‘The Diplomat’ Star Ato Essandoh Explains What Grace’s Brutal Betrayal Means for Stuart

The Diplomat star Ato Essandoh calls Season 4 “an embarrassment of riches” in our interview about the Season 4 finale. And he’s right. The fourth season of the Netflix political drama, created and written by The West Wing‘s Debora Cahn, is packed with dense dialogue that never feels like too much. The payoff for the carefully charted detail is a finale so satisfying, you wish you could see it in real life with our actual political leaders. But the season is not without its tragedies. Warning: The Diplomat spoilers ahead!

The Diplomat Season 4, which came out in full on October 15, pushes leading lady Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) into morally gray areas as mounting pressures at home and at work make her feel that toeing the party line is more important than doing what’s right.

This was predicated by the shocking death of Defense Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) and the subsequent resignation of Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear). Kate goes down a slippery slope near the season’s end to protect Hal’s (Rufus Sewell) position as vice president, but what President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) does to Stuart Hayford (Essandoh) pulls her back from falling into a point of no return. Instead, she jumps into unknown territory when publicly protesting the president in front of the G7 Summit.

Grace planned to take military action against the United Kingdom, a NATO ally, if the new prime minister, Bethan Vaughn (Jodie Whittaker), allowed Russia to retrieve the bodies of their dead soldiers from a sunken submarine. That sub previously contained the Poseidon nuclear weapon, but Grace and Hal had it taken in secret, and she wanted complete control of when that information became public and how.

Threatening a NATO ally was unacceptable for Stuart, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in London. He wanted his disapproval noted in historical records, so he submitted a dissent in the U.S. State Department Dissent Channel, an internal communication system established during the Vietnam War that allows Foreign Service officers and other State Department employees a place to express opposing views on foreign policy with top leadership.

Kate cosigned the move, and Grace retaliated by recalling Stuart from his post. This means he’s being sent back to Washington, D.C., immediately; he can’t even gather his things. His girlfriend, Chief of the London CIA Station Eidra Park (Ali Ahn), had to get his life together. Stuart and Eidra both felt betrayed by Kate, but her protest of Grace’s actions at the G7, which was followed by subsequent resignations from Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah), Secretary of State Miguel Ganon (Miguel Sandoval), and Vice President Hal Wyler, could mend things.

Here, Essandoh breaks down The Diplomat Season 4 finale with TV Insider and how Stuart will be changed forever after the president punished him for dissenting, potentially ruining his career. As Essandoh tells us, “I don’t know where Stuart goes after this, but it is not to a good place.”

I say every season of The Diplomat is the best season. It just keeps getting better and better.

Ato Essandoh: It’s an embarrassment of riches. I say this every season now; we’re not privy to what’s going to happen when Debora’s writing it, but each and every episode is like you want to read it as soon as it comes out. And I’m always going, “Holy sh*t, we’re doing this. Oh, we’re doing that.” I am a fan of the show as much as I am an employee of the show.

It’s crazy. And this season, now she’s showing off. Do you know what I mean? Now it’s like, what is going on? It’s so good.

Yeah. When I was watching the finale last night, the final scene specifically, from Stuart’s recalling all the way to the end, I put my phone on do not disturb. I didn’t want to see any texts.

[Laughs] Absolutely.

To your knowledge, has this season’s plot been the plan for the whole series? Or does Debora discover things between seasons?

She discovers things between seasons.

Really, I think it’s based on what happens in the season, our individual characters. I think there’s a lot of things that she discovers. And in fact, don’t quote me necessarily, but I think that sometimes she has absolutely no idea what’s going to happen. And I don’t even know that she knew what the last two episodes were going to look like before she figured it out, basically when we were already in Italy.

Oh, fascinating. OK. That ending feels like everything’s been building to that, which of course can be the case without having a series map laid out in advance. But it’s a credit to the writing that it feels like this was always coming.

Yeah. I think there’s some sorcery happening here. I mean, the things that she can come up with in the moment, even when we’re working on a scene, and she’ll come up with a new line or come up with a new moment to make something work; she’s always sort of writing in her head.

There’s something inspirational about her ability to plan and then change the plan when it’s necessary, when she sees something else coming that might be a better way to represent the whole story. I’m in awe of her talent, just absolutely.

This being the fourth season, do you and the cast have a little more ownership of your characters now? Is there a collaboration where you say, “I think Stuart would say something this way; it feels more natural for me to say it this way” kind of thing?

Yeah, I wouldn’t dare. [Laughs.]

It’s a common thing!

It’s a common thing, absolutely.

Her writing is so dense, I would understand if that didn’t happen here.

Yeah, it doesn’t happen, not because of any, I don’t think, edict from Debora, but it’s more that she trusts us as the actors to do the homework that we need to do to come up to the level of the writing that she’s got. So, personally for me, I never question what’s being written for me. I just hope that I can come up to the level of what is necessary. And there’s a lot of homework that I do because I can read an episode and enjoy it from the preliminary level, but you have to read it over and over again to get really deep into the soil of it. And that’s the enjoyment I have.

