How Keri Russell Decided to “Punch the Living Shit” Out of Rufus Sewell

The fight took a full day to film, and while the experience of figuring it out was light and playful, the significance of it working correctly proved pivotal. Up until this point, Cahn—a veteran of shows ranging from Grey’s Anatomy to The West Wing to Homeland—had been toying around with scripts that juggled elements of heavy drama and loose farce. The Kate-Hal collision represented a kind of make-or-break fusion of those elements. “Because you’re trying to figure out the tone, you’re like, Okay, what’s this going to be?” Russell says. “By the third episode, everyone had found their footing a bit and we were like, ‘This is where we are.…’ It cranks the volume—you’re either with it or you’re not.”

Sewell puts the moment in starker terms: “It’s like the screwball equivalent of chopping Robert Baratheon’s head off in Game of Thrones. We’ve established that you live in a world where that can happen.” Except, instead of decapitations, we’re talking here about punches to the face.

The beauty of Russell’s performance in this scene is that, while it descends into a rather pathetic display of petty violence, the Emmy nominee never loses sight of Kate’s devastation. “It’s so painful,” Russell says. “She’s not saying, ‘You fucked my best friend’ or ‘You stole all this money from me.’ She’s saying, ‘We loved each other so much and we tried so hard to make it work, and we both agreed that we’re not going to do it anymore because it’s been so painful for us. We both agreed to quit at the same time so we could make it okay for each other. Were you telling the truth?’”

Sewell calls it a “scary scene,” meanwhile—one in which he played Hal’s fighting for Kate’s continued belief in him, for their ability to move forward together amid the great dysfunction around them. (As the scene consistently shows, security guards loom on the other side of the garden, uncomfortably watching this very private moment.) Kate slowly winds him up, goading him into confessing his deception, which he tries helplessly to explain. “That’s his position,” Sewell says. “That’s what’s hilarious about it, because he fucking means it. He does!”

The actual mechanics of the fight were figured out largely on the fly. Of course, there was the punch, which Cahn, Russell, et al. felt very in sync on as they got to filming. There was the wrestling in the grass, some moves of which Cahn demonstrated for her cast. (“I have a big brother. I gave them moves that I used as a nine-year-old to wrestle to the floor a 17-year-old.”) There’s the way in which Hal essentially gives up and lets Kate overtake him—a dynamic shift Cahn pushed for as the actors got into it. In one moment, Kate plays dead. (“Keri is small, but when she plays dead it’s quite difficult to handle her,” Sewell says.) Through it all, Russell felt at one with the elements. “At one point, my dress was up, my underwear was showing,” she recalls, to which Sewell interjects: “Oh, yeah. Arse in the wind. There goes Russell!”

But it’s all in service of a poignant resolution, even as the fight ends with a simple interruption. (There’s a lot going on this particular day.) Russell was surprised by how emotional the scene felt the longer they filmed—and how oddly that dovetailed with the material getting funnier. This is in many ways a credit to the patient, focused direction. “[Andrew] wasn’t giving us much direction for a long time, he was just letting us play,” Sewell says. Bernstein, who’d worked with Cahn on The West Wing and Russell on The Americans, favored moving, long takes in handheld form. “It really set the glamour and the drama of the world—and the funny too,” Russell says.

Cahn and Bernstein were aware of how difficult it can be to comically depict one spouse hitting another, but they were willing to take that risk and depict a core reality of this particular couple. “I knew that I wanted it to get physical in a way that was completely undignified and ridiculous—and that never felt dangerous, but did feel out of control,” Cahn says. “They are able to hit that sweet spot of feeling like they’re having a good time with each other, and I hope it feels safe for the audience.”

From here, The Diplomat richly explores this dysfunctional marriage with an underlying caustic sweetness, having shown us what Kate and Hal can look like at their desperate worst. “I try to push them about 15 degrees more ridiculous, so that we’re all living out either the fantasy or nightmare version of what a moment like that is,” Cahn says. Sometimes, the wilder you go, the closer you get to the truth.

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