The wigs are off. The truth is out. The Americans has brought us, finally, to a moment four seasons in the making: Martha knows that Clark—who is really Phillip, who is really Mischa—is in the KGB. And last night we saw what could be the end of Martha's journey on the show (though we very much hope not!).
Now, when you ask your husband, who married you in secret and only sleeps at your place three nights a week, to reveal his hidden identity, there's no great answer that he could give you. But when you are a secretary at the FBI and you realize that you have been inadvertently aiding the Russians, the revelation that you have been sleeping with the enemy is particularly—not to mention personally—excruciating on about ten thousand levels. And Alison Wright, who plays Martha, can portray every single one of those levels, sometimes with just a gasp or a glance, at the exact same time.
The actress has taken a role that started as a source of pity and cringe-inducing comedy—the hapless, lovestruck woman who couldn't see through her boyfriend's shady excuses or shoddy toupee—and, slowly, proven her to be the closest thing The Americans has to a moral compass. Martha is who she says she is. She loves whom she says she loves. And so she handles completely life-destroying information with an almost super-human dignity.
Wright spoke with Esquire by phone about the historic Secretary Offensive that inspired Martha's story, how she prepares for all of this season's heart-wrenching scenes, and if she believes Martha and Clark's love is real.
I want to go back to the beginning for a minute. What was the initial character description of Martha? How much did you know about her when you signed on?
I think the description was literally something like, "secretary, in love with Clark, very plain." It might have said "dowdy." And that was really it. My second audition was with Joe Weisberg and Gavin O'Connor [who directed the pilot], and Joe really filled me in quite a lot on that idea that this very much based in the real history, in real people's situations. We played around a bit at the audition with the different levels of how head-over-heels she was about Clark, so it was collaborative from the very beginning.
I was about to ask about what you learned about these real-life victims, but I'm not sure if I should call them victims. These real secret wives?
"Victims" is fair, really, because they were targeted. There was something called the Secretary Offensive, and that was the plan: to go out and get these secretaries who were in their 30s, who were lonely and emotionally vulnerable, who would be easy targets for emotional manipulation. I read as much as I could. A lot of it is still secret, of course, but I was scavenging for everything I could get.
What was the most surprising thing you learned in that research?
Probably that the majority of them killed themselves within 24 hours of finding out who their husbands really were.
Oh my God, that's horrifying.
The stakes are very, very high very quickly. Most of them were so horrified and destroyed that their life had been a complete lie. They could handle the fact that they had been spying, effectively, and that they had broken the law and would go to jail for it. But finding out that the man that was their husband was never really in love with them, that he was on the clock—that they couldn't bear. And whether they were hanging themselves or throwing themselves out a window, they were just very sad.
Do you think Martha believes that Clark loves her, even knowing, as she now does, that he's a KGB officer?
I think that she thinks that their love is still real. I think she thinks that his job got in the way, and if only he hadn't had that job... At first the job was working for this mystery government agency, and now the job is working for the KGB. It's the same difference to her. I think she hasn't fully realized the extent of what's happened to her now. I don't think that she could have left like she did if she didn't have any hope left at all.
I was amazed at how calm she was in that scene, when she says goodbye before getting on the plane.
I agree. I mean, I think shock has got a lot to do with it. And she's going to need time to think about all of this and ruminate on it and see how she feels about it. It was a bit much all in one go, I think.
How do you feel about this arc of Martha's and the choices she's made, within her limited ability to make decisions about what she does now?
We see her being pushed to limits that she probably never would have imagined she could never go anywhere near. She tries to survive on her own. She realizes she can't do it, she doesn't know what to do. None of her options are any good. So in the end, she has to go back to Clark, who she does feel is her protector, and he's the only one looking out for her at this point. She has to put her faith in him. If it doesn't work, she had no options anyway. She's all in with Clark, with her trust.
As a viewer I thought, it's probably better for her to get captured by the Americans, because they won't execute her—at least, not right away. But the Russians, from what we've seen on the show so far, just get rid of inconvenient people.
