I blame that fuckin girl for everything. I'm a true bgolian now.
The Americans: The 2nd best espionage/spy show on TV
- Thread starter GAMETHEORY
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This is back on?
I think April
The Americans’ Alison Wright on the Tragedy of Playing Martha
On FX’s The Americans, our heroes are constantly changing, but ever so glacially. It's Martha Hanson — the FBI secretary Philip (Matthew Rhys) married to gain access to classified secrets — who perhaps best captures the show’s emotional urgency. Played to devastating effect by Alison Wright, Martha’s season-three arc ended with a gut-punch: Philip-as-Clark stripped off his glasses and wig in a huge, shiver-inducingshow of trust. But for Martha, truth is stranger than fiction as she begins season four adjusting to marriage with a man she doesn’t recognize. Wright stopped by the New York offices to discuss studying serial killers’ wives, the amount of tears she had to produce this season, and why Martha’s in more danger than ever.
Now that Martha knows who Clark is, or more, who he isn't, does this make you trust him more or less?
Martha pushed his hand and wanted the next level of intimacy from him. She wanted him to reveal himself in an emotional and psychological way, but he also did it literally. Being faced with the truth absolutely has been terrifying for her, and we find her in that place when we start the fourth season. She's only had not even a couple weeks to deal with this new face on her husband, this new man who looks drastically different to the guy that she married. She's in that adjustment period when we start, and right out of the gate he tells her, "I've murdered your coworker." I don't think she thought he was a murderer. Something breaks in her in that moment that is not repaired throughout the rest of the season.
It's not that she's afraid of him, it's not that she doesn't trust him more. She gets that he revealed something for her because she wanted him to. But what he has revealed is really shitty.
In terms of her idea of having a marriage with him, has that been shattered?
No, I don't think so. She really values the honesty he's given her by doing that, and him revealing himself explained a lot of things. It explained the absence and the reticence and what she thought might have been lies. She can see it's a huge thing he's done by showing her himself, and she thinks it's just going to be a long period of adjustment. She's in a state of mind that this has bound her closer to him, for worse or for better.
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Will Martha enter Philip's world more this season?
She's with a weird combination of Clark and Philip now. She's aware that Clark's not just Clark anymore. He's a man with a new face and dark hair and no glasses. Philip drops his Clark act from now on, so it's another level of the discomfort and confusion that she's with both of them. I used to think about the moments where I imagined her watching him, seeing his new face and thinking, Who is this new man who doesn't look anything like my husband? Maybe she liked the old guy better. This is a strange man she's with now, and I imagine that could be quite terrifying.
As an actress, knowing that Philip exists and knowing who he is, does that affect how you see him as Martha?
It does, because Alison is seeing the whole story. I told the Js [showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields] recently that it had occurred to me at the beginning of this season to ask them to only give me my story line, so I didn't get to know what else was going on with him. But unless you create those boundaries of keeping that information kept away from you, it's really impossible not to hear stuff on set. It would be super hard, and now maybe it's too late in the game for me to try that. It would've been interesting from season one to do it and see what would be different. Once you know something you can't unknow it. Honestly, it's hard to say.
At least from the viewer's perspective, it doesn't feel like you know more than you do.
That's great. And I think that's as well because there's a level of her not admitting stuff to herself, too.
When you are going through your process with Joe and Joel, do you sit down at the beginning of the season and go through your story line?
No, they don't talk to you at all unless they can help it. [Laughs.] I'll go to them with questions all the time.
They mentioned that your script is usually scribbled all over with notes, to a Beautiful Mind-level of specificity.
Yes, when it starts to get really complicated, like this season.
What kinds of notes do you make for yourself?
Anything. You're taking onboard as much as you can and you don't know what's going to serve you in the end or what you're going to use. You never know how something's going to inform a line or your opinion of something. For her it's complicated as well, because there are all these different things she knows on different levels and is not admitting to herself or the audience necessarily. My notes are just trying to track all the thoughts and ideas she could be having and trying to figure this stuff out — what could the options be? What does she expect, and what is actually happening?
