‘The Diplomat’ Team on How That Season 2 Finale Shocker “Changes Dynamics” for Season 3
[This story contains major spoilers from the season two finale of Netflix’s The Diplomat.]
There’s a new president at the end of season two of The Diplomat and Kate (Keri Russell) and Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) have just made a “very powerful enemy,” as the actors themselves tell The Hollywood Reporter.
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In the closing seconds of the season two finale of the Netflix political thriller, Kate and viewers learn, as Hal relays to her over the phone, that President Rayburn (Michael McKean) got so upset when Hal told him that his vice president, Grace Penn (Allison Janney), was behind the attack on the British warship that kicked off the series that the president died.
As the vice president’s staff swarms onto the back lawn at the ambassador’s residence to protect the new commander-in-chief, the camera closes in on Penn.
Speaking to THR, both Russell and Sewell indicate that their characters are likely still so shocked that they haven’t thought about what the White House shake-up means for their political future, including Kate’s vice presidential ambitions.
“I think this is one of those rare occasions where Hal has not gamed this one out,” Sewell says, with Russell agreeing and both saying they thought they were being “super clever” with their plans prior to the president dying. “In this moment, he is absolutely like a child in terms of he’s helpless, and she is walking this lost man through it.”
Russell adds, recalling how before she gets the news, Kate and Penn were arguing about the vice presidency, “I mean, the real, immediate battle is Grace Penn. I mean, we have just had it out. It becomes very complicated, but fun and rich and exciting.”
The two have already had a roller coaster dynamic including a contentious early interaction where Penn criticizes Kate’s appearance, saying that if she really wants to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, she should spend a little more time on how she looks.
The Diplomat showrunner Debora Cahn says Penn’s speech, in which she calls out Kate’s hair, bra and the paperclip holding up her pants, came from discussions with people who worked on Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns.
“Just talking about the level of granularity into your life, yourself, your body that happens when you are being crafted into a product for the public, I just found it so striking that I had been waiting for two seasons to find a place to put it in and finally did,” Cahn says, adding that the comments about Kate’s hair and bra came from things people had really said.
As for that shocking moment at the end of season two, that idea, Cahn says, came up in the middle of the season and was connected to knowing that Oscar- and Emmy-winner Janney, who Cahn previously worked with on The West Wing, was boarding the series.
“Once we knew that Allison Janney was coming, it became clear that we wanted her to be a strong center of gravity in the story. And at that point, it sort of seemed obvious that that was the move,” Cahn says. “But for me, that’s really the fun of it, is you have an idea for where the story is going, but something changes. There’s a casting change, or there’s a way that a story hits you when you see it on film, and perhaps you didn’t read it that way on the page, and that gives you an idea that just changes the whole direction of the series.”
The Diplomat has already been renewed for and begun production on its third season, likely welcome news for fans disappointed that season two only had six episodes and still reeling from that shocking finale.
And Sewell indicates things only get more complicated and thrilling in season three.
“The end of season two is one thing, but very quickly even more extraordinary things happen,” he says. “What I loved that made me take the job was the relationship. Now what I realize was that the more extraordinary the surroundings are, the more context there is informing that relationship. Allison Janney coming in, the dynamics of the story after what happens at the end of season two really gives us some extraordinary things. Also it changes dynamics that might have been in danger of playing out. And it’s getting really complex, the dynamics, the billing, is changing, which is always so rich when you’re acting in a relationship.”
Penn coming up with the attack on the British ship, which viewers and Kate learned from Hal in the closing seconds of the penultimate episode of season two, with Penn explaining her rationale to Kate with a piece of coal and a world map in the season two finale, was connected to Cahn’s initial ideas for the series.
“I always knew that I wanted to kind of come back to a position of American responsibility,” she tells THR, adding that the development reflects the more nuanced portrayal of political officials she’s aiming for with the series. “And the idea behind that was that something happens: our first move is we have a like Islamophobic reflex, and we immediately blame Iran, and then we blame Russia. And then it turns out, we had this idea of the call’s coming from inside the house, and that we were learning that our closest allies and best friends have perhaps inflicted this one upon ourselves. And, how do you investigate your host country? How do you kind of make an intelligence investigation in a place where you share all intelligence resources, as we do in the U.K.?”
She continues, “But the goal was ultimately to bring it back to us, to start with something that we quickly see as something that we can blame on bad people. And then it turns out that you dig all the way around to the end, and there’s the involvement of this person who we don’t think is bad. We think she’s really smart, and she did her best in a hard situation. That’s what I am looking for always. I think that it’s sort of a cop out to say that, well, like a bad person and a bad country did this thing, and that’s why we’re all getting hurt. It isn’t that easy, and it’s, I think, way more compelling and way more complicated if you say, OK, good, smart people who care about their own families and care about other people’s families all did their best, and we’re still in the middle of this shit show, and we are.”
Cahn says that this objective of good people taking actions that might still result in negative consequences is something she wants to portray with all of the characters, including Kate, as viewers this season see her facing the unintended consequences of some of her decisions, including her call to Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie) at the end of season one that ultimately leads to the car bombing that kills embassy staffer Ronnie (Jess Chanliau) and wounds Hal and Stuart (Ato Essandoh), and Kate and Hal miscalculating how Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) will react to the news of Roylin’s involvement in the ship attack.
