The Dark Stuff, Distilled
Joshua Bright for The New York Times
Joseph Weisberg is the creator of “The Americans,” a TV series on the FX network.
By LAURA M. HOLSON
Published: March 29, 2013
When Joseph Weisberg was training to be a case officer for the C.I.A.in the early 1990s, he soon learned that deception was a crucial skill, one that involved lying to his family on a regular basis.
“It was painful,” Mr. Weisberg recalled. “Fundamentally, lies were at the core of the relationships. I lied to all my friends and most of the people in my family. I lied every day. I told 20 lies a day and I got used to it. It was hard for about two weeks. Then it got easy. I watched it happen to all of us.”
So does he find it easy to tell lies now? “It’s had the opposite effect,” he said.
That experience, though, has been put to good use in the critically acclaimed FX show “The Americans,” of which Mr. Weisberg, 47, is the creator and head writer.
The show, which is shown on Wednesday nights, tells the story of two Russian spies, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, living undercover in suburban Virginia in the 1980s, at the height of the Reagan-era cold war. Their artful deceptions — a pretend marriage, made-up back stories, ever-changing identities, quick-shifting loyalties — are at the series’ core.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, in the writer’s room of a fifth-floor downtown Manhattan office that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, Mr. Weisberg recalled the episode in which Elizabeth, played with cool detachment by Keri Russell, pounded the face of her K.G.B. boss with her bare fists after her husband, Philip (Matthew Rhys), was accused of being a mole.
“Everyone watching went crazy,” Mr. Weisberg said. On Twitter, someone praised Ms. Russell’s ultra-aggressive demeanor. Mr. Weisberg shuddered with delight; the poster had picked up on the physical ferocity that Mr. Weisberg hoped appeared authentic in the show.
“I shouted, ‘K.G.B.! K.G.B.!’ ” he said, jumping to his feet, his two fists punching the air.
Mr. Weisberg nodded. “In the aggregate,” he said, “they are simply all the things in my brain.”
For those who suggest spy culture is a vestige of the past, Mr. Weisberg pointed out that, in 2010, federal prosecutors arrested 10 Russian agents living suburban lives (one couple grew hydrangeas in Montclair, N.J.), part of an espionage ring that, among other things, sought to recruit Americans.
“I feel close to all of them,” Mr. Weinberg said of the show’s main characters, including Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an F.B.I. agent who lives next door to the Jennings family and who seems alternately friendly and suspicious. “A lot of my life people told me I was stubborn and I know what that meant. But I wanted to be a positive, not a negative. I see that in Elizabeth. Philip has lightness and humor masking a lot of dark stuff, which is familiar to me. And I see Stan, who is confronted by so much stuff, having to make decisions, spiraling down.”
He paused. “I don’t feel like that now,” he said.
Mr. Weisberg came to New York in 1997 by way of Chicago, where he grew up in a liberal Jewish home. His father, Bernard, was a prominent civil rights lawyer, and his mother, Lois, a well-known social activist celebrated by the writer Malcolm Gladwell in a 1999 New Yorker article as a “connector” for her uncanny ability to navigate the city’s social strata.
In 1987, Mr. Weisberg graduated from Yale University, where he took classes in Russian history, having come of political age in an era when President Reagan railed against Soviet-style communism. Three years later, he joined the C.I.A. and moved to Washington, because, he said, “I wanted a job where I could be a cold warrior,” adding, “where you can be a brainy, dark weirdo and do all kinds of fascinating crazy stuff.”
The move startled his family and friends. “He was contrarian,” said his older brother, Jacob Weisberg, the chairman and editor in chief of the Slate Group. (Jacob Weisberg’s wife, Deborah Needleman, is the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.) “Growing up in a liberal family, joining the C.I.A., was the most transgressive thing you could do.”
Joshua Bright for The New York Times
Joseph Weisberg and Joel Fields go over a script for “The Americans.” Mr. Weisberg says of his characters, “I feel close to all of them.”
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In 1993, Joe Weisberg took a leave of absence before his first foreign assignment and moved back to Chicago to take care of his ailing father. Disillusioned by then with spy work, he decided not to return to the C.I.A. after his father died the following year. “Many of the foreign agents they recruited, I did not see a single one that I thought was providing valuable intelligence to the United States,” he said. “With case officers, it is their job to recruit. I was seeing that it doesn’t work.”
He wanted to write fiction, and supported himself by teaching after moving to New York City. He also wrote country songs that he implored friends to watch him perform in local bars.
He was married in 2005 to Julia Rothwax, who works in public relations; they have a daughter, and he has written two novels, including “An Ordinary Spy,” inspired by his work at the C.I.A.
“There is a mystery to Joe,” said Peter Jacobson, an actor and one of his closest friends, whom he met in 1974. “He is funny, nice and fun to be with, but there is an underside. He was able to hide that in the C.I.A.”
That underside proved lucrative in the creation of “The Americans,” which has been picked up for a second season, and a boon to the actors who receive lessons from Mr. Weisberg in countersurveillance. Mr. Rhys said Mr. Weisberg spent an afternoon explaining, among other things, how to hide behind buildings when trying to evade capture. They ventured onto the streets of Brooklyn, where Mr. Weisberg taught Mr. Rhys how to determine if he was being followed. One technique: cross a street, which allows a look around without suspicion. “You can look two or three times if you know how to do it well,” Mr. Rhys said.
And every now and then, when someone on the set questions a technical aspect of a spy’s actions, he said, Mr. Weisberg pulls an imaginary C.I.A. card out of his pocket. “In a moment, it reinforces his status,” Mr. Rhys said. (Too much verisimilitude could get Mr. Weisberg in trouble. Every script he writes must be submitted to the Publications Review Board at the C.I.A. before filming begins.)
And though deception may have proved personally difficult, Mr. Weisberg clearly relished some of the more colorful aspects of his C.I.A. gig. While in training, he said, he decided to disguise himself at lunch, slicking back his then medium-length hair, putting on glasses and a fake mustache. He sat down at a table with 12 people from his training class and did not say a word.
“At the end of 40 minutes, I said, ‘Hey, guys. It’s Joe,’ ” — which was news to them. “It’s very easy to disguise someone with a few minor changes,” he said.
Many of the show’s details ring true to those who lived through the Reagan era — particularly the episode in which the president is shot and Alexander M. Haig Jr., then secretary of state, is glimpsed briefly on a TV screen, asserting, “I am in control here.”
But as much as the show can be a history lesson in 1980s politics, “The Americans” is also about a marriage. In the writer’s room, Mr. Fields and Mr. Weisberg debated how to play a scene in which Elizabeth chides Philip about his driving during a getaway. “You can’t imagine how much of this comes from everyday life,” Mr. Weisberg said.
Mr. Weisberg contributed little when it came to costumes. The show is set in suburban Virginia in 1981, before shoulder pads and shiny fabrics were prevalent. Instead, its characters wear high-waisted jeans, blazers, knit shirts and corduroy jackets, the kind also memorably summoned for “Argo” and which are remembered fondly by some who came of age in that period.
Mr. Weisberg is among them. “I loved the clothes,” he said. “I loved the hair. I loved the Afros.” (Mr. Jacobson said Mr. Weisberg had an Afro in high school despite an already receding hairline.) Clea Lewis, an actress and friend whom he met in 1988, recalled his questionable taste in polyester. “I had to conduct raids on his closet,” she said, “and get rid of the synthetic shirts and replace them with cotton ones.”
“I remember a lot of negative things from the 1980s,” Mr. Weisberg said.
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