SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for The diplomat Season 4, now streaming on Netflix.
There have been three British Prime Ministers and five Foreign Ministers since THE Diplomat created in April 2023.
However, in the universe of Netflix’s Keri Russell-led drama series, there has only been one of each. So far, that’s the case.
The show created by Debora Cahn launched its fourth season today (October 15) and with it came surprising new arrangements at No. 10 Downing Street and No. 1 Carlton Gardens.
Austin Dennison, played by David Gyasi, dies tragically in the opening episodes of season 4. The character was killed in a helicopter crash in Amritsar, India, also involving the Indian Prime Minister.
British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge, played by Rory Kinnear, reveals the news to Hal Wyler, Vice President of the United States, played by Rufus Sewell, during a rather tense meeting in London.
David Gyasi as Austin Dennison in The diplomat (Liam Daniel/Netflix)
“Did you send Austin to a horrible place and then pray he wouldn’t come back?” the ghost of Margaret Roylin asks Trowbridge as he processes Dennison’s death.
Russell, who plays Kate Wyler, the US ambassador to the UK, told Deadline that the storyline was “powerful” and “devastating”. Her character has romantic tension with Dennison, and despite the plot of an affair, the pair only flirt and never act on it. “When you’re on duty, but traveling, everything is really heightened…so the connections that you make when you’re away from home, away from the distractions of everyday life, away from the people that you meet, it’s extraordinarily deep and passionate, and I think that character for Kate is really essential,” she told Deadline. “So losing him is monumental, but I also think it’s realistic for these worlds.”
Creator Cahn added that his death was a “terrible thing.” “We reached a point where the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, in our series, had been in office for as long as the UK had had five changes of government… and we had the same people throughout, and it seemed hypocritical to us not to have our characters face the challenge of the second you build relationships, the second you get your feet on the ground in a country, everything changes and you start from scratch. The nature of that kind of work is what happens when you start again. You start again all the time,” she told Deadline.
Earlier in the season, Russell’s Wyler revealed to Britain’s new Foreign Secretary that Trowbridge had attempted to kill Roylin after it emerged she was involved in the attack on HMS Courageous which saw the deaths of 41 sailors.
This appears to have led, directly or indirectly, to Trowbridge’s resignation as Prime Minister. “An hour ago, I spoke with His Majesty the King. He accepted my resignation as Prime Minister,” he says in episode four.
After a fairly long political battle, Bethan Vaughan triumphed over an anti-Semitic and xenophobic candidate to become only the second Prime Minister during the election campaign. The Diplomat.
Cahn also knew how to keep this casting secret: Jodie Whittaker, better known as the Thirteenth Doctor in Doctor Who and as a star of Broadchurchplays PM Vaughan.
“She looks like a real crackerjack,” one character says, before revealing that Vaughan was previously an “acid house devotee.”
Russell called Whittaker “so awesome.” “When this character was being written, I was very curious about who they were going to cast because they were all over the store. Debora told me, which I really appreciated, she said, ‘I wanted it to be someone who was a peer of Kate’ so that in those scenes it wasn’t someone above her. We already have that with Allison Janney’s Grace Penn character, but she wanted it to be someone from my era and my peer, who is in a real position of power and she does it quite well and she’s able to present herself in a way that Kate can’t quite understand yet, she’s wonderful,” she added.
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