There was a piece in The New Yorker, “The Spy Who Loved Me,” in 2014, with a story somewhat similar to Martha’s. How much do you read stories that mirror Martha’s experience?
All the time. Everything I can possibly get on the literal cases that there are and then anything that would compare to her level of stress, about finding out she's living with a stranger. Further into the season when the story develops more, I started to try and find some substitutions for someone in a similar situation, about what that must be like. And I thought about the wives of serial killers because that's comparable to me.
Are there any examples that jump out?
Yeah, Judith Ridgway. She was the wife of the Green River Killer, who’s in prison. His name is Gary Ridgway. She was a woman that seemed to be quite like Martha. The day, the moment she found out for real that her husband had killed 40-some people, in their 17 years of marriage, there's a tiny bit of footage of her looking out of her little kitchen window. She looks like how I imagine Martha — she's this really small woman with her glasses on, and she's not even there. There's an interview of her talking about that moment where she just felt like a wall came down in front of her, and her life was never the same. She said this great thing about her husband, which I took onboard for Martha in the later episodes [this season]: "I love my husband but I hate the man that took him away." I think that's a little bit of Philip and Clark, when she gets further down the road and starts to stand on her own two feet a little more and makes some hard decisions.
I was trying to find something that compares to being that huge, to that life-devastation bombshell. That's not just grief, that's not just death.
Right, that's such a specific experience. You mentioned looking at Judith's face during that footage. One of the things I love about your performance are your reactions — a lot of the role is in your face and your expressiveness. How much of that is you feeling it in the moment versus notes that are written in the script that "Martha should feel this or that way"?
Both. Some people actively ignore that stuff, all of those adjectives. It's never really a clear line to me when I'm supposed to do that or not. Because if you make your own decisions, then you get to set and they're like, "Well, it says here, you were supposed to be crying." It's a tricky thing, but it has to be in the moment, in the reality of the circumstances. There are a lot of directions for her crying in the script this season, I'll put it like that.
When you cry on the show, it draws out so much empathy for the character, and in the season-four premiere we see that again. How do you prepare for that? Does it come easy for you?
It has to be there in the writing, or at least it's better if it is. I'm usually good — depending on how long the scene is, if it's super emotional and I'm supposed to be crying the whole time — for four takes. Then it becomes a bit more laborious. That scene [where I'm crying] in the season-four premiere, we were doing that for about five or six hours.
Alison Wright in the season four premiere of The Americans. Copyright 2016, FX Networks. All rights reserved.
Oh, my God. So you have to just ...
Produce tears.
Early on, some people referred to Martha as the comic relief in the story. Did you think of her that way?
I thought of her as being a very open person that doesn't really have any armor. That allows for lots of moments of levity. I can see how she could be quite comical because she was never trying to edit herself. So I wasn't surprised to hear that. Maybe quirky is a closer description. She's a little more like the rest of us, she's a little more like the audience.
She does feel like a gauge for how the audience is feeling.
She's a normal person who doesn't have any of these skills or abilities or protection devices. She's a way for the audience to connect into the story.
Do you imagine any kind of backstory for her? Did she have any friends at some point?
Essential backstory, yes. All of those things fill up the moments where you maybe don't have any lines, because you're a person who has a life. So you can be having that life in the background of a scene or if someone else is having a moment. Her relationship with her parents as well, and we get a bit more of that this season.
As her role has deepened, Martha has become a fan favorite. Have you noticed a difference in how fans have reacted to you as the seasons have gone on?
Now women come up to me often and talk about how bad they feel for her, and how lots of their girlfriends from their 20s into their 60s can empathize with her and take her plight seriously. It's not a joke anymore. I feel the gravitas from people when they talk to me more.
