Back in the early 2000s, Debora Cahn had the idea for a TV show set inside the US embassy in London. At the time, she was working as a writer on Aaron Sorkin’s seminal political TV drama The West Wing, but the former playwright was keen to expand her range.
“I [was] part of something taking a serious, detailed, nuanced look inside Washington politics, combined with entertainment,” she recalls of Sorkin’s show. “I wanted to do that with foreign policy, the way The West Wing had primarily done with domestic. I wanted to write something that got inside the way our country deals with other countries.”
Cahn developed the idea into a pilot but nobody bit, so she set it aside — for almost 20 years. Following spells on medical dramas Gray’s Anatomy and Private Practice as well as spy thriller Homeland, Cahn decided to try again. On Homeland and The West Wing, she and her fellow writers had frequently spoken with experts in the fields of politics, intelligence and journalism to pick their brains for story ideas. Among them was Beth Jones, US ambassador to Kazakhstan, 1995-98. “[She] blew my hair back,” remembers Cahn. “I wrote in my notes, ‘This is a series; she is a series.’ She was a big part of my decision to revive that idea.”
Cahn finally found a home for her geopolitical drama at Netflix, which ordered an initial eight episodes. Now in its third season, with a fourth on the way, The Diplomat stars Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, US ambassador to the Court of St James, and Rufus Sewell as her husband Hal, a seasoned diplomat and, since season three, vice president to Allison Janney’s president, Grace Penn.
Before Cahn began writing, she reached out to Jones for advice. “She talked to me for an hour and then said, ‘Do you want some other names?’ The next day she sent a list of 40 ambassadors, all of whom she had spoken to and agreed to speak to me. More than one had worked in Embassy London. She connected me with an incredible diplomat named Liz Dibble, who had been deputy chief of mission at Embassy London. Once you talk to Liz Dibble, the doors start to fly open.”
To play her ambassador, Cahn wanted Russell, star of the Primetime Emmy-winning Cold War spy drama The Americans. “Keri was the fantasy choice,” she admits. “I didn’t think we would get her. My initial sense was, having been a huge fan of her work and seeing her play such a fountain of strength on [The Americans], she seemed too in control for Kate, who was more of a basket case and a portrait of the lack of control a woman feels on the inside, worn on her sleeve.” The pair got together on Zoom, two days before Christmas. “She had three sets of in-laws in the house,” says Cahn. “Her hair was on top of her head, held up by a pencil, and she was so clearly as down to earth, out there and neurotic as Kate. I thought, ‘She’s not just the right actress, she’s Kate.’”
Thereafter, Cahn found herself tailoring the part to Russell, particularly regarding Kate’s lack of vanity and messy, awkward nature. “She is a trained dancer. Good with her body, with physical comedy. That became a much bigger part of the character once we knew that was in her tool set. That’s the joy of working on a long-running series. You create a character then you hand it to an actor, and it turns into something you’re creating between the two of you.” Russell also spent time with both Jones and Jane Hartley, US ambassador to the UK under Joe Biden’s administration. “The two have become pretty close friends,” says Cahn.
A natural ease
As Kate’s very American hubbie Hal, Cahn opted for the very English Sewell, who she saw in 2007 in the Tom Stoppard play Rock ’n’ Roll and fell “desperately in love with him”.
“It was an extraordinary performance and had the kind of nuance and alacrity with language and emotion that is my favourite thing,” she says. “I’m not sure why he felt more right as an iconic American than the American guys we were thinking about, but he was first choice. And that relationship [between Kate and Hal] became more of a spine for the show than I originally imagined because of the incredible chemistry between those two actors.”
“It was there from day one, a natural ease with each other,” agrees Sewell, whose Hal is a difficult character to pin down. Fiercely smart and hugely ambitious, he is Kate’s number one fan, but in the season three finale Hal does something that makes her question if he is a good guy after all.
“I think he’s a good guy,” contends Sewell. “His heart is in the right place. He and Kate both want to do good things. What gets confusing and interesting with Hal is he is prepared to do things to achieve those ends that sometimes we might associate with the bad guys.”
Sewell spoke with former diplomats during his preparation and drew on past politicians for inspiration, notably another husband-and-wife team. “The relationship between Bill and Hillary Clinton is a big part of it,” he reveals, “especially with him coming down and her in the ascendancy, and his brilliance but also being a slight liability at the same time.”
