Allison Janney Modeled Her Character from ‘The Diplomat’ on Hillary Clinton

Grace, meanwhile, lands in The Diplomat with a steely blonde bob—a look that wasn’t chosen by Cahn and co. so much as handed to them, since it’s how Janney showed up to set. (Cahn’s reaction: “Fantastic!”) The actor’s template for her character? Hillary Clinton. “It’s unbelievable, the experience that woman has and how incredibly smart she is, yet she’s still polarizing—she’s respected, she’s admired, she’s hated,” Janney says of Clinton. “One of the things that Hillary faced in her campaign is that she wasn’t warm or friendly enough. She didn’t smile. Grace suffers from that a little bit—she’s not a particularly fuzzy character.”

Janney leaned into this particular detail as a way to differentiate Grace from The West Wing’s C.J.. She gets giddy when asked about returning to the world of TV politics. “I watch all the MSNBC shows—I love to listen to people talk about politics, but I don’t enjoy talking about it myself,” Janney says. “Now I get to be in that arena again.” She can’t say too much, given where the season ends, but Grace’s positioning within the world of The Diplomat only gets more intriguing over time. (The show has already been renewed for a third season.) After reading the end of season two, “I got chills and I threw the script across the room and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’” Janney says. “It was the best moment I’ve ever had reading a script.”

The Diplomat’s first season opens with an international tragedy. Season two, by contrast, unpacks the grave geopolitical mistakes being made right here at home. Cahn maintains The West Wing’s famed belief in politicians who are doing their best, but spins it toward more dramatic—and less optimistic—ends. “Let’s take away the easy answer of ‘a bad guy did that’ and say, ‘No, a bunch of really good people did that. And how the fuck does that go down? How did we get here with the good guys?’” she says. That complexity informs the dynamic between Kate, who’s trying to stop the stream of bad decisions, and Grace, her figurehead for those diplomatic mistakes.

“I’m okay with saying to the world, ‘Okay, here is somebody that Kate Wyler, who we know and love, hates and blames for an evil act. And then [she] learns a little bit about what happened and realizes, ‘Oh no: She did something really smart, really strategic, really brave, and it went wrong like things go wrong,’” Cahn teases. “The basis on which we judge leaders can be so flimsy.”

Cahn wrote and shot The Diplomat’s second season when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, with Vice President Kamala Harris very much in mind while devising Grace as a character. “How the smartest and most experienced and most capable women wind up shuttled out the side door was very, very important for me to think about,” Cahn says. But The Diplomat will arrive on Netflix a mere five days before an election that may see Harris becoming the president herself. “It’s a little bit scary,” Cahn says of the timing. “We did not see this coming.”

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