There are some parallels between Paige and Martha — they've both had their worlds upended, and neither of them is very good at lying.
We observed it at the end of last season. There were moments where they felt like the two noble characters still left in the story, or just the most benign. That doesn't really continue into this season, though.
It does feel like things can't really end well for Martha. Major characters haven't died off very often on The Americans, and it's clear that Philip is looking out for you. But it's always a question for your character.
She's in the most dangerous spot she's ever been in in her life, and it's not going to get any better as we progress. Stan is already sniffing around. She's in a really bad way. So, yeah, you should worry about her.
In one of your scenes with Stan this season, you deliver one of the best lines: "I guess you never really know a person, do you?" How self-aware is Martha in this moment?
The Js have purposely wanted to walk either side of that line. It's pretty subjective, the words people use to describe her. Especially because she's not spelling out what she does know and what she doesn't know or what she thinks. That's something that I had to go back to the Js about a lot. I've always assumed that she was more self-aware than they want her to be. And I often had to step back and not have her thoughts link together so fast, because she doesn't put stuff together as fast as I do. So that was tricky, that was something I had to keep checking in with them about, "How come I don't understand ... ?" And they're like, "Well, because ..." But she has a mirror held up to her this season, and there's no more not admitting things.
How do you change your body language to play Martha?
Where we're at now in the story, she doesn't have a lot of time that's not really stressful, and it's really taken a toll on her body and her mind. All of this season, she's very tense and tight and ready to run. She's not as relaxed and open as she was before.
Outside of The Americans, are there any roles that are on your bucket list?
For me, it's more directors I'd like to work with. I'd like to be in a Mike Leigh film. And I'd love to work with Pedro Almodóvar.
As your first big TV role, how has playing Martha changed your life?
It's been completely career-changing for me. It's wonderful, every room I walk into for auditions or meetings, 99 percent of people are big fans of the show. Everybody in the business watches it and respects it. So regardless of our numbers and all those things that they measure, it's a really admired show, and it's great to be on a winning team. It's like supporting the Yankees.
“I guess you never really know a person, do you?”
An FBI field-office secretary named Martha poses that question in season four of The Americans. The delivery, by actress Alison Wright, is muted, devoid of self-consciousness, like nearly every line on this modestly excellent series, and that’s why it lands with such force. Every major character harbors multiple secrets and sustains multiple lies. They’re interwoven so deftly by series creator Joe Weisberg, his co-executive producer Joel Fields, and their cast and crew, that whenever fate tugs at a frayed strand and somebody’s life starts to unravel, you’re invariably surprised and appalled, even though The Americans has made an art of exploring the peril and necessity of deception, never shying away from the collateral damage it inflicts. Melding the prosaic and the metaphorical, the mundane and the absurd, always with a poker face, the series has gotten sharper and more confident by the week. It now carries itself with such relaxed confidence, it can build to a tragic twist so subtly that you simultaneously wipe away a tear and laugh at yourself for not seeing it coming from a continent away.
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There are so many secrets and lies on display that the show is always also about the performance of life even when it’s telling tales of mayhem and intrigue. The main couple, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), pretend they’re suburban D.C. travel agents, but really they’re Soviet spies, trained to impersonate Yankees and sow disorder for Mother Russia. They’re masters of assassination, theft, seduction, and disguise (their awesome array of wigs has become a running joke among fans), but because they have to integrate their missions into a façade of normalcy, you rarely think about how super-competent they are. Their more security-sensitive discussions happen in the kitchen of their nondescript split-level suburban home (when the kids are at school) or in an adjacent laundry room (when the kids are at home or asleep). A typical scene in season four finds Philip and Elizabeth in disguise, sitting in an outdoor café waiting for a contact to walk by, killing time by discussing the suffocating cologne their son, Henry (Keidrich Sellati), has started wearing.Despite all the killing and screwing and sneaking around they do on the motherland’s behalf, Ian Fleming might find them sad, but John le Carré would feel for them.
