After the shocking cliffhanger that ended the first season of The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell, we were relieved to find out that Hal (Sewell) survived the car bomb explosion in London, even though not everyone was so lucky. Season 2 of the Emmy-nominated series continues with Kate (Russell), the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., not only having navigate the truth of what happened in both the warship and car bomb attacks, but she’s doing so with her husband managing a physical vulnerability and trauma from the explosion.
The Diplomat, from showrunner Debora Cahn, continues to be clever and thrilling on all fronts. From gripping political tensions to the evolving relationship between Kate and Hal, and everything in between, the show’s second season feels even more energized than the first, and never loses sight of the humanity behind all its characters.
For Cahn, starting the season right after the explosion and evaluating grief and trauma throughout the season is specifically linked to what people in these positions face in real life, and portraying that authentically within the context of this fictional story.
“We talked to a lot of people who do this kind of work for real, and it happens,” Cahn told Yahoo Canada. “It happens when you’re working in the Middle East and it happens when you’re working in Paris, … it’s a realistic piece of the job in the way that I think it isn’t for a lot of other people.”
“So it felt like it would be a cop out to not do that. … In my experience of trauma and grief, you deal with it in moments that you don’t think you will. You’re sort of ready for it in the hospital and you’re ready for it at the funeral, but you’re not ready for it at that meeting on Tuesday, and that’s when it shows up, and that’s when it kind of cuts the legs out from under you.”
While in Season 1 we saw the escalating tension between Hal and Kate. Hal had been sidelined after calling the Secretary of State a war criminal just as Kate takes up her post as ambassador to the U.K., and he was particularly vocal about how Kate should do her job. But it’s a different dynamic after the explosion, when he finds himself needing Kate more, even to just put on his shoes, and he’s not particularly comfortable being in that position.
“As an actor it’s wonderful to have these problems to tussle with,” Sewell said. “You want things to be going wrong. You want difficulties and his physical incapacitation was such a big part of [this] season, and it took a lot of my thinking, and his slow recovery, his need for her and what that brought up between them. His vulnerability, her urge to protect him, seemingly shoving all other concerns to the side for a while, but it doesn’t make things go away.”
“And this is what can happen. Someone suddenly gets hurt and you rush to them, it doesn’t make all of the things that were happening in your life go away, but it makes it seem like that for a moment. So there’s an immediate change to their relationship, but then they’re still there, but he needs her and these things can bring up good and bad things. It can bring someone towards you, but it can also bring an element of pity and embarrassment and shame and resentment on both sides. So it’s nice and complicated.”
For Kate, there is this sense throughout the season that she understands Hal differently than she did in Season 1, with the stakes of her job so much higher than she previously anticipated.
“Not only understanding what Hal’s perspective was as the leader, … and when things had gone wrong and all of Kate’s previous judgments of him, understanding that, but also having the people that you are in charge of now start questioning [you],” Russell said. “Like the Stuart character, having people that you really care about, and that you respect and want to respect you, having them question you or judge you is hard.”
“That’s what it is when you’re the boss. You have to let people down, you have to make mistakes. You’re the leader, you’re the mom, and everyone’s mad at mom sometimes, and that’s kind of what it is.”
As viewers work their way through the six-episode season, one character that blew us away in Season 2 was Stuart, played by the brilliant Ato Essandoh, the U.K. embassy’s deputy chief of mission. Also being caught in the car bomb explosion, it impacts how closely he works with Kate, but what’s particularly striking is how he continues to work to uphold democracy to the best of his ability.
“He’s an unbelievable actor, so it was great to be able to take the character on that kind of journey and know that he was just going to eat the whole thing alive in a really exciting way,” Cahn said. “There’s a dynamic of kind of perspective change that happens, which is, Kate is concerned that she’s becoming Hal and then Stuart is sort of going through the loss of innocence that Kate went through earlier in her career.”
“So many of the people who do this work I think come into it so idealistic and optimistic, and devoted to the protection of democracy in a really genuine way. And a lot of them are able to keep it all the way through their career. And then often they are faced with these real crises of faith and crises of confidence in themselves and the people around them, and in their own government. Watching somebody go through that, I think, is a really important part of an honest look at what it’s like to be in that world.”
