about what is going on [with their characters]. In a way, The West Wing was kind of like my post-grad film school, and I think it was for Deborah as well.
Each character in The Diplomat is expected to conceal secrets and put on a happy face when they appear in public at grandiose spaces.
The Diplomat is a combination of very intimate moments on a very large scale, set in a very broad landscape.
You’ve filmed at Inveraray Castle in Scotland, Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, the real U.S. Embassy in London, and the Louvre in Paris. Do you have a favorite set piece involving one of these landmark locations?
The most special setting for me in Season 2 was St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Deborah gave me a Christmas present, a ten-page sequence with almost no dialogue, which is a filmmaker’s dream. For me, it was about breaking down the intimate story going on with about eight characters in the middle of one of the greatest cathedrals in the world. That represented the huge scope of what was going on in the story.
For more big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Director Alex Graves on Keri Russell’s Balletic Excellence in Netflix’s Hit Series “The Diplomat”
End Game: “Squid Game” Season 3 Trailer Teases Final Reckoning
Featured image: The Diplomat. Keri Russell as Kate Wyler in episode 108 of The Diplomat. Cr. Alex Bailey/Netflix © 2023