From The Twilight Zone to The Sopranos and beyond, some of the greatest television shows have found ways to lift basic human predicaments out of their familiar contexts and deposit them in alien scenarios, so that we see their essence etched in sharp relief against a background of contrivance. The Americans does this as well as any show in TV history, and with more modesty than many of its predecessors. It has a knack for creating metaphorically or symbolically rich situations that never strut about announcing themselves as such. It’s all there if you care to delve into it, but it’s never in the foreground and affixed with a tag; often you catch it hiding behind, or within, the characterizations and plot twists, as spies hide in plain sight.
Fields and Weisberg often seem surprised when viewers find more than one or two levels in any scene or subplot, which suggests that everyone involved with the series is committed to being, or seeming, like a meat-and-potatoes TV show, the kind of thing that might air on CBS. The ebb and flow of Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage and their children’s relationship to them and to the truth; Stan’s fluctuating feelings of dedication and ennui, patriotism, and cynical disgust; Nina’s alternations of hope and despair, romanticism, and regret; the sense of the former Soviet Union and the United States as parent-states using and abusing their “children” in the name of global dominance: These touches and others come through in crisply written and directed scenes of people going about their (often ridiculous) business as if they aren’t characters on a TV show; as if they’re just like anybody else.
The exceptional cast benefits from the writers’ no-fuss attitude toward metaphor, simile, and all that other fiction-workshop stuff. They can justbe the characters, and let the additional layers accrue organically, often imperceptibly, over time. If you could watch Rhys’s extraordinarily detailed performance in time-lapse over four seasons, you would see a character’s soul wilting like a flower deprived of water and sunlight. Russell, whose character was at first stereotyped as “the cold one” of the duo, complements Rhys’s raised-antennae empathy. Her performance suggests that she keeps Elizabeth’s own tragic history, which includes a traumatic separation from her parents and a rape at the hands of a KGB handler, close to her consciousness. The ebb and flow of their marriage has been portrayed with intelligence and subtlety, despite all the scenes of Philip and/or Elizabeth having sex with a potential source or murdering somebody in the dead of night. When the show began, the Jenningses’ union appeared to be at a crisis point, with Elizabeth fiercely committed to the motherland and Philip falling for the allure of American comfort, excess, and showmanship (all three came together in the pilot, when Philip did a boot-scooting dance in a department store to Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts”). Now they seem to be closer than ever, which makes sense when you think about how the walls have started closing in around their potential for transformation or escape. All they have is each other, and their kids.
Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent who used to live down the block from the Jenningses, is another mundane-fantastic creation. He’s still suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from his undercover days. He once murdered a Soviet bureaucrat to avenge a colleague’s murder (by Philip, though Stan doesn’t know that). And he’s spent the last season pining over his deported Soviet lover, Nina (Annet Mahendru), whom he turned into a double agent, and who later became a triple agent before getting convicted of treason and shipped to a Soviet gulag. Like Russell, Rhys, Taylor, and Sellati, Emmerich invests Stan with such beaten-down gravitas that you think of the character not as a brooding super-cop, but a grumpy working stiff: a divorced, depressed, gifted-but-mercurial problem employee; a man who starts his own unauthorized investigations partly out of frustration with FBI inertia, but mostly because he’s bored and depressed and needs to fill his lonely hours with something besides booze and self-loathing.
The not-funny funniness of The Americans, a show stocked with refreshingly un-self-aware characters, comes through most clearly in Stan’s scenes. Even more so than Philip and Elizabeth and their kids, he has no sense of humor about himself, indeed no apparent notion of how he appears to other people. Whenever Stan and Nina’s other lover, Oleg (Costa Ronin), a high-ranking employee of the Soviet Rezidentura, meet to discuss Nina’s fate, their conversations are hushed and awkward but charged with yearning. Equally fine and funny are the scenes between the towering Stan, who has the classic middle-American swagger of a gym teacher who calls every student by their last name, and the much shorter Philip, who can slip into a convincing impersonation of a milquetoast American white guy but is a trained killer who could crush Stan’s windpipe with a single well-timed punch. Stan has no idea that Philip and Elizabeth are Soviet spies, or that they’re responsible for his partner’s death, or that Philip is secretly married to his colleague Martha (under the assumed name of Clark, as in Kent), and persuaded her to steal information from the FBI office by convincing her that he’s a U.S. government agent investigating corruption.
