For some of us, it’s a rude awakening to realize Felicity is old enough to be someone’s mom. Fortunately, actress Keri Russell — who played that character in the late-’90s J.J. Abrams show of the same name — picks interesting mothers to play.
In her new movie, “Dark Skies,” out now, she and her suburban family are preyed upon by increasingly menacing aliens. And in the ’80s-set FX show “The Americans,” she’s a KGB spy masquerading as the perfect American wife and mom.
Both are a far cry from the heart-on-her-sleeve young woman who followed her crush to college in “Felicity,” which made Russell a star. And that’s sort of the point.
“I think that’s one of the assets of being a person who needs to take breaks,” Russell, now 36, tells The Post. “I’m not someone who likes to work straight through. I like to do something and then go on with my life. I was taking a break, having kids and living my life. And it’s nice — people kind of forget about you, and you’re able to come back and, hopefully, be fresh.”
Russell, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, carpenter Shane Deary, and their two young kids, Willa and River, is back in the public eye in a way she hasn’t been since the “Felicity” heyday. But the actress has done it on her terms, signing on for a show that conveniently shoots in her home borough, at the Eastern Effects Studios in Gowanus.
She’s just as eager to rave about her personal life in Brooklyn as her current professional projects. “I really love my community right now,” she says. “All my friends live here — no one lives in the city anymore. And all the restaurants, and the cool places opening — that new park down by the water is so nice. It’s out of control, it’s so good right now!”
Russell says that unlike the Amy Sohn stereotype of maniacal Park Slope moms, the crowd in her Boerum Hill neighborhood is fun and laid-back.
“My friends who are parents are super cool,” says the actress, who’s been in Brooklyn for about six years. “The parents tend to have interesting, creative jobs, and then it spills over into parenting. Like my next-door neighbor is this amazing photographer, and he’ll be doing something in the house and have all the kids line up and take all these amazing artsy shots, and then he sends them to all the parents.”
Russell’s husband is equally crafty with kid stuff. “He builds them homemade hockey sticks,” she says. All this domestic bliss couldn’t be more at odds with the home life of her character on “The Americans.”
“I love how complicated she is,” Russell says. “It’s set in a spy world, and in this political time, but it’s this bizarre complicated marriage. I love that it was an arranged marriage and now, maybe for the first time, they’re first realizing how they feel about each other. But they have such different core beliefs. My character is so icy emotionally.
Fortunately, she says, the conceit of the show — that the sleeper agents never speak a word of Russian — is such that she didn’t have to take a crash course in the language. “It’s f - - king hard!” she says. “It’s not something you learn in two weeks.”
Meanwhile, “Dark Skies” sees Russell besieged with all manner of unsettling disturbances in her home: Once she wakes up in the middle of the night to find all the food arranged into an elaborate sculpture; another time she finds that her young son is missing his eyes.
“It’s definitely a departure for me,” says the actress, who describes herself as “a bit of a scaredy-cat” when it comes to horror flicks. “I like scary movies like ‘The Others’ or ‘Pan’s Labyrinth.’ ”
“But,” she says, “[director] Scott Stewart really sold the idea in this movie of a family first. Kind of in the way ‘Poltergeist’ did.”
Next up, Russell will appear in the romantic comedy “Austenland,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and which she describes as “wildly different” than the last two projects. “It’s such a fun, poppy little lark of a movie,” she says. “It’s about these Jane Austen-obsessed lonely girls, and the lengths to which they go.”
Looking back on the “Felicity” days, Russell says having an early hit with a show that meaningful to so many people has made her subsequent career more challenging: “It was such a great place, and I was with [creators J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves] for so many years,” she says. “Going on to other things, I would read scripts and be like, ‘Why isn’t it good?’ I was really spoiled!”
sstewart@nypost.com