Another inspiration was Richard Holbrooke, who served as diplomat or ambassador under several US administrations. “He was incredibly influential but, at the same time, would piss people off by putting his feet up on their desk,” says Sewell.
When the show began, Cahn and her writers initially looked to the real world for inspiration, even having to rework season one following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Then the real world got, well, even weirder. “Foreign policy in the United States has gone hurtling into what can best be considered the Marvel Universe and is so chaotic and cartoonish it isn’t something we would want to try to get our arms around,” she says. “Things change so quickly [now], even if we wanted to be involved with creating some kind of mirror for what’s going on, we’re writing a year before we air. There’s no way to keep up with the pace of absurd change happening on the front page.”
Instead, Kate and Hal’s personal relationship remains at the heart of The Diplomat, a marriage that has gone through the emotional wringer over the past three seasons. The Wylers bicker and row like a 1940s screwball comedy duo.
“The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, it’s that dynamic,” says Sewell. “It’s what I recognised in the first couple of episodes I read. Keri and I love the same things about the writing, that when it’s funny, it’s funny in the way real human situations are. We don’t need to lean into a comic tone. These people think in a way that is funny. They see the joke. They know who’s a twat and who’s not. It’s their oxygen. And when they row, it’s the same.”
Expanded role
Another role that grew was Vice President Grace Penn, played by The West Wing’s Janney, who joined as a guest star in season two.
“When we knew Netflix was happy with it and we were going to do another season, I had a conversation with Jinny Howe, who runs drama [at Netflix],” recalls Cahn. “She said, ‘Are there any big actors you’d like to bring in for the second season?’ I launched into this lecture about stunt casting, then Jinny leans forward and says, ‘If we got Allison Janney, you wouldn’t want her?’” Immediately Cahn took everything back. “The vice president’s role was a seed that had been planted that we knew we could take advantage of. As soon as it became clear [Allison] was interested, the character took on a much larger role and a more central one.”
In fact, Penn becomes president in season two’s frantic finale, requiring a First Gentleman for season three, with Cahn bringing about a West Wing reunion by casting Bradley Whitford as her husband Todd. “At first, we thought it would be a teeny role and talked about it as a joke. Then it turned into, ‘Holy shit, do you think we could get Brad?’ I asked Allison, ‘Would that be too weird?’ She said, ‘No, it would be amazing.’ It turned into this dream come true that played out primarily in episode six of season three.”
The episode, entitled ‘Amagansett’, and set at the Penns’ Long Island residence, is Sewell’s favourite. “It was like a play. It was the first time I’d really acted with Allison and Bradley together in that way. For Keri and I to have long scenes with people in a kind of mirrored dynamic was like something from a ’70s relationship comedy. It was the closest I’ll get to being in a late ’70s, early ’80s Woody Allen. Again, it was a matter of the drama being tied up with the comedy; something funny being a hair’s breadth away from something scary or fractious. It was a treat.”
To date, The Diplomat has been filmed mostly on location in the UK — season four, currently shooting, ventures further afield, travelling to New York and Florence — including at the Foreign Office and at the US Embassy in London, although production is limited to one day there per season. “It’s very complicated and they had to shut down a lot of the building to let us in,” says Cahn. “We try and do pieces from a bunch of different episodes in that day.”
Off limits, however, is Winfield House, the US ambassador’s official residence in Regents Park, but not for security reasons. “Ambassador Jane Hartley was a great friend to the show,” continues Cahn. “She said, ‘You can film in Winfield House whenever you want.’ We said, ‘Great, we’ll be here for six straight months.’ And she said, ‘How about one afternoon?’” Instead the production uses Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, north of London, although one scene was filmed outside the gates of Winfield House in season three.
The Diplomat paints an interesting view of the UK, its government and people, with the Brits presented as either stuck up, stuffy or repressed, or a combination of all three. In the final episode of season three, the Boris Johnson-like prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), engages in a spot of rumpy-pumpy with his wife Lydia (Pandora Colin), who insists he be “vigorous, vigorous”. It is not a pretty picture.
“I’m a huge anglophile,” insists Cahn, “only more so after having spent a couple of years in the UK. [But] the Brits in this show serve as a stand-in for the side of American politics I don’t like. We have a bombastic, impulsive prime minister who is unreasonable, unpredictable and hard to control, creating dangerous situations for his country and others. All those things seemed to me easier to talk about if you were talking about someone from another country than to simply say, ‘Presidential politics in the US is really fucked.’ So, the Brits end up looking pretty bad. Occasionally. Or a lot. My apologies.”
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