Paul Risker chats with Noah Emmerich about The Americans Season 2…
Ten years after graduating from Yale University, New Yorker Noah Emmerich began mapping his route to the big screen. Unlike many others, whose sights are set on being a leading man in Hollywood, Emmerich found his voice in character roles such as friend and traitor, Marlon in Peter Weir’s, The Truman Show, or the compulsive yet merciful ex-cop, Larry Hedges, in the drama Little Children; all of which have earned him both respect and admiration from peers and audiences alike and a reputation as the actor to call on for nuanced layered performances.
But it is Emmerich’s commanding portrayal of troubled FBI agent, Stan Beeman, in FX’s hit spy thriller The Americans, which is earning the actor the biggest accolades and fanbase of his career. Rarely does a character evoke such contrasting emotions; as audiences are compelled to root for Beeman’s homegrown sense of pride and duty, but thrown by the character’s deep-seated darkness and struggle.
When Emmerich is not commanding the screen with his compelling performance on The Americans, the man behind the makeup is making waves behind the camera. We talked with Noah Emmerich about his experience with this character and the actor’s take on his complexities.
Paul Risker: It is hard to figure out your character Stan, do you know more about him than we do?
Noah Emmerich: He hasn’t told me anything. I keep asking.
PR: Seriously, though, do the writers tell you…
NE: One of the great things about the role is that there’s a lot of room for ambiguity. Everyone has a different opinion about, what Stan is feeling. Does he really love Nina? Is he just using Nina? Does he know he is being used by Nina? Does he love his wife? Would he betray his country or not, to save Nina? These are questions that I think are important to be alive. I think if we answer any of them, he becomes a less interesting character, to some degree. That’s one of the hard parts about playing the character is that you have to keep all those possibilities alive and yet have a strong sense of who you are. I think by answering them you deflate the intrigue and the tension of the character. Although I would say there can be duality; they don’t necessarily negate each other: Stan could love Nina and his wife. The heart is a complex instrument and so many in life can be in love with two women, — I think one of the things that is interesting for Stan is that he has this espionage life that’s very lonely and very isolated and Nina’s a character that understands him through that prism and he understands her through that prism as well. And then there is Sandra, and his family and his son as well, he came to the show having spent a few years undercover, estranged from his family; quite distanced, not being able to share his day to day issues with his family and that’s very isolating. Just as it is for Phillip and Elizabeth from their children. So there’s a reflective quality to these two different families that they are two sides of a similar sides of a coin.
I think Stan imagined he’d come home from his under cover work and get to know his family again, and it turns out he goes into this counter intelligence department. And once again he can’t really quite share everything he’s doing with his wife. There’s a further estrangement, an inherent loneliness to that. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love his wife, but part of the fabric of love is actually the sharing of the daily existence and so much of that is prohibited from his job. That leads him to Nina. We are social creatures. We need to feel like we’re not alone in the world. And I think there is a connectivity between Stan and Nina.
PR: Is there anything that Stan did in Season Two that really surprised you?
NE: There are lots of things that Stan does that really surprise me. I mean from the very beginning of the script of Season One, the affair with Nina surprised me a lot. It was not how I pictured the character evolving, to the violence in Season One as well. Season Two was less shocking in a way because the course was sort of set in Season One. In Season Two I was presented with the quandaries that Stan was presented with — I never thought Stan would betray his country for the sake of Nina; I think that would eat him up and it would hurt him. But I don’t think it’s a question of his integrity as an officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation –I don’t think he would ever compromise that. I think really that’s what’s first in his life and it’s cost him a great deal in his life, mostly personally. I think he really sees himself as a soldier in the fight to protect the country, to serve his country. There is a big hanging question in Season Two – what is he going to do?
PR: Can you talk a bit about going back into the eighties? What is the most fun or interesting thing about jumping back in time, and particularly playing a spy?
NE: I just feel younger! It’s interesting because I did live through the eighties; I was a young kid and I lived through them, so to come back and visit them with an adult’s perspective is odd — just like on a personal level I’m playing my dad, not at all like in character, but just in terms of age. So it’s interesting to be a grown up in a time when you were a kid and to think of the world and to remember quite viscerally how I saw and experienced it as a kid. And through the show living in the realities of the sort of political, socioeconomic issues that we’re dealing with as adults. It’s interesting, it’s just another layer — it’s sort of a layer cake of a moment in time that is a richer, deeper cake than we usually get to have because we’re usually only in that time once in our life. To go back to it is certainly interesting… a deepening of understanding, so I guess it’s like being a historian to some degree, of modern history.
