You’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately. Aren’t you tired?

At least this one is done from home with smeared mascara from last night and sweaty, with no shower. We have a newborn, so we took the summer off and decided to let the craziness of no sleep happen amongst nature.

Is there any Emmy competition between the two of you? What if one wins and the other doesn’t?

Yeah. We’re breaking up. Absolutely. [Laughs] No, no, this year I feel like the win was the nomination. If anything, I was just hoping for [the showrunners] Joe [Weisberg] and Joel [Fields] that the writing would be nominated because the critics seem to be most in love with that. And it was.

You’ve spoken about how cool it was that “The Americans” stayed under the radar. But these nominations make you officially mainstream, don’t they?

God, ugh, it’s true. We’re in this sweet spot where we have this great job on this creative cable show. We’re not oversaturated in the market. We celebrated for about two minutes after the nominations, then we talked to Joe and Joel on the phone, and we all went: “Argh, this is awful. Now no one’s going to write anything good about our show. Now people aren’t going to like us.” All of us have such a healthy dose of pessimism and underdoggedness that we were very happy in that place.

It was a great season for Elizabeth, whom you’ve described as hard core in a way you love. Why?

I relish this character because as a woman, I get to not be always the sensitive one in the scene, the one who fixes the family, the one who is pining in the relationship — although one might argue that in this season I did a little bit more of that. I don’t think people realize that still for women, those are a lot of the roles. Even in great movies there are, like, two good scenes for a girl, and you’re the doting wife or the understanding girlfriend. Elizabeth demands respect. She doesn’t care if it’s wrong or what the neighbors are thinking. She’s a little bit of my fantasy, absolutely.