Keri Russell is as preposterously all-American as she looks. Raised out West, the ex-Mouseketeer and Golden Globe-winning sweetheart of J. J. Abrams’s early-aughts, cult-favorite soap, Felicity, is today a mom who reads food blogs and makes sea-salt caramels for her kids. It’s precisely that freshness that gives edge to her Nadezhda, cover name Elizabeth Jennings—a ruthless and hard-boiled K.G.B. double agent on FX’s The Americans, set in Reagan-era D.C. (It is the brainchild of former C.I.A. officer Joe Weisberg, brother of *Slate’*s Jacob.) Earning two Emmy nominations after its first season—the second debuts next month—the drama drew raves for its complex portrait of a sham marriage, posing the eternal question: When two agents are “spouses,” can they remain emotionally unentangled? Offscreen, Russell is a sunny, self-effacing goof who finds the role thrilling, even as her six-year-old remains dubious about Mom’s foe-vanquishing abilities. Herewith, the details of her day, in her own words.

LOVE FOR her two children is nearly surpassed by an adoration for her bicycle. It’s an original black Gazelle, one shipped by tanker from the Netherlands after she fell in love with a Dutch neighbor’s model “four or five years ago.” She loves its pert upright seat, putty-colored tires, and snaking chrome handlebars with both bell and headlight, but she’s in thrall mostly to its heft. She can often be seen peddling around Brooklyn, carrying her six-year-old son, River, or several canvas bags of produce.

“THE WORST,” in her view, is that she now has to quash her famous waves beneath a bike helmet, a precaution ignored until “I did, uh, sort of get hit by a car the other day.” It robs her of one of her most favorite feelings: “the wind in your hair!”

SHE MAKES a mean roast chicken.

SHE LOVES second-day eyeliner, slept on and smudged, for the implied rebellion, “showing up to school like the mom who’s been out too late.”

SHE IS a Brooklynite “for now,” but—raised in Texas, Arizona, and Colorado—she thinks wistfully about “big sky.” She misses the feeling of “driving toward open horizon.”

SHE ALWAYS, always takes the stairs.

SHE IS a coffee snob (cappuccinos from Van Leeuwen on Bergen Street) and a beer snob: if you can’t get her the California-brewed I.P.A. Racer 5, she’ll settle for Sierra Nevada.