The Diplomat: Rufus Sewell on Hal Wyler’s Season 4 Breaking Point: “He Pushes It to the Nth Degree”

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 4 finale of The Diplomat, “Warships.” Read at your own risk!]

Rufus Sewell may just be the secret weapon — no pun intended — of Netflix’s The Diplomat.

Across all four seasons of creator Debora Cahn‘s deftly crafted political drama, Hal has gone from career diplomat and husband of Keri Russell‘s Kate Wyler, the whip-smart yet unpolished new U.S. ambassador to the U.K., to vice president under the mercurial Grace Penn (Allison Janney). Along the way, The Diplomat has become a compelling study of long-term marriages, both between individuals and between nations, as the Wylers’ volatile partnership mirrors the push and pull of the transatlantic “special relationship.”

Hal has often come across as wily, slippery, and, at times, self-interested. But, according to the actor who plays him, that picture is incomplete. “He is very easy to judge,” especially “if viewed from a certain perspective before you’ve got all of the data,” but he “always has a very good reason for doing what he’s doing,” Sewell insists to TV Guide. “Often, Hal is described in terms of his ambition, but he has an enormous ambition for his wife and for the things that they always said they wanted to do together in the world. I think that is different from just being an egoist. He’s a very complex person, like all of the characters in this show, and I’m very fond of him.”

That shared ambition was tested when Grace shockingly chose Hal over Kate to be her vice president at the start of Season 3, once again upending the balance of power in their marriage. “Hal would always argue that it’s better to be in the room with a slightly modified version of what you’re asking for than out of the room with a perfect slate,” Sewell says, adding that Kate is the same way. “The story with Hal has been: How far can you go in terms of bending your original dream in order to get access to do anything at all?”

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But the fourth season pushed Hal to a breaking point he couldn’t rationalize, even to himself. Picking up after the Season 3 revelation that Hal and Grace had covertly seized the Poseidon nuclear weapon from a Russian submarine behind Kate’s back, the Wylers’ marriage continued to sway precariously under the weight of their clashing roles in the administration. Kate effectively blackmailed U.K. Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) into resigning with a recording of him attacking his now-dead former advisor, clearing the way for his successor, Bethan Vaughn (Jodie Whittaker), who quickly became a foe. Meanwhile, Hal spent much of the season protecting his position as Grace’s decisions, especially in the wake of an assassination attempt, grew increasingly reckless.

After learning that new PM Vaughn has granted Russians safe passage to retrieve the missing submarine, Grace sidestepped her advisers and deployed warships, vowing to fire on any nation — allies included — that tried to stop her from keeping Russian vessels out of U.K. waters. At the G7 Summit, Kate resigned as ambassador in front of the assembled diplomats, and three other U.S. officials followed her out of the building: White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah), Secretary of State Miguel Ganon (Miguel Sandoval), and, yes, even Hal.

As the dust settles on yet another jaw-dropping Diplomat cliffhanger, Sewell opens up below about the inner workings of Hal’s mind; how he and Russell have worked together to craft a universal portrait of marriage beneath all the diplomatic jargon; and why he doesn’t believe Hal ultimately chose Kate over his work, even after walking out of that summit.

How has your understanding of Hal shifted as his access to power has grown and the stakes of his maneuvering have risen? Do you think he’s changed in this VP position?
Rufus Sewell: There’s certain things that the audience are getting to see about Hal 1792760545 that I had thought and hoped were in the mix from Day 1. The great thing about the first few scripts of Season 1, as far as I was concerned, is that all of the DNA of these characters was there in the writing, if you were to look for it. So we knew — not in the writing, but from Debora Cahn — about how [Kate and Hal] had met, what their relative positions were and how that’s adjusted over the years, things that had happened to them in the past with regard to the troubles they’d had in their marriage. We had a little potted history of that before we started. What’s been very interesting is to watch the audience discover that bit by bit.

Do I think that he has changed? I’m not sure. I think there are certain aspects of his personality 1792760545 that may have come to the fore in the past before. In fact, part of what Kate is so weary about what Hal can be like is based on things she’s seen in the past, and some of that is what’s coming up now. But Kate gets to discover that a lot of the stuff she attributed to Hal’s personality is actually just [the demands of] the job, because you get to see her make a lot of the same mistakes and come to the revelation that a lot of the things that she had the luxury of blaming him for were actually just as much part of her makeup.

