Note: The following story contains spoilers from “The Diplomat” Season 2.
After “The Diplomat” established the complex marriage between Keri Russell’s Kate and Rufus Sewell’s Hal, Season 2 digs into how the couple’s dynamic shifts after tragedy strikes.
“What we’re looking at is what happens after a trauma, what happens after a tragedy … the daily irritations and power struggles that happen that can be blown away in this kind of incident,” creator Debora Cahn told TheWrap. “It blows out all of the smoke of the mundane of a relationship, and suddenly, you’re dealing with the real heart of it.”
While Kate and Hal were inching towards a divorce by the onset of the Season 1 finale, the finale delivered an explosion in its final moments that left Hal’s fate hanging in the balance. Season 2 picks up just afterwards, with Kate dropping everything to tend to Hal, whose critical condition luckily stabilizes soon after Kate’s arrival.
“Something so monumental where something happens to a partner, it just refocuses everything,” Russell told TheWrap. “There’s a lot in our show that the up for debate about their competitiveness as a couple, or their push and pull and their hate and love and all of those things, but I think beyond all of that, they are each other’s protector. When this happens, you just drop everything, and everything else feels ridiculous and frivolous.”
While Russell admits Kate was “certainly entertaining other options” in Season 1, particularly via her alliance with British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), she points to the direction give by director Alex Grave, which saw Kate not even make eye contact with Dennison after learning about Hal’s accident. “She’s like, ‘That is done — that is so over,’” Russell said.
With Kate still reeling from the discovery that British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) was the one behind the terrorist attack that sent her to London, Russell adds that her discovery “only brings her closer to Hal,” saying “she trusts him from before all of this — she knows she can trust him, regardless of any sh–ty things she’s ever done to him. She knows that she can count on him.”
“The energy between them and the way they are is kind of unstoppable,” Sewell added.
With Kate and Hal standing as a (mostly) united front to take on the unfolding global crisis before them, Cahn admitted that she didn’t realize the marriage would become as central to the Netflix series as it has.
“It turns out that it really became a portrait of a marriage, and it was nice to know that that was happening,” Cahn said, “to be able to just dig deeper into that, and to know that we had Keri and Rufus, who worked together in this incredible way and have such a great time together, and that those Kate and house scenes are so engaging that you can write the 15-page scene and do it on TV — like, that’s not normal.”
While Hal made it out of the car bomb explosion, Season 1’s premiere reveals that Stuart’s aide, Ronnie Buckhurst (Jess Chanliau), wasn’t as lucky. His death, which is treated with notable reverence for a minor character, sends Kate into a spiral as she considers whether she’s more like her husband than she cares to admit
“I liked the idea … that these two people who came together in a kind of a shared passion about their work, were being torn apart by … a different ethical line in the sand and different ideas about what was an acceptable amount of risk in trying to do this very important job,” Cahn explained. “The idea was to sort of re-create the wound that initially dealt such a such a terrible blow to their marriage, and that was [that] in the past, Hal did things that put people who work for them at risk, and those people died — or at least that’s how Kate sees it.”
Cahn aimed to put Kate in Hal’s shoes as she experienced the diplomatic community coming together to mourn Ronnie in a way that Cahn likens to the loss of a child in a relationship.
“Would her judgment of [Hal] change, and would she have more perspective on choices that he made and and what would that do to their relationship?” Cahn asked. “What would it do to the people around her — the people who looked up to her in the way that she initially looked up to Hal — there was a sort of a hero worship thing, and there’s a real loss of faith that happens when somebody who you care about that much and you respect that much does something that you feel kind of blithely endangers somebody else’s life.”
Season 2 also introduces Allison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn, a character that Cahn describes as an “unexplained, unexploded grenade that we had in our pockets, sort of waiting to deploy” after first mentioning the character — and her husband’s scandal — in Season 1. Janney’s appearance also reunites the “The West Wing” star with Cahn, who served as a producer on “The West Wing.”
“I don’t dream big enough sometimes, and one of our great Netflix execs was like, ‘Well, have you considered bringing Allison in?’ And I just never believed that it would work — I didn’t think she would say ‘yes,’ and it was just a mind-blower when I called her up, and she did,” Cahn said. “We hadn’t seen each other in a few years, and it was kind of terrifying writing for her again. I was very intimidated by it, and it just turned out to be as magical as we hoped.”
“I was such an enormous fan of ‘The West Wing’ and everything I’ve ever seen her do, so to have her to the news that she was coming on board was such a competence in the show,” Sewell said, applauding her for being fun to work with and prepared on set. “It was just a treat.”
As Grace operates in a prim and pinned up way that is foreign to Kate, Russell noted that Grace’s challenge to Kate ends up bringing Kate and Hal closer. “If anyone is pushing or pulling either of us, it brings us closer, so I think a foil is good because it just makes them tighter,” Russell said. “Although so much of the end of last season was about kind of this disintegration, this season, I think, there’s a lot of things that have brought them together.”
As Kate and Grace present foils of alternative ways to engage with femininity on the political stage, their conversations parallel discussions regarding the upcoming presidential election — though the show was written well before VP Kamala Harris stepped up to become the 2024 presidential nominee.
“We like to be in conversation with what’s happening in the world, but we’re not trying to be a dramatization of real life events or political figures — and then s–t got real … the show was suddenly skating dangerously close to what was going on in the world,” Cahn said. “And on a certain level, it’s exciting. But I also don’t want to present the impression that we’re making a comment on this particular presidential race, although we’re talking about a presidential race. And boy, a lot of the characteristics are similar.”
“The Diplomat” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
