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Thefinal episode ofThe Americansdoes just about everything anAmericansfan could want.
It provides a conclusive, tragic ending for our now-exposed Russian spies, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings.
It leaves certain questions unanswered, which was very much in keeping with the shows ethos.
(Is Renee working for the Russians?Well never know!)
And it does something that few series manage in their last chapter: It delivered genuine surprises.
(Stan just let the Jennings go?
Paige got off the train?!)
Ahead of the finale, Vulture spoke to the key members ofThe Americanscreative team about how START came together.
What follows is an oral history of one of the finest finales of the modern TV era.
Joe Weisberg (co-showrunner and series creator):[We knew] just the first part.
Fields:Or neither of the kids.
I remember thinking it was neither.
We certainly played with all three of those options over the course of all the intervening seasons.
In a way, we consider it a minor miracle that we ended up sticking with that ending.
We did not spend the next four seasons trying to get to that ending.
We essentially thought, Boy, that would be a great ending, and honestly then forgot about it.
They didnt give us any clues as to how it would end.
So when we read it, it was an absolute surprise.
It did involve us going back to Russia.
I kind of wondered if it led to that realm and world.
But, yeah, that was about as specific as I got.
Weisberg:The story we originally built was that the kids would stay.
Who would there be a reason to leave?
It would be Henry.
Holly Taylor (Paige Jennings):I was really shocked and speechless when I first read it.
I couldnt really process what I had just read, but I loved the ending.
Wait until you read this one thing.
Or well go, Oh, just tell me.
I sat at the bar and ordered a giant glass of really nice red wine.
It was so incredible to read them like that.
It was this little secret space in which to read them in a private way.
Rhys:I was on a train to Washington, D.C.
I just read it then, and I wept my way there with a businesswoman looking at me.
I was on my way to do the premiere ofThe Post, the Spielberg film.
I had [my script] wrapped up.
No one could see the cover.
Chris Long (executive producer, START director):Going into this one was incredibly tricky.
Everything is the last and the end and theres never a chance to fix anything else after this.
Then you want to forget all that and just do your job and tell that beautiful story.
Fields:We avoided writing [that scene] for the longest time.
Lets just write a version of it.
We wound up with a first draft that needed a lot of work.
And then we proceeded to rewrite it for several months.
I dont think you could point to any other scene inThe Americansthat took several months to write.
We never had a scene that really needed that.
Part of it was, we would just feel we werent there yet.
We had to accomplish something enormous.
Essentially, we had to make it believable that Stan let them go.
Fields:To tell the truth, Joe and I were pretty nervous until we saw the read-through.
At which point we knew we would be okay.
Rhys:Theres no hiding in a scene like that.
Also, your vanity kicks in.
Yeah, everyone turned up ready to go.
I was brimming and ready to go at the rehearsal.
I mean, we feltgreat.
We were really wondering, How much are we going to have to dig back into the scene?
At this read-through, we knew we were okay in the actors and the directors.
Thats how you want to feel.
It had a weight to it and an expectation attached to it that I had never experienced before.
Theres no way theyre going to be able to fit in much else.
Long:It was the only scene we shot that day.
We shut off [this parking garage in Manhattan] and didnt let the traffic in there.
Emmerich:Every take was ten minutes long from all the different angles.
But it had a lot of energy around it.
It was an exciting moment.
Rarely have you worked that hard to earn a scene, you know?
I mean, its a painful scene.
It was the end of our story line and the end of our work together.
Rhys:Its six years of everyone going, Whens Stan going to catch them?
[Sten letting them go] is an enormous decision that happens in an incredibly fleeting moment.
So yeah, I was surprised, given the amount of betrayal that Stan feels within that scene.
You know, what makes any television interesting is conflict.
Youre conflicted in that moment.
Beyond this, its, you know, finales need shocks.
And that is a shock.
Emmerich:I thought it made sense.
Stans journey throughout the last couple of seasons has been away from the spy game.
The ends didnt seem to justify the means.
Its a real moment of grace and humanity that supersedes the political.
Which is at the heart of our show.
There isnt a moment that goesclickin Stans brain, in our minds.
Emmerich:I do think the resonance of Henry is definitely explosive for Stan.
That has a big impact on Stan, for sure.
Itd be hard to identify a singular turning point, but that has a real impact.
Rhys:Its Philips charm that wins him over, once again.
[Russell starts laughing.]
What I loved about that scene was that Stan has clearly been in love with Philip for so long.
There is no clean-cut guy whos right.
Thats what I love about Stan letting them go.
He doesnt want to let them go, but he cant not.
Because he cares about them.
And he has to let us go.
Fields:Theres that moment when the car pulls past and Stan steps aside.
It was not a moment written into the script.
Long:That was a moment we added when we were in there.
Noah just stood there for a moment and it was like, Oh my God, this is amazing.
Its nerve-wracking enough to present, what is it, a 12-minute scene with no action and just dialogue?
It was just really a great opportunity for everything to come together.
Renee the Spy (or Not?)
Laurie Holden (Renee):Renee serves a very specific function in the narrative.
I know, but I will never tell.
I was told at the very beginning.
Whether or not that changed, or went to a different incarnation, thats a whole other story.
But [Joe and Joel] are very smart writers.
She was there for a reason.
Emmerich:I have my thoughts, but Id hate to pollute the waters for other peoples thoughts.
But I do think its a tantalizing question.
