“Do you regret something?”: How Bon Jovi became a thorn in Keri Russell’s side
A few years ago, I came to a realisation about Bon Jovi, which is that they are, quite impressively, simultaneously both the best and the worst band in the world.
They possess an exactly equal amount of pros and cons: terrible lyrics, massively middle of the road, and they sum up some of the worst excesses of America. And yet, if ‘Living on a Prayer’ comes on the radio, anywhere, everyone is immediately bang up for it and jumping about the place. It’s a dichotomy that even The Diplomat’s Keri Russell appreciates, for she has very mixed feelings about them too.
Russell’s star is at an all-time high at the moment after she scooped the award for ‘Outstanding Female Performance in a Drama’ gong at the newly christened Actor Awards for her work on the Netflix show, and it’ll sit nicely next to her Golden Globe she picked up many years ago for the early JJ Abrams romantic drama series Felicity.
While that was no doubt well deserved, what’s incredible is that Russell didn’t win award after award for her jaw-dropping work on six seasons of The Americans, one of the finest and most ignored TV shows this century. In fact, people started to wonder what was going on because she was nominated for so many Emmys, Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe awards for the show, but rarely took the win, and that pattern had continued with The Diplomat, until the Actor Award landed this week.
It was recognition that rounded off 25 years of superb performances from Russell, who has been acting since the early 1990s, mixing film and TV work but having most of her success on the small screen. She was a Disney Channel kid between 1991 and 1994 before picking up small roles in network shows like the comedy Married… with Children and then a first lead role in the concerningly titled 1996 TV movie The Babysitter’s Seduction.
Like most actors at the start of their careers, Russell had to take on work where it could be found, and looking back, she isn’t always fond of what she ended up on. Speaking on chat show Watch What Happens Live, the host Andy Cohen asked her if there were any projects she wished she could scrap from her IMDb page, leading Russell to answer, “Well, I’m sure there’s a million”, before recalling her early appearance in the music video for Bon Jovi’s ‘94 hit ‘Always’.
She added, “I was in a green bra”, and when Cohen pushed with, “Do you regret something?”, she responded, “Did I need to take off my shirt and have a green bra in a Bon Jovi video?” The answer to that, having watched the video, is ‘almost certainly not’, and the clip is a genuinely bizarre, overly sexualised mess, while the song itself was neatly summed up at the time by the NME, who called it “A best-a-man-can-get ballad”.
Fortunately, her time doing soft porn soft rock was mercifully short, and she landed Felicity a few years later, the college angst show which proved a monumental hit with audiences and critics alike, racking up bucket loads of awards and regularly being voted one of the top 100 shows of the 2000s.
Meanwhile, Russell is aware that people are pining for a season four of The Diplomat after the third series left watchers on a cliffhanger, saying, “It just gets better and better”, and it has indeed been renewed for another helping, although no release date has been confirmed.
