“I’m not even sure I remember that,” Russell said, sipping a beer.
Too late: Rhys was already reliving the conflict. “I was outraged at the time,” he said. “I was, like, ‘That is disgusting! This is the fucking culmination of six years of work! You can’t do that to her!’ She was, like, ‘It’s O.K., that’s fine.’ Because she’s prepared and then she kind of . . . does it.”
“You’re making me sound very professional,” Russell said, amused.
“No, no, no. I’m just recounting what happened on set. And then I saw it, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, fucking hell, how did she do that?’ ”
“But the writing was really great,” Russell said.
Rhys turned toward me, then whispered, “And the quick deflection.”
I asked how their romance started. “Oh, we just sort of started having sex,” Russell said. “No, I’m kidding. I don’t know.” She turned to Rhys: “How did we get together?” He told me that he’d had his share of on-set romances, and knew the pitfalls: “So, I would say, slowly. With a lot of, kind of, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t. Oh, this is terrible, we shouldn’t!’ . . . Inevitably, a bottle of red wine would be opened.”
Their bosses found out in stages. Season 2’s opening episode includes a sequence in which the Jenningses’ daughter walks in on her parents having oral sex, 69 style. Schlamme told me that, though he loved emotional risk-taking on set, he had always been “stunningly uncomfortable” shooting literal sex scenes, which could feel invasive. Not this time: “They were so comfortable! It was like we were filming a scene about eating Cheerios. And they had jokes. Matthew kept saying, ‘Hey, Keri, could you do me a favor? When she opens the door, could you jerk your head back really far, so it looks like I have a huge penis?’ ” When the scene was done, Schlamme walked over to the script supervisor and said, quietly, “Those two people are fucking.”
Soon afterward, thieves broke into Russell’s house, in Brooklyn, while she and Rhys were asleep in a garden-level bedroom. (Her kids were at Deary’s place.) After hearing noises, the couple barrelled up into the living room, naked, with Rhys brandishing a poker from the fireplace. The thieves ran off with items that they stuffed into Rhys’s backpack. (In Rhys’s telling, he feared having a “Force Majeure”-style failure of nerve in front of his girlfriend; Russell laughed when she heard this account and reminded me that he was a storyteller, saying, “He’s not Irish, but he might as well be.”)
“You have him in your phone as ‘God (Work)’?”
Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai
The police arrested the thieves; the district attorney, hoping for a nice news story involving a star, arranged to have the stolen merchandise returned to Russell on set. That’s when a crew member blew the couple’s cover by yelling, in front of the entire production, “Wait, that’s not Keri’s backpack—it’s Matthew’s.”
At the upstate hotel, Russell’s friends Mollie, a retired nonprofit executive, and Andrea, a coder, arrived for a planned hike in the mountains. The actress’s weekly drinking buddies and frequent travel companions, they were fellow-parents at St. Ann’s School—their kids had nicknamed the trio the Moms Gone Wild. We climbed to a high-up shelter, where four chunky stone seats faced a clearing with a dramatic view of the mountains. The previous day, there had been a tragedy in Texas, in which young girls at a summer camp had drowned in a flash flood. The women talked about the event in quiet tones, trading stories of their own near-misses when their children were small—the sorts of scary stories that become funny anecdotes after nothing bad happens, like the time Mollie’s baby fell off a sled on the way home from Fort Greene Park.
Did Russell’s kids want to act? She winced, as if she’d tasted sour milk. “They can do it when they’re older,” she said. “I think it’s Creep City.”
She had recently read Sarah Polley’s memoir, “Run Towards the Danger,” in which the director and actress described, among other things, her misery as a child star on Canadian TV, starring in “Road to Avonlea.” When Polley was nine, she’d been pressured into running through live explosives during the filming of the movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen”; in her teens, she was paralyzed by stage fright while playing Alice in Wonderland. Russell knew that Miller, her lawyer friend, who had recommended the book to her, had started to question whether children should work as professional actors at all.
Russell sympathized with Miller’s thinking. But when she thought back on her early years, she was struck less by moments of danger than by what she described as “adultification”—being exposed early to enormous responsibility. She explained, “The second you start getting paid like an adult, you’re expected—it doesn’t matter what people say!—to act like an adult.” Russell hadn’t been victimized sexually, she noted, although as a young actress she’d had her share of sketchy moments. (Later, she told me, in broadly comic terms, about the time a married producer—“an ogre”—had tried to play footsie with her under the table.) Like every actress of her era, she’d had an “all-around” meeting with Harvey Weinstein. Hers took place in a room at the Peninsula Hotel, in Beverly Hills; because Russell’s manager insisted on chaperoning her, nothing unusual happened, unless you count her and Weinstein bonding over their shared love of Leon Uris novels.