Part of the magic of Debora’s writing and your performance is that you can never quite pin down whether Hal is acting for his or his wife’s best interests. Those best interests are inextricably linked — and seemingly one and the same — at this point.
Sewell: One definitive answer is kind of impossible, but I think that’s very true about us as people. I like to keep these ideas I have about who Hal is, and a lot of it is [from] my understanding of myself, other figures that I’ve studied, and people that I’ve known. But then there’s the unknown unknowns — this is why I love Deb’s writing so much. Who knows what she’s going to throw at us? [Laughs.]

But I do have a feeling about him and his relation to power. He has been seriously gunning and plotting for his wife’s advancement since the beginning of Season 1. People have described him as getting in the way and being tricky and being manipulative. Maybe all of those things are true, but he’s been tricky and manipulative for what he believes is her best interests. Are her best interests also his best interests? Yes, because they both want the same things.

[But] what happens when it looks like the door that was looking to be the easiest to open — i.e., her being vice president — suddenly gets jammed and a door opens in front of him? He’s going to walk through it because it’s all about doing. What’s very interesting about Hal — and what I was very gratified [to see] in the script — is that at the beginning of Season 3, his initial worry before he even accepts the vice presidency is: What position is Kate going to have? That’s not just bulls—. He wants her with him. In Season 4, he starts to get used to having the power. For the first time in their relationship, Hal starts to like the feeling of access and power and being fully intellectually utilized [by someone different] — maybe more than this very tricky stage of their relationship that they’re having — and that starts to play on them.

Now that Hal has somewhat settled into his position of power, how did you come to understand his interactions with Grace? Is he willfully blind to her actions, or fully aware of what everyone else sees in her?
Sewell: In Season 4, what Kate and everyone else is seeing about the president’s reaction to having power and how it might be changing her, Hal also sees. There is nothing that he does not perceive and try to work around, but he intuits that in order to have any kind of sway with someone who might be leaning in dangerous directions, he needs to be beside her. And this was a very difficult thing for me to play — sometimes, he’d be following around like a lapdog, and when there’s a moment where you would really want him to have some gumption and speak up, he doesn’t because he is constantly calculating.

Even though I do think he feels these little humiliations, he needs to be there. It’s very much like how I would’ve described [Tony] Blair and [George W.] Bush’s relationship around the time of the Iraq war. As far as I’m concerned, [that approach] can turn out to be ineffective, but he’s later than most to the realization, but that’s because he’s desperate to be in a position to help.

Hal temporarily assumes the powers of the presidency after Grace is nearly assassinated, and Kate remarks that he is good at the job and has clearly thought about what kind of president he would like to be, if and when the time comes. Do you think Hal has really thought about taking that next step? Is he thinking about it now?
Sewell: Yes, I think he certainly does, but very, very long-term. There’s a couple of times when he says to Grace, when she suspected that he’s kind of trying to finagle his way into her being ousted and him taking her place. He explains, “That’s not good for me.” I think he’s too ambitious for [winning the presidency by ousting Grace]. He doesn’t want to be tainted by some awful incident that brings him into power that way. If he wants to be president, I think it would be considerably later. One thing that I think happens when he does temporarily take on that mantle [after the assassination attempt on Grace] is, yes, he does it very, very well, but it doesn’t go to his head; he keeps quite level about it. There’s no idea that he wants to stay there.

I think he really wants to make the transition for Grace coming back into control as seamless as possible and to just do right by her in this instance. Now, is that a signal of even greater ambition? Possibly. But I just think he plays the long game. One thing that does definitely happen through his time as vice president with Grace in the early days is… He’s incredibly impressed by [Grace]. I don’t think he’s in a position where he’s seeing someone screwing up and thinking, “I’ll see if I can manipulate them here and there.” I think she’s too formidable for that, and he respects her — and game recognizes game.

In the finale, Kate realizes that she cannot, in good faith, continue to serve in the Penn administration, so she publicly resigns at the Summit and walks out. It’s only in the final minute of the season that we realize Hal has also resigned. What did you make of that ending?
Sewell: When I first read the final episode, it was a great relief for me because I could suddenly see the trajectory that I needed to play. It was a great opportunity to play someone very nearly fail in the way that we all do. I get the opportunity to show Hal really getting to the edge of how far he can go without screwing up all of his principles. I truly think that up until that point, he’s in constant internal dialogue about: “How can I take this to the edge in order to have some say at the last moment before she does something potentially catastrophic?”