Season four’s main story builds on season three’s most momentous development: Elizabeth and Philip’s decision to tell the increasingly suspicious Paige (Holly Taylor) the truth about why they’re always sneaking around at night and coming back with torn clothes and bruises. Paige had previously rebelled against her openly atheist parents by joining a left-leaning Christian youth organization and protesting nuclear proliferation; in the season-three finale, she tells her most trusted adult confidante, her youth pastor Father Tim (Kelly AuCoin), the truth about her family, because it’s eating her up inside. Now, Paige’s parents and their handler, Gabriel (Frank Langella), have to decide how to handle this security breach. The obvious solution is to kill the pastor and make it look like an accident, but if they do that Paige will realize what happened and maybe melt down and complicate things further, and then what can they do, really? Kill Paige? Relocate to the U.S.S.R.? This plot is yet another example of The Americans' complicated attitude toward deception: It is often justified and subjectively necessary, but at the same time it poisons every life it touches — even the lives of people who have no idea a deception is being perpetrated, much less the extent of it.
Much of Philip and Elizabeth’s season-four spycraft is in the service of obtaining purloined samples of biological agents. A “biological agent” is, of course, what Paige will one day become, if Gabriel and his bosses back in Moscow have their way. The looming threat of a pathogen contaminating an unsuspecting civilian population also becomes an unfussy metaphor for how the Jenningses’ sustained, multivalent acts of deception leach into every relationship in their lives, including their marriage. In an unbearably sad moment this season, Martha goes out to dinner with a co-worker and confesses that she’s in a relationship with a married man. The lie bears no relation to anything that’s actually happening in Martha’s life, yet it describes her situation perfectly. Like The Americans itself, this lie is a fiction that’s so true it hurts.
Man it seems like I've been waiting on this for years. This season is already starting out fire.
If this shit doesn't get a gawd damn Emmy.
If this shit doesn't get a gawd damn Emmy.
Looks like Martha is completely in now... I don't see an ending where her and Paige's preacher dude survive.
I'm always suprised poor martha made it this far.
When its all said she could be downfall of everything and i wonder if phil would be able to pull the trigger if it came to it. He definitely has feelings for her.
And phil so used to keeping secrets he didnt tell his 'best friend' he is seeing his ex wife. It purely platonic but say it out loud and you realize you shouldn't be doing it
When its all said she could be downfall of everything and i wonder if phil would be able to pull the trigger if it came to it. He definitely has feelings for her.
And phil so used to keeping secrets he didnt tell his 'best friend' he is seeing his ex wife. It purely platonic but say it out loud and you realize you shouldn't be doing it
I think he realized that as soon as it came out of his mouth. You could just see it in his eyes. That and the fact that he has a bio-weapon on him.
Man this season looks like it is going to be nothing but tension and that the walls are finally starting to close in on them. And again I have to say... if fucking Matthew Rhys doesn't get a mutherfucking Emmy win for his portrayal of this character it is a travesty. This guy has deserved an Emmy every single year. That conversation that he had with Martha the first scene.... about killing dude to protect her.
And I love the shit that they are doing with Nina in Russia. Playing that long game on that Scientist and then the random drop that Nina has a fucking husband.
I been trying to tell you.
I missed the f*ck out of this show.
This is easily the most underrated show on Television. I just don't understand why it doesn't get any love from this board or America.
I am actually a fan of Martha and think she is an important character
She is his OTHER wife.
