#joel fields

Steve Carell is playing Alexander Strauss, a psychotherapist who is being held prisoner by a serial killer (Gleeson). Alexander begins to unpack the mind of the man keeping him captive and thus explores his own trauma and past. He's being held captive to help this killer curb his homicidal urges. But in doing so, he opens up sides of Alexander that might prove dangerous for his captivity.

Fields: We avoided writing [that scene] for the longest time. We wrote a lot of the rest of the script around it, and then, if I remember, we finally sat down, and we just said, “Let’s write it. Let’s just write a version of it.” We wound up with a first draft that needed a lot of work. And then we proceeded to rewrite it for several months.

Weisberg: I would probably call that the hardest scene we ever wrote on the show, and the one that we spent the most time on. I don’t think you could point to any other scene in The Americans that took several months to write. We’d leave it alone for a couple of weeks, we would come back to it, rewrite it, leave it alone for a couple of weeks. We never had a scene that really needed that. Part of it was, we would just feel we weren’t there yet. We had to accomplish something enormous. [...]

Fields: To tell the truth, Joe and I were pretty nervous until we saw the read-through. At which point we knew we would be okay.

Rhys: There’s no hiding in a scene like that. Also, your vanity kicks in. You want to do a good job, you want the respect of your peers in those moments, among the other greater reasons such as serving the story. Yeah, everyone turned up ready to go. I was brimming and ready to go at the rehearsal.