I am not a baller.
I said this over a telephone, standing in a field of sheep. It was an anxiety-riddled confession, so more like, I’m so sorry. I am not a baller.
I had pitched to Netflix a first season of “The Diplomat” that ended with Stuart Hayford, the beloved character played by Ato Essandoh, getting killed. I, like everyone, had watched “Game of Thrones” slack-jawed when Ned Stark met his end. Such a baller move.
That’s how we discussed it in the writers’ room. It was muscular and devastating, and we should do it. Build a character we’d adore and kill them, from nowhere, in the second to last episode of the season.
We had backstory for Kate and Hal. They fell in love on the job, stopping wars from starting or bringing violent conflicts to an end. But there was a wound in the relationship. They worked in dangerous places. Hal had taken risks Kate thought were reckless. People had died. Young, idealistic people who saw Hal as a mentor and would have followed him into any battle. They were killed.
I didn’t want to make a show about a marriage that was on the rocks because of infidelity. That ground seems adequately covered in popular culture. (Succinctly, in “St. Elmo’s Fire”: “You f— Kevin.” “You f— many.”) My experience said marriages end for a lot of reasons. Maybe this TV marriage could be forged by a shared commitment to world-changing work and broken by ethical disagreements over its execution. Far too lofty, but I had a high school teacher who used to shout, “We’re not teaching you rules, we’re handing you a moral, ethical code.” And he coached basketball, so he would proclaim this with a ball slung under his arm, wearing a jersey that featured his exuberantly hairy shoulders. The high-low combo really spoke to me.
We decided we’d meet Kate and Hal when their marriage was nearly over. They would inch toward repair. And then it would happen again. Someone young, idealistic, like the kids they’d never had, would die as part of a well-intentioned but risky move from Hal.
Unfortunately, Stuart, cast to be loved and lost, was too loved. By me. By the cast. By the story. We built a world around diplomacy. We placed Hal and Kate at the center — hot-zone diplomats who, in a twist, were deployed to the UK. Not an adrenaline-fueled posting. Kate and Hal were defined by the grit and ingenuity that made them successful in a crisis. Embassy London wasn’t like that. How would we know?
Stuart. Great guy. By the book. Not in a shirty, s— way. But conventional. Stuart was the embassy.
We had a big cast of characters. Young aides Ronnie and Alysse were the next generation, but they were still learning. Eidra and her cohort were CIA, not diplomats. Our story included British diplomats, but fundamentally it was about what it means to represent America in the world. This wasn’t a hospital show. People didn’t come to the series with a working knowledge of the State Department, ready to see what the renegades were like. As one actual diplomat put it after watching Season 1, “This was helpful. Now my parents understand what I do.” The show needed Stuart.
And we liked him. We liked Ato. A lot.
We liked Ronnie too. We loved Ronnie, played by the sparkling Jess Chanliau. And we definitely didn’t want to lose the one nonbinary character in the show — a terrible trope we were loath to fuel. (We still feel bad about it, which, I’ve been assured, doesn’t help at all.) But the realization dawned that Ronnie might, as it were, take the bullet for Stuart. Losing Ronnie wouldn’t just be a blow to Kate and Hal; Stuart had never experienced the kind of loss that broke Kate and Hal. It would metastasize the show’s central conflict. Build a driveshaft for the second season, which was growing from a flickering hope to an alarming likelihood. In Season 2, we needed the franchise to be legible. Kate and Hal were the spine. Stuart was the franchise.
We filmed Winfield House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence in London, at a historic home outside London called Wrotham Park. Winfield abuts Regents Park, which is picturesque, has ducks and is clearly urban. Wrotham had rolling fields and a herd of sheep which we painstakingly removed from every exterior shot. I stood among them as I called Netflix and proclaimed I was not a baller. This was probably not news to them. Somehow it was to me.
That was years ago. We’re filming the end of Season Four now.
Stuart lives.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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