His early attempts to hold her back are rebutted and rebuffed, but he knows instinctively not to push with someone like Grace. However, his old, dyed-in-the-wool instincts are to stay for access. In this case, they seem to have ended up being a mistake. He pushes it to the nth degree, and then when finally Kate gets up and hands in her resignation, and [some] others do [too], he realizes that is the time where he has to make the stand and in the spur of the moment goes with her. I’m very, very glad that that happens because it’s such an interesting twist.

Now, what do they plan on doing in the future? I don’t know, but it’s certainly an explosive decision, and the aftereffects will be enormous. No one’s going to be invited back into that room. And for him to walk out of the room that he thought he wanted to be in his whole life deliberately — on principle but with a nudge [laughs] — that’s when I suddenly could see the trajectory of his decision-making fully.

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Debora told me that, unlike the first three seasons, she always knew how she wanted to end the fourth season — and it’s exactly what is shown in the final cut. Did she clue you in about that big cliffhanger, or did you also learn about it upon reading the script for the first time?
Sewell: No, she did not clue me in at all! [Laughs.] When we’re filming, we start off with a couple of episodes, one and two. And then towards the end of the first block, we might suddenly get another script. Debora’s very fair that if there’s something that Hal would know and is operating based on that knowledge, she’ll let me know. That doesn’t mean that I should show it. It’s just something for me to know. Very often — as I think with all of these characters, but definitely with Hal — he doesn’t show what he knows. He always knows a hundred things.

Bit by bit, we had little clues of what was coming up, but nothing to prepare quite for the end. She’s very closed-lipped about it. It’s a need-to-know basis, really. It’s a fun aspect of the read-throughs. When there’s an enormous reveal at the end of an episode, normally at the season finale, the rest of the cast who are not in said scenes have received redacted scripts.

So, [with] the finale, for example, you got those final lines of Kate getting up, but [the rest of the ending] was all blacked out. You didn’t get what happened once he went outside. So the great thing about that is that we get to experience an audience’s reaction. Believe me: When Ato Essandoh, who plays Stuart, is in the room, and [watching] Ali Ahn, who plays Eidra, and Nana reading that for the first time, the explosive reaction was very, very exciting, and it just gave us a clue as to what a great ending it was.

When I asked Debora about that ending, she told me, “I don’t think [Hal] chooses his wife. I think he chooses right versus wrong as he understands it.”
Sewell: I also think so too. It was not a soppy decision. If he had fundamentally disagreed with what Kate did in that moment, he would not have got up. In that moment, when they look each other in the eye, they seem to have an understanding of what he’s about to do [by walking out of that room]. Who knows what that pact is? It’s not contingent on them necessarily fully reuniting as a couple. It could be a new way of being together or apart. There’s certainly a maturity to it. They’re making a decision to do [something together].

I think it might be a mistake to assume that means they choose the marriage, but I wouldn’t necessarily say otherwise either. Listen, I’ve been taken by surprise enough times by Debora Cahn. [Laughs.] But I do know that whatever she writes for us will be fascinating. I don’t worry about protecting the DNA of what we love about this relationship — whether the characters are fully united, apart, in crisis. They could have new partners, but I think that that dynamic always remains interesting for us to play. So who knows? I don’t say this with any knowledge of what’s coming up — or if anything’s coming up at all, to be honest. We just got to wait and see.

Much of what makes Kate and Hal’s marriage work comes down to the writing, but there’s no denying the chemistry between you and Keri. What do you think accounts for it?
Sewell: I think so much of it is just our initial human response to each other when we work. I’m a great believer in [this idea that] if something’s there that feels right, you don’t need to necessarily dissect it. From the first day, me and Keri seemed to arrive at the material together in a way that worked. We are very similar in the way we work together; there is a certain lightness and a fun to the way we work. Even when the subject matter is very heavy, we want to keep it alive. Obviously, we’ve done our work on it, but I know that whatever decisions or impulses I have when I read the script, I know that they will meet whatever Keri does.

I think me and Keri are similar — we want to embrace all of the imperfections. You don’t always want to be right; you don’t want to always be good. People fail all the time, and I’m always looking for the little failures. I’m trying to hide from them in life, but in what we’re doing, you relish the things when your character is in the wrong or slips up, or gets smug and makes a mistake, because that’s what makes it human and recognizable.

Debora told me that she always knew she wanted to end the season with that final shot of Kate looking straight ahead at Hal, but were you given an actual speech to perform when Hal is speaking to the press?
Sewell: I was.

Given that this show hates doing time jumps, I have a feeling we may get to see part of that speech in a potential fifth season.
Sewell: [Grinning] Who knows? It could be. I’m certainly not going to tell you what it entails.

The Diplomat Season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.