Kerri Russell stars in the Netflix political drama The Diplomat as a foreign service officer tapped to become the American ambassador to the UK. Russell also starred in the series Felicity and The Americans. She spoke with us last year about these characters and getting her start on The All New Mickey Mouse Club as a kid. Also, we remember author Dorothy Allison, who died this week at age 75. Her critically acclaimed 1992 novel Bastard out of Carolina was based on her own childhood experience of being physically and sexually abused. We listen back to Terry's interview with Allison about the book and her life.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the Netflix series 'The Diplomat' about?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Sam Brigger. If you like to distract yourself from real-world crises with the fictional kind, then you can now watch season two of the Netflix series The Diplomat. Keri Russell stars as Kate Wyler, a career Foreign Service officer with an excellent reputation for handling international crises, often behind the scenes.
Her husband Hal, played by Rufus Sewell, is also a diplomat and former ambassador. Let's hear a clip from the current season. But first, a little exposition. Last season, Kate Weiler and her British counterparts had been investigating the terrorist attack of a British aircraft carrier.
She had been told that a Russian mercenary named Lenkov was behind the attack, but that it was secretly planned by someone within the British government, and she suspects the prime minister. Last season ended with a cliffhanger. A car bomb went off, severely injuring Kate's husband, her deputy steward, and another staff member named Ronnie.
In this scene, Kate meets the embassy's lead CIA agent, Idra Park, at the hospital and fills her in on the investigation. Park is played by Ali Ahn.
Lenkov put together the attack on the carrier, but the Kremlin did not hire him. I think the prime minister did. Of this country. Slow down. They are British police. This is a British hospital. Our people are not safe here. Kate, you think the British Prime Minister ordered a strike on his own warship, which may or may not be connected to the bomb that just went off in his own city?
You think he ordered that too? I think the call is coming from inside the house. And three Americans, including my husband, just got blown up inside the house.
Kerry Russell has played two iconic roles on television, the lead on the show Felicity as a young college woman in New York, and Elizabeth Jennings, a Soviet spy in the 80s living undercover in the United States in the critically acclaimed show The Americans. she received three Emmy nominations for that role.
She got her start on television as a teenager on the all-new Mickey Mouse Club, with a cast that included Britney Spears, Ryan Gosling, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake. I spoke with Keri Russell in 2023 when The Diplomat premiered. Keri Russell, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much.
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Chapter 2: How did Keri Russell land her role in 'The Diplomat'?
I began to believe that there was an explanation for what had happened to me. And I came to it largely through a political understanding. I went away to college and somebody talked to me about Marx and showed me, you should be a communist. They said you're working class. Well, I'm not much good at that because communists need to do what they're told. But I started reading and trying to study.
Why is it that these things happen and why is it that everybody especially believe that incest and violence happens to poor and working class kids? And I lucked into a study group, a feminist study group, and all of a sudden it was bigger. It wasn't just that we were poor.
It was because I was a girl child and because girl children in my family are taught to endure and survive and not to fight back. And that began to let me be angry. It began to let me believe that I wasn't this monster that deserved what had happened to her, but somebody who had fallen under somebody else's madness.
You did something that it sounds like nobody else in your family had done before. You left home. You went someplace else. You tried to have a life different from the lives you had seen around you. How did you make that move?
Oh, I did something. I did a number of things nobody else in my family had done before. I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school, the first person to go to college. There have been two since. And I have come of an enormous family. It's just that both of my sisters dropped out of high school in the 9th and 10th grade.
It's just not something that we were given the idea that we could do. But a lot of it had to do with my mother. My mother believed that I was this incredibly special person, that I was... Brilliant. She thought that I was just amazing. So when I was five or six years old, she started getting me books, and she started saving money to send me to school. She would put quarters in a tip jar.
She did it my entire childhood. The point I went to college, she had almost $200, and she'd been saving for more than 10 years.
Wow.
It wasn't exactly a life in which you could keep money. But if you make that decision with my mother's encouragement, believing that I was different, a lot of other things come along. The fact that I was so bright and won so many prizes and awards and things drove me away from my family. I didn't have any choice about leaving. I didn't know how to talk to them after a while.
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