Allison Janney on Playing the President in ‘The Diplomat,’ Her Broadway ‘Seven-Year Itch’ and the One Genre She’s Never Tried
by Clayton Davis · VarietyAllison Janney is shy, and she has no interest in ever being president.
The first part surprises people. The second is now professionally inconvenient because Janney has spent the better part of two decades walking the corridors of a fictional Washington, D.C., and finally has taken the seat behind the Oval Office desk. In “The Diplomat,” Debora Cahn’s political thriller on Netflix, Janney’s Grace Penn has ascended from vice president to commander in chief, a turn the actor swears she did not see coming. “I didn’t know until I read the last page of a script,” Janney tells Variety. “I was sitting right here in my kitchen and turned the page and saw it, and it just freaked me out. I haven’t had that kind of reaction to a script before, ever.”
We are talking over Zoom, Janney at a desk in her home office, a pool visible behind her. Walking around her and then hopping onto her lap is Lilo, a pit bull her niece is fostering. It is a domestic scene entirely at odds with the woman she plays. I met Janney almost a decade ago at the after party for “I, Tonya,” Craig Gillespie’s 2017 biopic, following its screening at the New York Film Festival. In my early pundit days, I walked up to her and told her flat-out she was going to win an Oscar. She said, in so many words, “You’re kind, but that’s not happening.” A few months later she won the Academy Award for supporting actress as LaVona Golden, the abusive mother of figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie).
Nine years later, the seven-time Emmy winner has her latest nomination, for supporting drama actress, and “The Diplomat” has its strongest awards haul yet, with seven total bids, including for co-stars Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell, and a drama series nom. A win would place her alongside Cloris Leachman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the record books as the most awarded female performer in history, a prospect she waves off with characteristic dryness. “Sure, those hacks,” she deadpans.
Nonetheless, Janney has recently wrapped Season 4, which she calls “a doozy,” and does not sugarcoat where it leaves everyone. “Both marriages are in trouble,” she reveals. Grace and Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) have done something “morally, politically questionable.” As of the close of Season 3, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) knows about it. “Kate is the smartest woman in the room, and she now knows their secret,” Janney says. “Going into Season 4, that could not be great for a lot of people.”
The fallout, she suggests, reaches well past the marriages. “This new thing they’ve done is creating more tension and could create more tension between the U.K. and the U.S., and possibly Russia, and sets us up for a potential war scenario. They’ve done something very, very dark.” She repeatedly declines to say what it is.
Then, later discussing whether C.J. Cregg, her character on “The West Wing,” would recognize Grace Penn, she may have dropped a hint sideways: C.J., she says, “wouldn’t be willing to steal a nuclear sub.”
The show’s inauguration sequence landed harder than anyone on set anticipated. It was shot not long after the 2024 election results, and the mood was eerie. “Everyone got kind of emotional about it,” Janney recalls. “It was that our country can’t seem to get behind putting a woman in that office.”
The irony is that Janney has now played two of television’s most formidable Washington women and identifies with neither. When told she’d make a fine candidate herself, she cuts the idea at the knees, going back to my initial prediction that she’d win the Oscar. “That is one thing I’m going to tell you you’re wrong about,” she asserts. “I love playing strong women with huge flaws or huge secrets. But in real life, I am not that at all. I am shy. I do not like to speak in front of people. I am not these characters at all, and all my friends will tell you that too.”
She credits Cahn’s dense dialogue that’s so packed it has become the show’s signature tempo. But what impresses her most is what Cahn chooses to withhold. In one scene, Janney and Bradley Whitford, who plays her husband, Todd, get ready for bed after a fight without a word between them, then curl up together anyway. “Her writing gives actors so much to work with, and then she also trusts us to have no dialogue,” she says. “That was a beautiful scene.”
Weeks after the upcoming Emmys, Janney will open on Broadway in Jon Robin Baitz’s play “Other Desert Cities,” which runs from Oct. 18 through Jan. 17 . She stars opposite Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Lily Rabe and Joe Keery. It’s her first stage appearance since “Six Degrees of Separation” seven years ago; she calls it her seven-year itch. “Acting is a team sport, and when you’re on stage, there’s nothing like being in front of a live audience,” she says.
Theater, she believes, is why she was never typecast: “All the actors I love the most have come from the theater. All the ‘West Wing’ actors came from the theater.”
Next on her docket is a role in Oscar-winning Justine Triet’s “Fonda,” which shot in France in February with Odessa A’zion and Andrew Scott. “I had the best time,” Janney says. “I know the way she’s editing it and the music; it’s going to be a really cool movie.”
With a career that’s so adored and respected — her résumé ranges from “The Hours” to “Juno” — it’s no surprise fans stop her on the street to talk about their favorite roles, like “Drop Dead Gorgeous” and others that have surprised her. But alas, there are two roles she has yet to play.
The first is a superhero, a want that is traceable back to her childhood spent watching the classic “Bewitched.” “I was determined that if I twitched the right body parts, I too could be magic,” she says.
The second is the layup she’s yet to tackle: “I’ve never done a horror film before. That would be really fun.”
Blumhouse, your move.
And somebody, go adopt Lilo.