In the opening seconds of The Americans’ first episode, actress Keri Russell is front and centre, but not quite resembling her standard headshot. Sporting a Marilyn Monroe-style blonde wig, her character Elizabeth Jennings flirts with a U.S. intelligence official. On the surface, her behaviour might seem purely coquettish, even verging on ditzy — at least until a moment later, when, having seduced the official and extracted the necessary information for her Soviet bosses, she’s peeling off the wig in her car and dropping the act to reveal a cutthroat KGB agent.
Considering The Americans’ main premise — married couple Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Russell and co-star Matthew Rhys) lead a double life in suburban Washington, D.C. as Soviet sleeper spies in the 1980s — it’s no big surprise that this type of identity switch from naive suburbanite to Soviet agent happens relatively often throughout the show’s six seasons. Yet, the switches between “real” and disguised Elizabeth never get old, and it’s in large part due to Russell’s astonishingly magnetic performance.
Look closely at Russell in a scene like that series opener, and you’ll notice a knowing look behind her eyes that ever-so-subtly gives away the fact that she’s not playing the flirt, taking off the wig, and then playing the spy: Rather, she’s embodying two distinctive people (and jobs, and personalities) at once. It’s this ability to convey disparate personalities simultaneously that makes Russell’s performance over 75 episodes of The Americans truly spectacular.
These acting chops certainly earned Russell some credit, but her acting on The Americans from 2013 to 2018 was criminally underrated. Over three Emmy nominations for outstanding lead actress in a drama series, Russell lost every time (losing out to Tatiana Maslany for Orphan Black in 2016, Elizabeth Moss for The Handmaid's Tale in 2017, and Claire Foy for The Crown in 2018), although Rhys won the actor category for the show’s final season. (Considering that Russell and Rhys’ in-show relationship morphed into a real-world romance, perhaps you could argue it’s a shared win.) But either way, it wasn’t until season 4 that buzz for The Americans started to build up. The show’s earlier instalments were overlooked (some would say snubbed) for big awards, even though it’s where Russell was laying the essential groundwork for her character’s twisting and turning narrative arc.
We can only guess why Emmys voters didn’t give her that credit, but one good explanation is that both the series and Russell’s acting didn’t fit neatly into one box. In terms of genre, The Americans is so much more than just a Cold War spy thriller: It’s a domestic drama, as the Jennings balance everyday suburban family life with two kids against their Soviet spy work. Elements of workplace dramedy, political fable, and crime procedural all sneak in, too.
Correspondingly, Russell is tasked with myriad roles: The hard-nosed Soviet spy, of course, but also the all-American mum who chides her kids for swearing, the communist ideologue who strategises ways to nudge her US-born kids away from totally embracing American culture, the businesswoman who runs a travel agency to cover her spying activity, and many fake jobs that promise to garner Soviet intel, from home-care nurse to multilevel-marketing-scheme saleswoman. The impressive part isn’t just that Russell can flip between these roles. Rather, it’s that she brings them all together under one character: No matter what persona she’s inhabiting, there’s always a trace of Elizabeth’s other “selves” present. Even when she’s playing a caring mother, flickers of her violent KGB alter-ego are there in tiny glances or gestures. These flickers are typically very subtle: They have to be, for Elizabeth not to expose her double life. Yet it's these subtle cues that make for edge-of-your-seat viewing, as they give constant reminders of the difficulties of keeping all these walls up; Elizabeth is just a badly-timed grimace or a wink away from accidentally giving herself up.
Speaking of subtlety, that’s perhaps another reason Russell didn’t get the Emmy she deserved for The Americans. Her acting is superbly nuanced (even if her costumes and many, many wigs are much more brash, which is also part of the fun). Her emotions run the gamut, from vengefulness towards a Soviet defector who attacked her as a trainee, to horror at the idea that the Soviets want to draw her unwitting kids into the same line of work, to cheerfulness as she plays up the perky McMansion-dwelling mum persona. Yet these states of mind are always expressed delicately. In the capable hands of Russell, Elizabeth is not a character who needs to yell or flail her limbs to convey her interiority, where minute changes of tone or body language will do.
But really, you don’t come to The Americans for that kind of flashy spectacle. Beyond the acting, this isn’t a show that dabbles much in extended fight scenes or tense bomb timer countdowns. It lives closer to reality, with a slow-burn immersion in Elizabeth and Philip’s attempts to maintain their web of lies. As much as it’s a show about the USA and USSR, it’s equally about the individual price of deceptively holding together all those identities, and Russell conveys this better than anyone.
All seasons of The Americans are now streaming at SBS On Demand.
