Yahoo Lifestyle ‘The Diplomat’ Star Rufus Sewell Talks Redacted Scripts and Season 2’s Shocking Final Scene: ‘The Hairs on the Back of Your Neck Stand Up’
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers about the Season 2 finale of “The Diplomat.”
“The Diplomat” stars Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell already knew how Season 2 was going to end when they arrived for the table read of the sixth and final episode.
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“The rest of the cast didn’t know,” Sewell tells me over Zoom from his Los Angeles-area home. “The scripts they were given were redacted. The very end of Episode 6 was blacked out, and only at the read through did they get the actual scripts.”
The last minutes of the episode find Hal (Sewell) frantically trying to get to Kate on the phone after he is seen speaking to Pres. Rayburn (Michael McKean). Kate is on the lawn to Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) she wants her job when deputy chief of mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) hands her the phone. Hal tells Kate that he had just told president that Grace was the one who ordered the fatal false flag bombing of the British naval ship. The president was so upset, he tells Kate, that “he died.”
“It was so exciting waiting for everyone’s reaction at the table read,” Sewell says. “As those pages were turning, you could feel like a series of explosions. It worked its way across the room, and Ato, his reaction is always the most impressive and enjoyable because it’s kind of big. It was wonderful to get a kind of a taste of how it’s going to go down with an audience.”
Let’s talk about Season 1 first. It was the most viewed series on Netflix for its first two weeks on, top 10 in 87 countries, first four weeks’ viewing was 174 million hours. Did you feel pressure for Season 2 to do as well or even better?
I don’t worry about that. My attitude is I would always rather be in something that I loved that got overlooked, than something that I felt embarrassed about that everyone feasted about. It’s not something I was worried particularly once I got to know [show creator Debora Cahn] and the team.
What do you think is Hal’s motivation? Is it really about Kate or in the end, only about himself?
He and Kate really do believe in doing the maximum amount of good for a bunch of people they will never meet. It’s what drives them. But he also wants Kate to be vice president. It’s very, very important for me that all of the Machiavellian scheming and all of the tricks and all of the secrets and the maneuverings are the tricks that we associate with the bad guys are done in the power of the good. For Kate, she thinks she is not qualified to be vice president, but he thinks she is. He believes that she has greatness in her and she needs to be helped out of her own way. Hal has the tricks to do that because he knows his customer.
When I was watching the last moments of the finale and Hal is frantically trying to get in touch with Kate, I thought something was going to happen to Kate. I certainly didn’t think the president was dead.
You aren’t entirely wrong because he knows that Kate is on the verge of making the worst rift with the future most powerful person in the world. She needs to find out as quickly as possible before she talks to her – “You have to know this! You have to know this now!” — so that is part of the urgency.
The shot of the Secret Service agents running toward them was so powerful.
It’s so emotive. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Everyone was very conscious that there were two less episodes this season, and that people might not be very happy about that. But it certainly made up for it in terms of impact.
I know you can’t tell me about the next season, but I have to ask: Is Kate out? Is Kate going to be Grace’s vice president? Is Hal going to be her vice president? So many questions.
We’re already well into it. We’ve done the London bit. We did two months in London, July and August and now we’re in New York. Season 3 is insane already, and I’m very, very excited.
“The Diplomat” is available on Netflix.
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