Wayne's Holly Taylor gets lots of attention for her role in 'The Americans' — not all of it nice

So now the spies next door, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, are grooming their daughter Paige to come into the family business.

You could hardly blame Holly Taylor, the 20-year-old actress who plays Paige in the FX series "The Americans" (10 p.m. Wednesdays) for wondering when she opens the front door in Wayne: Just who might be living next door to me?

"I try not to think about that," Taylor says. "But you never know."

In the five years since she began, at age 14, to work on "The Americans," she's continued a routine that would seem familiar to most young people. There's school: first Wayne Hills High School, where she graduated in 2016, now Kean University in Union, where she's in her sophomore year, majoring in graphic design.

There's hanging with friends: favorite spots include the Wayne Hills Diner ("one of my favorite places to eat") and the Outback Steakhouse on Berdan Ave. ("they have amazing bread, which I'm a big fan of"). There's family life: the regulation mom and dad — Margaret and Mark Taylor — and an older brother, Philip. The proverbial 2.5 kids.

All very normal, very routine. But isn't that cloak of normality just what the KGB spies in "The Americans" hide behind?

"The show does make you think," Taylor says. "Especially since this was kind of derived from a true story. What town were they found in in New Jersey? That actually wasn't too far from here."

Richard and Cynthia Murphy, alias Vladimir and Lidiya Guryev, were the spy couple in Montclair whose 2010 arrest by Feds helped inspire the acclaimed series by Joe Weisberg, set in the 1980s, and now in its sixth and final season. During that five-year run, Paige has become an increasingly prominent character, as she's grappled with adolescence, love, religion, and a dawning awareness of her parents' unsavory doings.

"When I first started the show, I had no idea what it would become, and what my character herself would become," Taylor says. "I didn't really know that my character would become anything at all. That was a really pleasant surprise."

Then too, during the run, the show's premise has acquired a new, urgent topicality — as Russian espionage has gone from a dim Cold War memory to front page news.

"It has been a surprise to all of us that it turned out that way," Taylor says. "They didn't know, when they made the show, that this was going to become super-relevant in a couple of years, and people were going to love it for that. It was all by chance."

One of the real surprises — not entirely a pleasant one — is how fans of "The Americans" have reacted to her character's development.

"I [expletive] hate Paige, she's such a crying baby, a stupid little [expletive] who can't shut her filthy mouth. I want her to die, badly, I really do feel hatred towards her and hope she suffers psysically [sic] in the near future," someone wrote on the character's Wiki page.

Some fans, of course, love Paige. But the ones who don't are often that nasty — or nastier. Moreover, they have a habit of conflating the character with the actress who plays her.

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"I don't know if it's because she's a teenager and people just get annoyed with teenagers no matter what they do," Taylor says. "Some people just harbor anger toward her that they can't seem to shake off, and they also think that I'm the character in real life, so when they see me, they're like, 'I hate your character.' And I'm like, 'Well, I'm not her right now, I'm Holly. I'm not the same person. But I'm glad you're invested in the show so much that you can't separate the two.' "

In particular, the moments in the show when Paige has expressed inner conflict about her family's treasonous activity, or gummed up the works for parents Elizabeth and Philip (Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys), have annoyed some fans excessively.

"One person came up to me and said they hate me to my face in L.A.," Taylor says. "I was like, 'Listen Buddy, I'm an American, you're an American, and you're telling me to leave my parents alone to get on with their job. And that's kind of wrong, isn't it? 'Cause they're killing American people.' And he was like, 'Yeah, well, whatever, I still hate you.' And I was like, 'OK, good argument.' "

In a way, Taylor says, it's a backhanded compliment to the skill of the writers.

"The Americans" team have done their job so skillfully, she says, they've caused audiences to root for the bad guys. Alfred Hitchcock used to talk about the moment in "Psycho" when serial killer Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) stuffs a body in a car, and then tries to sink the car in a swamp. The moment when the car hesitates, before going down, makes the audience gasp. "The public is thinking, 'I hope it goes all the way down!' " Hitchcock recalled. "It's a natural instinct."

Paige, for viewers, is that swamp — the obstacle that could keep the villains from getting away with their dirtywork. For "Americans" fans, Taylor says, Paige has come to occupy the place in the series that Skyler White did in the not dissimilar "Breaking Bad." Fans hated Skyler, too.

"So many people were annoyed by Skyler White, and she was just trying to get her husband to stop doing something illegal that would potentially kill him and his family," Taylor says. "And people are like, 'Oh my God, she needs to shut up already and let him get on with it.' No, she doesn't! She's actually doing the moral thing in the show. It's just that the writing is so amazing that they've made you now root for the bad character."

The richness of the Paige character, emerging over five-plus seasons, is a benefit of the new "long form" television template, that has allowed for in-depth character exploration over many years. And Taylor was only allowed to explore those nuances, she says, because of the very accommodating Wayne school system.

Originally from Nova Scotia (the family moved to Wayne when Taylor was three), Taylor is a show business veteran. When she was 11, she appeared on Broadway in the original production of "Billy Elliot." She's also appeared in TV commercials and movies. Her next film, "The Witch Files," is due out sometime this year.

But "The Americans," set in Washington D.C. but shot in Westchester and Brooklyn, required enormous forbearance from Wayne Hills High School. "The Americans" shot October to March, all through her high school years. She was often required to be absent anything from one to five days a week.

"I thank the public schools for letting me work," she says. "I know other towns might not have been so cooperative. The teachers really worked with me, and I'm forever thankful for that."

This season will ring down the curtain on Paige, and on the whole Jennings family. A bittersweet moment after five years, Taylor says.

"My parents are very proud, and very happy for me, and they love the show," she says. "But now that it's over and I'm 20 years old, it's kind of weird for all of us to look back on it and be like, 'Oh, your puberty years are immortalized forever on 'The Americans.' "

As for viewers, now in the home stretch of a six-season story arc, what should they be looking for as the show builds toward its climax?

Taylor can't reveal any trade secrets. Just keep watching, she says.

" 'The Americans' for the past few years has been so good at making every single character have an in-depth story line, so you have to kind of watch every single one of them," Taylor says. "Somehow, some of them are going to tie together. So you have to keep an eye on everyone. Just like a spy would do."