I think there's something incredibly humane about the way the Russians execute somebody.
You mean the surprise, like what happened with Nina?
They said they very much did that on purpose, so the person only had seconds to be in terror and to lose their mind and to think about what's happening. Whereas, we'll let someone rot in jail for years, and let them wonder when they'll die.
How do you prepare for these big reveal scenes, from the first time Martha sees Clark without his wig to these discoveries she's made in the past few episodes?
I'm lucky, really, because I've had a very long prep. You knew, eventually, the pinnacle of the story is that she finds out. So I've been preparing for that [for] four seasons. I've been able to slowly add my layers as I'm going on, knowing that I will have to unpeel them at some point.
I've read that you heavily annotate scripts. What kind of notes do you take? How does that inform your performance?
I do. Ideas come and go, and if you don't write them down, sometimes they're just gone. And your ideas about a scene and storyline will change from the very first time you read it. So it's really helpful for me to remember what I thought, weeks ago, when I was in a different frame of mind, or was influenced by something else that day. You never know how something will influence you. So it's a practical thing, and it helps me.
Of course you're a central part of the creative engine driving this, but is there anything about Martha's evolution that's surprised you?
That's a very interesting question. The ending is, for me. The fact that she seemed to enter this profound state of being sort calm and accepting and getting on that plane and leaving, and not having a breakdown, and not screaming and crying and kicking, which would have been my instinct. It's something I spoke with the Js [showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields] about, and they were very sure that they wanted it to be Martha's story. That's not what would have expected at all. That wouldn't have been my instinct.
Have any scenes or moments been especially challenging for you?
There comes a responsibility with the scenes where he tells her he's KGB. They have a great responsibility, because you're talking about four seasons of emotional payoff, and you want to make sure that the end result is satisfying. But other than that, no, I don't think so. Anything slightly tricky, we very much enjoy working it out. Noah Emmerich is always really great about it. I like the way he talks through the scenes, because he directed us again this year, and I think I have my favorite time with him. I always learn a new idea about the way he's dissecting the story, because he's involved on a different level. I'm very micro, so it's nice to work things out with him. Some of my favorite scenes are in his episodes.
Is Martha patriotic? She works at the FBI, so I'm curious, on top of the emotional betrayal of Clark lying to her this entire time about his identity, how offensive and troubling it is for her that he is in the KGB, an enemy of her country.
I think for everybody in the country at that time, the KGB was the worst possible thing that there was. You had the president on TV saying as much. So him working for the KGB is the worst possible thing that she could hear. It was the worst answer that he could give. I do think she's patriotic, and I do think she's had to compartmentalize, and she's not giving the full weight of seriousness to what she's actually done. She's separated those two things, because she had to do that for her marriage.
When you think about it, she has been okay with a number of things that the average person would think, "Wait, you want to spend half the nights away from me, and also we can never tell anyone we're married?"
The trick with that is, Clark has added each of those things, one at a time, slowly, over the years. So before you know it, you turn around and go, "Wait a minute, there are ten rules!" And if you always have a good explanation for it, and she wants to believe him, she's not cynical, she's not a liar herself, so she's not out to spot other liars.
It was so interesting to see Stan at the FBI talking about how sneaky they think Martha is, how she was able to lie this entire time. But really, it's because she didn't even know what she was lying about. Her poker face was mostly the real thing.
It's surprising what people can do, right? I'm sure in the FBI they're astounded that she could do this. But those are the people that predators target. They target the weak link.
Have you talked to Matthew Rhys about how real, or not real, the relationship between Clark and Martha is? Do you figure out together how genuine that relationship and that connection is?
It's not something that we've talked about, ever. I do think there are things Clark/Phillip gets out of that relationship with Martha that he can't get out of Elizabeth, just because they are such different people. Martha is a complete font of empathy, she's warm, maternal, forgiving, accepting. She's everything Elizabeth is not. We can be different people with people who think different things.
Has playing Martha changed how you think about relationships in real life?
I think people delude themselves every day. I'm surrounded by people that are in complete denial about the state of their relationships.
