Jane Got A Gun, For two decades, Noah Emmerich toiled in dozens of “that guy” movie roles, wondering what it would be like to have his turn in the spotlight. After finally breaking out this year as Stan Beeman, the muted, tortured FBI agent slowly losing his bearings on FX’s crackling spy drama The Americans, the actor finally has his answer: it’s a lot like sleeping with Jack Nicholson.
“The thing that pops into my head is the Shirley MacLaine quote from Terms of Endearment,” said Emmerich. “She hasn’t had sex in awhile and then she has sex with Jack Nicholson and she’s like, ‘That was fan-fucking-tastic!’ And it is. It’s fan-fucking-tastic!
It’s also a term that many fans of the FX freshman drama, which airs its season finale tonight, would use to describe Emmerich’s understated, mesmerizing performance as Stan, an FBI agent readjusting to the real world but still haunted by his multiyear deep-undercover assignment with a white supremacist group. As he doggedly searches for KGB spies on American soil—not realizing they are literally hiding in plain sight on his suburban block as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys)—Stan has already lost his FBI partner and is coming close to losing his marriage.
“Stan was initially conceived as a somewhat lighter character,” Joe Weisberg, the creator of The Americans, told The Daily Beast. “As the story developed, he became more complex and richer. And then Noah started doing the incredible things that really only Noah can do.”
Stan is the first series regular role for Emmerich, 48, who has spent 20 years turning out solid supporting performances in films like Beautiful Girls, The Truman Show, and Little Children, usually playing a cop, best friend, or both. “He’s one of those people that, when you realize who he is, you go, ‘Oh yeah, I love that guy!’” said Scandal actor Joshua Malina, Emmerich’s former Yale roommate and close friend of 25 years. “But I knew there would eventually be that role where you go, ‘Holy shit, this guy is a great actor.’”
Which is partly why Emmerich had shifted his focus toward TV in recent years. “I kept coming back to television as being a place where bold, interesting work was being done, more I think than in the cinema which has become such a crowded, noisy, expensive marketplace,” he said. “At the same time, I found myself sitting on the bench quite a lot, waiting for the right role, and I got tired of the intermittent-ness of it. I wanted some sort of continuity and a home base.”
He’s found both in The Americans. Emmerich, however, initially bristled at playing a part that violated his one edict for any potential long-term TV role. “Going in, I thought, I don’t want be a character who carries a badge or a gun,” he said. “I felt that I had done it enough in my career and if a badge and gun were involved, it would end up being a procedural show, which holds little interest for me as an actor.” So when he read that Stan was an FBI agent, “I dismissed it, prejudicially.”
Emmerich shared his reservations with longtime friend Gavin O’Connor, who had directed him in films like 2004’s Miracle and 2011’s Warrior and who was also helming the Americans pilot. “He said, ‘I think you should give it a second look. It’s a more interesting character than that,’” Emmerich said. “So I went back and read it again, this time trying to put aside my prejudice, and I realized that he was right.”
As the season progressed, Stan’s journey became ever murkier: he began an affair with his Russian informant Nina (Annet Mahendru), as his marriage—already on tenuous ground after the years he spent undercover—nearly unraveled. The season’s ninth episode, “Safe House,” brought Stan to the foreground for the first time and propelled him down his darkest path yet. Convinced that the KGB was behind the kidnapping and murder of his partner, Chris Amador—in reality, Chris had been killed only because he nearly disrupted Philip’s long con on an FBI secretary Chris was infatuated with—Stan ruthlessly executes Vlad (Vitaly Benko), a junior KGB officer that the FBI had nabbed in retaliation.
9 years ago
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