Academy Award® nominee and three-time Tony Award® winner Frank Langella will return next season to FX’s critically acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning drama The Americans.
Langella will reprise his role as “Gabriel,” Philip and Elizabeth’s mysterious KGB handler. Gabriel and Elizabeth share a nurturing relationship, while he and Philip continue to butt heads.
“Frank brings such instant depth and complexity to the part,” says Executive Producer Joel Fields. “You know that Gabriel loves Philip and Elizabeth. But you can also feel, on a visceral level, what he’s been through as a Soviet. And if he needs them to do what they don’t want to do, he’s going to use everything in his power to make sure they do it.”
“What we were looking for when we first conceived of the part,” adds Creator and Executive Producer Joe Weisberg, “was an actor who could really seemed paternal, in all that that word means: loving, nurturing, but also intimidating and demanding when it was required. Frank just gives you the sense of history: the history of a man who’s been through a lot, but also that particularly sad, deep, yearning history of Russia that frankly, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky make one feel. It’s just awesome to be able to write for him.”
Langella, who is repped by Paradigm, starts shooting his latest film, Youth in Oregon, in June and has three upcoming feature films set for release in 2015: the romance 5 to 7 opposite Anton Yelchin and Glenn Close, Driftless Area with Zooey Deschanel, and Captain Fantastic opposite Viggo Mortensen.
Set in the early 1980s, just after Ronald Reagan is elected president, The Americans, starring Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys and Noah Emmerich, is a drama series about the complex marriage of two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington D.C. The series was created by and is executive produced by Joe Weisberg (Falling Skies), a former CIA agent who went on to become an accomplished author. Joel Fields, Graham Yost and Daniel Sackheim are also executive producers, along with Amblin Television heads Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. The Americans is produced by Fox 21 Television Studios and FX Productions.
The Americans recently concluded its third season and has been renewed for a fourth.