Noah Emmerich
arts & entertainment
as Stan Beeman
in The Americans
For Noah Emmerich, era's tension in The Americans hits home.
Naomi Pfefferman
I Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.
N
oah Emmerich has earned
critical kudos for his portrayal
of Stan Beeman, a troubled FBI
counterintelligence agent who remains
unaware that his archenemies — married
KGB spooks posing as typical Americans
— live just across the street from his sub-
urban Washington, D.C., home in season
two of FX's lauded Cold War drama, The
Americans.
It's a series in which it's hard to know
whom to root for: the married KGB
agents Philip and Elizabeth (Matthew
Rhys and Keri Russell), who, while mur-
derous, are also sympathetic as they
grapple with their complex marriage and
the safety of their children; or Stan, the
patriot who can be ominous and lacking
a moral compass as he stalks Soviet spies
and conducts an adulterous affair.
In this new season, Emmerich's char-
acter continues his downward spiral into
loneliness and isolation, fueled in large
part by what we have learned was his pre-
vious, three-year undercover assignment
penetrating white supremacist groups in
the American heartland. The traumatic
experience has burned into his psyche,
leaving him with the sense that deceit is
the norm in personal and professional
relationships.
"There's a lot of tension built into that
question of what Stan did when he was
undercover all those years:' Emmerich
said recently in a phone conversation
from his Brooklyn home.
"We have the sense that he's somewhat
post-traumatic, that it was a very intense
experience and that that residual impact
is still resonant in Stan. He has been
deeply impacted by that experience and
has a vision of a darker world inside of
American culture."
This season, Stan finds a kind of solace
in the arms of a KGB mole, Nina (Annet
Mahendru), who, unbeknownst to him, is
playing him as a triple agent.
"In this universe of multiple worlds
and multiple truths, it's unclear whether
he's really in love with Nina or whether
he's just trying to use her;' Emmerich
said.
"There is so much that Stan has to keep
hidden from his own wife. But he does
feel a simpatico connection with Nina, in
that they both understand the deception
that is always present:'
Among Stan's cloak-and-dagger mis-
sions this season is the rescue of a Jewish
former refusenik scientist that KBG offi-
cials want to forcibly repatriate back to
the U.S.S.R. Turns out the scientist has
also been spying for Mossad agents, who
violently clash with Philip and Elizabeth
as they attempt to kidnap the former
refusenik outside a gritty Mossad safe
house.
The anti-Semitism of the former Soviet
Union figures prominently in these epi-
sodes, which began airing Wednesday,
March 19. In one scene, the former
refusenik tells a synagogue congregation
that Jews are deemed "non-persons" in
the U.S.S.R., and Phillip and his bosses
sneer the word "Jew" in derogatory tones.
"It was disturbing to read those lines:'
said Emmerich, who grew up in a Jewish
household in Manhattan. "But I was glad
that it is part of the fabric of our show
because it does reflect the truth:'
As a boy, Emmerich said, he first
learned about the plight of Soviet Jewry
when his older brother interned with an
organization involved in helping refuse-
niks immigrate to Israel and the United
Ken Russell and Matthew Rhys play
married Soviet spies on The Americans.
States.
"That was when I encountered the fact
that the Soviet Union was not a good
place to be Jewish," he said.
Emmerich added that he "loves" the
story line revolving around the Mossad
agents, "which comes from my adoles-
cent infatuation with the sense of these
incredibly well-trained, super-proficient
Israeli counterparts to our CIA."
His admiration for the Mossad was
fueled, in part, by his own family's expe-
riences during World War II: His father,
Andre Emmerich, a renowned art dealer,
fled Frankfurt in Nazi Germany for
Amsterdam at age 7 with his parents and
later escaped to New York. Emmerich's
grandfather was an esteemed attorney
who fought for reparations for Holocaust
survivors after the war.
While Emmerich's father rarely spoke
of his experiences, young Noah intuited
"the sense that the unthinkable can, in
fact, happen:'
This sense that "the planet could likely
go insane he said, may well have led to
his own deep paranoia during the Cold
War, when, as a teenager, he co-founded
a group, Future Generations, dedicated to
nuclear disarmament.
Last summer at the L'Ermitage hotel in
Beverly Hills, Emmerich, 49, described his
visceral childhood feelings about the pos-
sibility of nuclear war.
"I was really afraid:' said the actor, who
has channeled those anxieties into his por-
trayal of Stan. "I remember going to bed
at night and wondering, 'Will I wake up?
Will the world make it to the morning?"'
At L'Ermitage, the tall, lanky Emmerich
was as affable and easygoing as his char-
acter is brooding, even riffing on Stan's
paranoia by pretending to covertly scan
the lobby and quipping, "Those guys over
there look suspicious:'
The actor grew up around his father's
artist clients, including David Hockney,
attended the Dalton School and then Yale
University, where he aspired to become a
constitutional attorney before the acting
bug bit him while he was performing in
a college production of the Cole Porter
musical Anything Goes.
By 1996, he had landed his first movie
gig, in Ted Demme's Beautiful Girls, and
went on to play Jim Carrey's traitorous best
friend in The Truman Show and Sylvester
Stallone's deputy in James Marigold's Cop
Land, as well as a variety of other police
roles (including in Blood Ties, opening in
theaters tomorrow).
He was hesitant to take on yet another
cop character when the producers of The
Americans approached him several years
ago, but he changed his mind when he
came to realize that the show focused on
the personal demons of its protagonists as
much as on espionage.
To prepare for the role, he spoke with
undercover agents and learned about
1980s-era spycraft from the series' cre-
ator, Joe Weisberg, an ex-CIA agent who
schooled the cast in surveillance, Morse
code and dead drops (hiding money or
instructions for another spy).
For Emmerich, the recently renewed
Cold War over Russia's aggression in
Ukraine (as well as allegations of anti-
Semitism in the region) has brought back
memories of his fears from younger days.
"The escalation of events could indeed
happen, and it does underline the fragility
of world peace he said.
"But what's interesting about the show,
for me, is that it makes us look at the
world without a myopic, us-versus-them
point of view. It encourages us to look
behind the political agenda and see each of
us as fully human, as opposed to American
and Russian or good and evil." ❑
The Americans airs on Wednesdays
at 10 p.m. on FX. See previous epi-
sodes online or On Demand.
March 20 • 2014
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