Matthew Rhys
“Which door am I kicking in?” asks Rhys, as he prepares to bust in on an assassin holed up in an anonymous hotel room while director Bill Johnson calls for quiet on the set.
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Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong -
Out in the Cold
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Chairs set up for the cast and crew outside the LaGuardia Airport Marriott go unused on a freezing early-February evening in New York.
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Keri Russell
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Russell is swathed against frigid February temperatures between takes on the first season’s eighth episode.
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Matthew Rhys
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong The post-World War II Russia in which Rhys’ character would have grown up was “incredibly stark and poor,” he says, so America would have been “incredibly seductive.”
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Keri Russell
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Russell, who starred on the late-’90s cult-favorite drama Felicity, says she much prefers the shorter episode orders of cable. “It’s such a grind to do 22 episodes,” she says. “This feels like making a long movie: You get to go away and have a life and recharge and come back.”
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Keri Russell
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong After seeing Matthew Rhys in a Broadway production of Look Back in Anger, creator Joe Weisberg asked him to do a “chemistry read” with Russell. “Those are the two worst words in the English language,” says Rhys, laughing. “It’s so mercurial and nebulous and is this sort of Hollywood device of trying to assure that two people will work well together.”
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Keri Russell
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong “I’m more focused on the complicated-marriage aspect of the show than the spy angle,” says Russell of playing a spy in an emotion-fraught marriage that’s a cover.
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Keri Russell
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong “Keri is driving in silence, and that’s going to go for a good long time before anybody talks,” explains director Bill Johnson. “It’s shot from the backseat [with a] handheld [camera]. It’s all about the tension and the silence.”
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Brendan Russell
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Russell is second assistant cameraman and data manager for The Americans.
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Bill Johnson
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Johnson prepares to direct a tense scene that features Russell and Rhys driving from the site of an explosion at a hotel. “There are only two lines,” says Johnson. “But it will have a lot of emotional impact.”
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Adam Arkin
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong “It’s pretty clear even from the last election that we live in a country that seems to have a pretty strong split down the middle of it,” notes Arkin, a producer and director on the series. “The struggle with reconciling those two sides of our national psyche is fertile ground for a show like this. But ultimately, I think the reason this show will succeed is, it’s not so much about the Cold War as it is about a relationship.”
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Rob Tierney and Caryl Pierre
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Tierney, second assistant director, chats with production assistant Pierre on location.
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Margo Martindale
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Martindale’s character Claudia, the KGB handler assigned to Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell’s Philip and Elizabeth, has become Elizabeth’s nemesis. During one memorable scene in episode five, Elizabeth delivers a bloody beatdown on Claudia.
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Margo Martindale
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong Martindale, who had an Emmy-winning supporting role on FX’s Justified and next season will appear as Will Arnett’s scene-stealing mother on the CBS comedy The Millers, is “a little too busy,” she tells THR. “I never thought I’d be able to say that.”