The 1991 role Keri Russell barely survived: “Not everyone got out alive”
If you’ve ever watched The Americans, and you should because it’s one of the best TV shows of all time, or Netflix’s The Diplomat, then you’ll know Keri Russell can be a pretty intimidating presence.
She may be a deadly assassin and a fearsome political operator, but she’s not someone you’d ever imagine happily bouncing around a TV studio next to Donald Duck. However, from small acorns grow great oak trees, and had Russell not started her career with several years on The New Mickey Mouse Club, we might never have got Katherine Wyler, the wily US ambassador to the UK in The Diplomat, or, more importantly, The Americans’ Elizabeth Jennings, the ruthless, highly trained master of disguise who balanced life as a Russian spy with being a suburban mother in the 1980s.
One of the great things about Apple’s recent spooky smash Widow’s Bay (and there are many) is that it should shine a light on Welsh actor Matthew Rhys’ career, Russell’s husband and the man she met on the set of the sprawling FX drama that criminally few people saw when it aired between 2013 and 2018.
Russell, along with Rhys and many of the supporting cast, was a revelation on that show, rightly winning a host of award nominations for her work over a five-year period, and in fact, when you combine her recognition with The Diplomat, she has picked up eight Emmy award nods and five Golden Globe nominations.
The Golden Globe that she won, though, came many years earlier, for JJ Abrams’ Felicity, her breakthrough role as a University student in New York that began in the late 1990s and finished in 2002 and set her on the path to make movies like Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers, Mission Impossible III and even the unhinged Cocaine Bear from 2023.
She’s now well over a quarter of a decade into a career that’s seen her become one of the most impressive actors in the industry, but she still had those formative years as a Mouseketeer, and she doesn’t gloss over it; in fact, she recognises the wealth of talent that has come from the Disney Channel’s Mickey Mouse Club over the years.
She told W Magazine about her time on the show: “Some of those people are still my best friends. I was there at a time when there were a lot of famous kids there. And I say this completely truthfully, I was literally the least talented one there. I’m not kidding. When I look at those kids, I’m like, why in the world did they pick me? Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling and Britney Spears. It was wild.”
Asked by W if she had kept anything from her time on the series between 1991 and 1994, she grimly responded, “My sanity, my dignity. Not everyone got out alive”.
Russell will be back with a season four of The Diplomat later this year, having picked up an Actor Award for her work on season three, but no word on whether she might make any kind of appearance on Widow’s Bay, because that would be awesome.
One other project that would be very cool with Russell’s involvement would be a Cocaine Bear 2, which hasn’t yet been greenlit, although director Elizabeth Banks has said she’d be delighted to return for a second helping of monster-bear-drug-addled chaos. The first movie, which saw Russell as a mother trying to drag her errant teen out of the woods while a Class-A crazed ursine went on the rampage, was a surprise B-movie hit, earning $90million at the box office.
