KERI RUSSELL Is STILL the GIRL NEXT DOOR

NEARLY 30 YEARS AFTER SHE BROKE OUT ON FELICITY, THE STAR OF THE DIPLOMAT REMAINS REFRESHINGLY RELATABLE

- JULIA MOORE,ELISE THOMSON-HOHL

On the rare occasion Keri Russell has a day off, she’s most likely up early before her three kids are awake. She makes a coffee, listens to the news and might even hop on her bike to ride around Brooklyn, which she and her partner of more than a decade, actor Matthew Rhys, call home. On the most ideal, hypothetical version of that day off, “no one’s fighting, everyone has everything they need,” Russell says. “Just easy stuff.”

Russell says she and Rufus Sewell "drive each other so crazy" as husband and wife on The Diplomat.

If that doesn’t sound like the life of a typical Hollywood star, that’s by design. Russell, 49—who shares son River, 18, and daughter Willa, 12, with her ex-husband Shane Deary, and son Sam, 9, with Rhys, 50—would rather stay home than uproot her family to a set in the U.K., where the first two seasons of her political drama The Diplomat were filmed. For season 3 (now streaming on Netflix), part of the production was moved to New York—and Russell could even ride her bike to the set. “We’ll still go to London, but for a much briefer time,” she says, noting that she “loved” the summers she spent there with her kids—especially since it meant Rhys, who grew up in Wales, “got to go home a lot.”