So, there’s a point where I go, there’s nothing that I can say or come up with that’s going to be more brilliant than this. It’s just really get down into the script and figure out what I can do with it as me. So, there’s a collaboration between the two of us, between all of us, but it’s really led by Deb.

Very cool. Again, the writing is so meticulous and dense, and that’s the kind of dialogue I love. The acting performances really make it sing, of course, but the writing is good food.

Yeah, exactly. And the sort of weird things that she comes up with, which each character might have. I love what she finds with Stuart and Eidra in particular, just even based on the differences in our sizes.

There’s so many little subtle things that she’ll put in there, [such as] a couple of seasons ago, when Stuart hugs Eidra, and he picks her up and then he picks her up like a child, and her feet are just dangling. Little things like that she puts in, and there’s a lot of that in Season 4, [are] really fun to watch with all the characters, not just Stuart and Eidra.

I would say the best of Stuart and Eidra is in Season 4. In Episode 6, Eidra proposes to Stuart in a way that’s so uniquely Eidra. And Stuart, after that very romantic moment, tells her that Kate blackmailed Trowbridge. This feels like the essence of the show in one scene: the peak of personal intimacy combined with highly sensitive geopolitical intel. So, why did Stuart feel that was the right time?

They are always on. I think that’s what [he’s learned] about people in the Foreign Service that I’ve watched. It’s like, how do you have a life? How do you have intimacy with your family, with your partner, and also try to stop a war? All of those things are the same thing to them. So, it is important for him in that moment, as beautiful as that moment was of being proposed to is, [to add] here’s something that’s even more important.

There’s always a hierarchy of things that they have to think about throughout what they’re doing, so even if they’re in the middle of the worst fight in the world, they are always aware of the geopolitical moment and what’s more important to them. And I think it’s because of their dedication to the mission. Their mission is what is most important. So, yeah, it’s really nice that you proposed to me, but by the way, we might be going into World War III.

Just want to quickly mention.

Yes, yes. Just to make you aware.

Heads up! Do you think they would look back on this moment and think it’s romantic because of that intel looped in at the end?

I think it would be less romantic if Stuart hadn’t mentioned that. That whole scene would’ve been ruined for Eidra. How could you not tell me that? Well, honey, it was such a romantic moment. But no, that’s the time. Do you know what I mean? They get off on the geopolitical stuff as much as they get off on the romantic stuff, maybe even a little more. And I think that’s the banter that they loved.

It’s similar with Kate and Hal. That’s a huge part of their bond. Eidra doing that proposal for him, Stuart sharing that intel for her, is proof that they love each other, I think. They know each other very well.

Yeah. The interesting thing about this show is that I think the show is always about intimacy, whether it’s intimacy between countries and intimacy between geopolitical friends and foes and also between actual people. And when you have transparency, the more there’s transparency in a relationship, the more you have intimacy, and that’s what they’re all exploring.

I think that Eidra and Stuart are in a way becoming, they’re on the same journey that Kate and Hal were, but Kate and Hal have done it already, and Stuart and Eidra are finding what it means to be truly intimate and truly open to each other and open to each other’s foibles as well. And that’s how you get together in a country and in a relationship, and it works geopolitically, and it works individually with individual people.

When Eidra slides the suitcase over as a seat for Stuart to sit on so he can zip up her dress, that is so lived-in. It’s the most profoundly romantic thing I’ve seen on the show, I think. It’s such intimate knowledge of each other.

That’s what I’m talking about. That’s Debora Cahn. That is her stewing up her beautiful witches’ brew of just beautiful human moments. And you read that, and you go, OK, I get it. There’s nothing that I’m going to disagree with about that moment. And it’s also based on the fact that Ali and I are who we are.

I think if we’re different actors, she would not have come up with that moment, but she’s watching our performances and going, oh, hey, what would be good is this moment where you see that they’re used to each other and getting dressed with each other, and one guy is really tall, and the other person is really small, and this might work to bring him down to her level. It’s beautiful.

It’s so endearing. When Stuart gets recalled. It’s so heartbreaking, everything that’s going on around it. What’s top of mind and heart for him when this news sinks in?

Stuart is the true believer of the group, and he is sort of married to the mission. This is a huge betrayal, not just from Kate and not just from everybody, but it’s from the Foreign Service because he has established something that is sacrosanct. Here is, I am having a disagreement, and I am putting it through the channels that we all understand are the foundation of our belief in democracy. And now you are destroying that.

I don’t know where Stuart goes after this, but it is not to a good place. He is devastated and heartbroken, and it’s being told to him by the person that he’s believed in the most throughout the whole show.

Hopefully what happens in the final scene will revive his spirits, especially because Billie protested as well.

Yeah, exactly.

The Diplomat, Seasons 1-4 streaming now, Netflix