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Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Diplomat season 3.
If Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell are going to do anything right on The Diplomat, it’s fight.
Season 3 of the critically acclaimed Netflix series keeps the characters’ spiky dynamic alive, with Russell’s Kate Wyler and Sewell’s Hal Wyler reaching their most dramatic impasse yet as they decide to be publicly married but privately separated — at least for most of the season.
Playing their roller coaster is “so fun,” Russell, 49, tells PEOPLE. “I mean, I just think the writing of that relationship is so great. It’s such a fun relationship to play because it’s so many things.”
“I mean, it’s such a strange thing that they can drive each other so crazy, but be so good for each other too,” she says of how Kate and Hal manage to be the best-suited people for each other despite all their shouting.
“The start of the season is just, I mean, it’s amazing,” Russell continues. “It’s amazing what happens at the end of that first episode, and I think it just goes from there.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Kate and Hal face challenges in every sense of the word this season, as newly minted President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) decides she wants Hal as her VP instead of Kate, introducing a whole new source of marital strife.
“It’s really interesting — no matter what form their relationship takes, they’re still so connected,” Russell says of the onscreen pair. “I don’t know, there’s just some people in life that you have that with, and they are that couple.”
Ahead of season 2’s premiere last year, Sewell, 57, told PEOPLE that Kate and Hal are “fantastic together and a pain in the ass together and it’s all part of the same thing.”
“They know each other well. They know what they love and they hate about each other, and sometimes [what] they love are the things they hate about each other, and they hate the things they love about each other,” he explained. “It may be a marriage on its way out, but sometimes a marriage that seems like it may be on its way out is just in the middle of a change.”
Clifton Prescod/Netflix
He also shared that Debora Cahn, who created the series, wanted to show, through the couple’s story, that “the seeds of divorce and hatred and lust and hating the way that your partner breathes is very much part of a lot of long-term relationships.”
“I’ve heard her say very recently, that the people whose relationships ultimately didn’t make it, it wasn’t because someone f—– someone else. It was because they didn’t like the way the other person inhaled.”
Per the official synopsis, in season 3, Russell’s Kate “steps into a role she never wanted, with a freedom she never expected, an increasingly complicated friendship with Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), and an unnerving bond with First Gentleman Todd Penn (Bradley Whitford).”
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The Diplomat season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.