She was NEVER a secret...if you think about not until recently did Philip and Elizabeth truly begin to TRUST each other and divulge their past lives and loves.
But they SHARED Martha....
She is damn loyal and LOVES him without question and it messes with him you can see it now, he talks to her better then his wife.
But Phil is so masteerful played ...he is OBBVIOULY having a crisis of conscious an emotional breakdown
and with Martha he actually USES it to endear himself further with her.
But it is simply to much of a weakness to show Elizabeth.
Stan is so full of sh*t
He jeopardizing national security for his Russian whore and he ALREADY got a new chick in his bed but he mad at Phil.
That was a GREAT scene
Because it looks like Phil realizes he messed up (like he was paranoid when they were supposed to meet with that other agent) but is he MORE scared Elizabeth will find out he is still going to EST?
And IF he didn't have that vial on him would he have let Stan push him like that?
This show...awesome
I think he realized that as soon as it came out of his mouth. You could just see it in his eyes. That and the fact that he has a bio-weapon on him.
Man this season looks like it is going to be nothing but tension and that the walls are finally starting to close in on them. And again I have to say... if fucking Matthew Rhys doesn't get a mutherfucking Emmy win for his portrayal of this character it is a travesty. This guy has deserved an Emmy every single year. That conversation that he had with Martha the first scene.... about killing dude to protect her.
And I love the shit that they are doing with Nina in Russia. Playing that long game on that Scientist and then the random drop that Nina has a fucking husband.
i f*cking gasped...
That scene was great man. Matthew Rhys told you everything you needed to know... once he realized that it was fucked up that he was hanging with Stan's wife even though he wasn't doing anything about it. Man when Stan eventually finds out or if Phillip is ordered to kill Stan... Either one of those scenes will be Emmy worthy. Even though every fucking thing on this show is Emmy worthy. Even the shit Paige is doing, because now she realizes that she probably shouldn't have told the preacher. He feels like he has an obligation to tell the authorities and now she sees that she has put her entire family at risk. This show is the shit.
As many of you know...
I hate Paige and it is well documented
to that end I would like to tell all ya'll
I told you so.
that is all.
But ALL that being said?
I really hope there is a good arc for her character this season...
and ummm
where is Henry?
I hate Paige and it is well documented
to that end I would like to tell all ya'll
I told you so.
that is all.
But ALL that being said?
I really hope there is a good arc for her character this season...
and ummm
where is Henry?
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Damn...
I had to tell my mama the real reason I haven't started my little girls in religious instruction is because of Paige.
I had to tell my mama the real reason I haven't started my little girls in religious instruction is because of Paige.
Really? That's the reason why?
. Look at what Pastor Tim and Jesus did to this child on TV. I can't have my daughter going to church because she might expose my secret spy life.
Really? That's the reason why?
damn right Chief...
no stitches family over everything.
That was the BEST!!! But the dude running in the first place. Omg that was so fucking funny to me.
His posture was definitely not olympician.
Man why is it so hard to find this thread. The search function sucks.
I finally got a chance to watch this episode. The tension on this episode was crazy. Also the fact that Stan is watching Martha is huge. Huge.....
I finally got a chance to watch this episode. The tension on this episode was crazy. Also the fact that Stan is watching Martha is huge. Huge.....
My man said, "how close did you all get to him", all cool like, then took off running.
He was like ya'll motherfuckers dead. I'm out.
That might have been the first and only comedic moment of this show in 4 seasons
Stan is a blood hound. His FBI'ing skills are top notch. I can't wait till he gets some real dirt on Martha.
Cuz it was cool as shit. And he broke out! Like PFEW!!!That might have been the first and only comedic moment of this show in 4 seasons
Yea he did and i expected it looking at him lol. He is not the one to be fucking around. He took off with no hesitation.
I like that they're stuck together now too lol. He's going to have plenty of sarcastic shit to say during their ordeal.
Damnnnnnnn
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