ORLANDO, Fla. — Keri Russell’s “comeback year” has the feel of a reinvention, a re-branding of the dainty young lovely who burst on the scene with Felicity back in the last century.
But as different as her flinty mother in the new film Dark Skies might seem, as dangerous and “out there” as her Born Again Bolshevik sleeper spy is in TV’s The Americans, she refuses to label her return to public view a career makeover.
“The great thing about disappearing is that people forget about you a little bit,” Russell says. “Your past is forgotten. You can come back as something fresh and new. These past two years, I’ve come back to all these interestingthings that people might not have thought about me for in the past. They just happened.”
She stepped away from film and TV half a dozen years ago, getting married and giving birth to two children, who are now 1 and 5. At 36, she’s a different person - a mom, for starters. And it has made her a different actress.
“Anything that opens you up emotionally is going to [affect] your acting,” she says. “Parenthood, becoming a mom, certainly does that. For one thing, you practice storytelling at its most basic.”
Basic, and maybe primal. Russell’s return to the big screen has her playing a suburban mother whose children are threatened by a supernatural menace. Her turn as Lacy Barrett in Dark Skies - in theaters - was informed by herown motherhood - and by imagining real-life motherly terrors.
“The thing I kept in my mind doing those scenes where things got truly hairy for our characters was [Hurricane] Katrina. It helped me to try to imagine what that would feel like, as a parent - to know something so enormous was coming your way, hitting you, something you have no control over, and that you have these little precious kids in your charge who are looking to you to take care of.
“It’s heartbreaking to think of. They’re scared to death, and you have this terrifying, hopeless feeling, knowing that you might not be able to protect them. I kept that in the back of my mind in every scene where something extraordinary was happening tous all. You’re scared to death, but you’ve narrowed your focus to these kids and this one job I have - protecting them.”
Her “Mama Bear” on television’s The Americans (Wednesday nights on FX) is an altogether different mom, a mother of a mother from Mother Russia, laying low in suburban District of Columbia with her fellow-agent husband (Matthew Rhys), ready to ratchet up the Cold War to match new President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 rhetoric.
“Elizabeth, the spy, is plainly more stunted in her emotional life,” Russell says of the TV series. “She’s very uncomfortable showing it. She is very hard to like, she’s not the most moral person and she’s not exactly a touchy-feely mom. She is a communist, after all.’’
MovieStyle, Pages 28 on 02/22/2013