Im sure some people will be frustrated by it, but you know, thats the way life is.
It doesnt get tied up in neat bows.
This is a really gray area.
It feels organic and real, and I love that they did that.
And what was most interesting to us was how the characters would deal with what they didnt know.
We knew what worked, what didnt, and what took them to a place that was unrecognizable.
But we had never disguised Holly.
Shed done some missions, but it was always a hat and glasses.
Shed never had a wig, and wed never been trying to go full different persona with her.
Once I did it, I realized why I probably shouldnt have wanted to do it so much.
So after I did that, I was like okay, this is definitely the best-case scenario.
I got to try it once and then that was it.
What they landed on was really perfect.
That was the scene, when I read the script, that made me cry.
It really affected me so brutally, strongly.
Taylor:The last scene I shot for the whole entire series was when we call Henry.
Long:We were shooting it at, like, three oclock in the morning out in Staten Island.
It was freezing cold and we got most peoples close-ups.
We turned around to get Matthews close-up, and this blizzard came in.
Rhys:It was an average shooting day forThe Americans, really.
Four thirty in the morning, theres a snowstorm, youre trying to do something incredibly emotional.
Long:We were shooting and it just kept whiting out the frame.
The fact that Matthew Rhys could give that performance in a blizzard is unbelievable to me.
Rhys:For the last day of shooting, all of those externals made it incredibly unsentimental.
When they said, Wrap, everyone just ran to get warm.
Taylor:It was absolutely freezing.
We had hand and body warmers everywhere: in our tiny little coats and our wigs.
Nobody really did a big good-bye.
Everyone just wanted to go to bed.
And it wasnt working for us.
Thats how all stories evolve.
They work, or they dont work, and you keep going.
We certainly didnt know it was going to be on a train.
We had all sorts of different iterations of that final sequence until we got to that one.
They were in cars.
They were in airplanes.
They may have went up in a hot air balloon.
Fields:Never a hot air balloon, Joe.
Taylor:We had the whole train to ourselves on a Sunday.
We needed a train to pull in and then pull out and leave Holly on the platform.
We couldnt do it with a green screen because of that process.
I was just standing out on the platform, sitting still so they wouldnt catch me moving.
Russell:Its difficult because you read a scene like that, and its so moving.
But its one of those things that has to be moving in a second.
You have to catch that moment really quickly.
Theres no, Let me work up to it for ten minutes.
There were a lot of outside factors happening that were distracting.
It wasnt the easiest scene to shoot.
Everybody else was on the train, knowing nothing that was going on.
There were just five of us on that platform, shooting the last piece of Holly.
It was very intimate that way to do it.
Theres so many factors where she just feels betrayed by them.
She had that problem before, when she first found out that they were spies.
She was like, How can I trust you guys?
They finally built that trust back up, and now its just been torn back down again.
I dont think she has a plan.
And she doesnt even know how shes going to be able to do that.
Long:We didnt know in advance what song was going to go there.
We had several ideas before we started shooting.
One of the most famous songs we tried was American Pie.
We had it in there for a long time.
Amanda Krieg Thomas (co-music supervisor): American Pie lived in there for a while.
I cant remember who, but it was rubbing someone not quite right.
We werent really sure about it.
Myself and [co-music supervisor] P.J.
Bloom, we both really felt that having it be of that period was really important.
Long:In some ways, that American Pie song overwhelms what we were watching.
That was the reason why we didnt go there in the end.
That U2 song was released that year and it felt relevant.
We were very fortunate in that we heard people in their camp were fans of the show.
But it was not easy by any means.
The last possible day it could be cleared, it cleared.
Weisberg:We liked that scene.
It moves us, which is the main thing.
It isnt about a shoot-out.
Its about whatever the emotional shoot-out is for them.
And, you know, dream sequences are so broad.
Its just very, very tricky.
And it just rang true to us.
It was both sad and not sad.
And, in a funny way, affirming of her love for Phillip.
Because shes both letting go of it, but her unconscious is hanging on to it.
And because shes leaving her kids, its referring back to when she was pregnant with Paige.
Fields:Once the Gregory dream came, it came pretty fully formed.
Weve got art in a way that she didnt understand way back then.
But its good that clearly something is working there on her subconscious.
There was sure a lot of rewriting after.
Weisberg:The fact that they should be together, the mood, and the tone came very easily.
And that part isnt always easy.
When they start driving the first time was out by Jones Beach.
And then we come to the green screen.
Its a very famous place.
As soon as we saw Keri deliver it in Russian, we knew.
Weisberg:The truth is Joel and I never even looked at it in English.
We never watched the English version.
This would be a first.
We spent just an insane amount of time working on that scene.
Taylor:This is definitely the most tragic way that it could have possibly ended.
They dont just get an easy out.
They really wanted a Russian ending.
They wanted that melancholic feeling.
It wasnt going to be an American hero ending.
They did exactly that.
All of the choices ended up at a terrible cost.
Theyre alive, but they have to live with this terrible truth that their kids are not with them.
Its devastating and satisfying.
They did have to pay for what theyve done.
Rhys:They have this enormous, great grief.
In a way, the grief is almost worse than death.
I like the fact that there was payment for what they did.
In the best-case scenario, if all four went to Russia, Henry would still be devastated.
So I love this ending.
It was very, very apt.
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
Additional reporting by Maria Elena Fernandez.