PR: How did you prepare for the role? What research did you do? Did you work with the FBI — an informant?
NE: Yes, I talked to some FBI guys. I read a good bit about the period. I remembered my own point of views on the period, as I just sort of touched upon; thinking about what it looked like from a kid’s point of view. But mostly reading through the news of the times; through some books about the times; some procedural things about the FBI and how they worked in the Soviet Union. And about the different points of view during the Cold War. It’s most interesting to try not to get ahead of yourself because obviously its history now so, to make it sort of fresh and feel contemporary and real, without knowing the future is one of the harder tasks: to forget what we know. I try to just go back and not go past where we are in the show. A book written in 1990 about the Cold War is not as interesting as a book written in 1980 about the Cold War, even though it was right in the middle of it.
PR: Take us through the evolution of your relationship with your wife.
NE: Evolution is a kind word. More dissolution!
PR: I found there were some real moments of intimacy in Season Two through the separation.
NE: It’s a 20 year marriage so even if we find it in dissolution or in its breakdown that’s an opportunity to show what’s lost; what’s been lost or what’s been damaged. But you have to have the history and no matter how bad it gets or no matter how distant they get, — you can’t negate what they’ve been through together and they’ve had a child. The relationship between them is powerful and painful and hopefully interesting.
PR: Stan despite his cheating is a very likeable character.
NE: Well that’s good! You might be alone in that, just based upon — people’s responses: “how can you do that to your wife?’ and “you’re such a bastard!” and “you cheater!” It’s amazing people do conflate — as they’re supposed to do; it’s a weird thing we’re asking people to do. I mean I’m not Stan Beeman but I want you to think that I am Stan Beeman. So if you stop me at the coffee shop and get mad at me for something Stan Beeman did then I understand, even though I think you’re crazy!
PR: So what do you say to these people?
NE: I don’t say much. It’s something you learn over the course of a career. I used to feel very defensive and guarded about any character I played, even if he’s a terrible character. No one really feels that they are terrible themselves, so to play a character you have to love the character even if the card is to not love himself. I used to be just as crazy as they were; I used to think they were attacking me — but now I take it as a complement. Any sort of emotional response to the work is fantastic; if there’s emotion then that’s the whole point. Whether they hate them or love them it’s great, if they’re connecting or feeling invested enough to have a feeling or an opinion.
PR: What kinds of thinking points do you think this show brings up?
NE: I think it’s about, what it’s always been about; the nature of self; the truth of identity; who we really are to ourselves, to our friends, to our family. Is that the same person? Is there a public self and a private self? The nature of relationships. If you think about the identity of self as being quite a complex issue, then you put two people together and the identity of the relationship becomes exponentially more complex. In the context of the spy, the life and death world becomes more dramatized and more illuminated and exaggerated. But these issues that these characters have – are the same issues everybody has in any kind of relationship. The show goes from talking about relationships with children but before that it was relationships with each other and the marriage. It’s really about how we relate to each other as human beings in the world.
PR: What are your views on the writing and the scripts?
NE: I think they’ve gotten better every season actually. I think everyone’s sort of hitting their power zone to some degree, and the scripts this year I think, have been more sophisticated and complex and truthful than they’ve ever been, I feel. In Season One I had a lot of questions for the writers and suggestions for things that could maybe be done a little differently, and then in Season Two a bit less. The script as a whole, feels evermore complex and dynamic and interesting.
Many thanks to Noah Emmerich for taking the time for this interview.
The Americans Season 2 is out on DVD on 26th January from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Paul Risker is a critic and writer for a number of on-line and print publications, including Little White Lies, Film International, Starburst Magazine, and VideoScope. He is currently based in the United Kingdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84503534&v=qqtW2LRPtQY&list=PL18yMRIfoszFJHnpNzqHh6gswQ0Srpi5E&x-yt-ts=1421914688&feature=player_embedded