“I want to show everybody in that way,” Cahn says. “The idea was that we talk about this person who is absolutely evil and untrustworthy. And then we meet them, and we feel like, well, they’re kind of personable. But we still think that this is a bad actor. And then eventually we sort of wrap our way around to understanding the situation that she was in and feeling like, ‘Oh God, I might have done the same thing.’ And that was the plan in the beginning. And that’s absolutely the plan with Kate. Everybody who we sort of meet and we think is bad, ultimately, hopefully that opinion flips, and then it flips again. And the same thing with Kate, the kind of things that we would ascribe to villains in a different kind of narrative, Kate is absolutely making those moves and making those choices and mistakes.”
The season also sees Kate and Eidra, working as “co-conspirators,” as Ahn puts it, to investigate who’s behind the ship attack, pushing each other to do some questionable things.
“Eidra is being asked to break some rules that she wouldn’t normally but because she trusts Kate, she’s kind of stepping out on a limb for her,” Ahn says. “It’s basically a testament to how much she respects Kate, and Kate is basically asking her to trust her. And probably they don’t have a lot of options, and they don’t have a lot of time. She’s making the best decision she can with the information she has, and it means doing something she’s not comfortable with, but because of the security nature of it, there’s really not a lot of flexibility that she has so it’s sort of their only shot, and I think she knows that she’s risking her job but it seems important enough to take that risk.”
Hal characterizes the fatal car bombing as “the cost of doing business,” which enrages Kate, but Russell admits she thinks her character is starting to understand more of the difficult choices that her husband had to make when he was an ambassador.
“I do [understand], yeah, of being a boss and being in charge of people and having to make hard decisions, and sometimes you make the best decision you can at that time,” says Russell. “And I think the world is full of those decisions, in a family, in a relationship, in politics, I mean, we make them all the time, and you’re usually making the best decision you can with the information you have at that moment. But, yeah, I think there is a reckoning. I think she understands him a little bit more. I do think she’s still super judgmental of him. I just, I don’t think that will ever go away. That is who she is, and she makes no bones about it, with him.”
Despite the ongoing judgment, season two finds Kate and Hal more committed to their marriage than in season one, when she was ready to divorce him and a mutual attraction with British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) was teased.
“I think having a tragic event like that really does turn the volume down on personal like desires and wants. I mean, it’s just such a wake up, and I think things get really focused, and I think that’s what happened. I think you reevaluate everything, and you go in close and remember what’s important,” Russell says. “To me, this season is such a different temperature for them as a couple. It, for me, it becomes kind of heartbreaking and real and and mature, you know, kind of in the way that really long-term relationships do, or long-term marriages do. I think also story wise, there’s so much turmoil going on, giant things going on in Kate’s station and in the country and affecting the world that I think she needs help from someone that she knows she can trust.”
And Kate puts Hal to work more, investigating her theory about who was behind the ship attack.
“There are certain things that she cannot know, and as a kind of independent body, I can now perform the function of taking on the weight of information that she needs to have the benefit of, but she can’t actually officially know it herself legally, so she needs me in that regard,” Sewell explains of Hal’s increased involvement.
Though viewers might think Hal has ulterior motives, Sewell sees it as him just supporting her and himself as they achieve their ambitions together.
“I don’t think he’s being duplicitous at all. I think he is genuinely trying to help,” Sewell says. “He is personally ambitious for himself. He’s he is hugely ambitious for her. And as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think he is someone who’s secretly maneuvering himself, maneuvering for advantage, for himself at someone else’s Kate’s expense. I think they, both of them, between them, have developed a keen eye for what the play is. The play being what do we do to achieve the things that we believe are important in the world.”
While Dennison ends the season strongly shutting the door on him and Kate expanding their partnership, as he allies himself more with Trowbridge, partly in a bid for “survival,” Gyasi suggests the feelings between Dennison and Kate might still be there.
“I think in their heads, they think this can’t possibly happen. But I think the problem with human beings and human emotion is you can’t just switch it off like that. It’s quite interesting to have to say those things and then have those feelings. So I don’t know. At the end of season one there’s this massive explosion but instead of all of the pieces being blown apart, they just get separated, but they’re still whole so I think you get these pieces starting to land again but I think that relationship gets hidden in a box somewhere and we’re not going to look at that. But what happens is that starts to fester and grow and then we’ll see.”
Another romance that fans may have been disappointed to not see revived is the one between Stuart (Ato Essandoh), dealing with a “loss of innocence” and “jagged,” “volatile” PTSD from surviving the car bombing, and Eidra (Ali Ahn). And Essandoh and Ahn seem to share their characters’ differing views on whether they should get back together.
“I’m a romantic and I’d love for them to get together,” Essandoh tells THR. “I don’t know what Debora’s going to cook up. I kind of like how all of these relationships interact and change and how they change based on the circumstances. I think they’re a great couple. but who knows.”
Ahn, meanwhile, just doesn’t think he’s “the right person for her.”
“There’s a lot of love, but I think Stuart’s still not respecting her when she’s at work,” Ahn says. “I think for Eidra, I think there’s a lot that she likes about Stuart but I think ultimately she feels like he doesn’t understand and respect what she’s doing. He compromised her at the end of season one and in season two he’s still not respecting her boundaries. It’s a very adult relationship in that even though she recognizes that she has feelings for him, she recognizes, at least at the end of season two, that he’s not the right person for her as much as she might want him to be.”
Going forward, Cahn says she has “ideas for a long, long time,” and seemed confident the series could “keep going” beyond season three.
“I know some of the way that the story could continue or end. There’s some of it that I don’t know,” she says. “And, you know, to be completely honest, I have to say a lot of my favorite stuff was not in my plans in the very beginning. It’s great that what we see from the actors could be the inspiration for that or somebody else on the writing staff. I have ideas but I want them to be outdone, like just blown out of the water by something else that’s even better.”
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All six episodes of the Diplomat‘s second season are streaming on Netflix.
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