In the penultimate episode of the documentary series “I Am the Ambassador,” Rufus Gifford visits a Danish high school and is greeted eagerly by beaming students snapping pictures on their phones as if a celebrity had just walked through the door.
Gifford was in the second year of his tenure as U.S. ambassador at the time, and he was something of an icon in Denmark in large part because of the television show. Its 10 half-hour episodes following his work and his life proved so popular that Gifford won a Danish television award and attention all over the country.
Now, almost three years after the show aired its final episode in Denmark — and two years after Netflix began streaming the program, greatly expanding its global reach — Gifford is in the midst of his next major effort: running for the 3rd Congressional District.
The show puts Gifford in an unusual position for a candidate. Being a public figure is a common prerequisite to most campaigns for higher office. But having a 10-part taped record of Gifford’s work overseas, one that candidly captured successes and missteps and personal struggles, is another thing entirely.
Gifford rarely mentions the documentary on the 3rd District trail when discussing his time as an ambassador. In an interview, though, he said he is happy the show is out there and even hopes voters will watch it because, for better and for worse, Gifford believes the show reveals who he is.
“I had no clue I would be running for office when I did this,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is everything about the show is consistent with what I talk about now.”
After the 2012 presidential election, in which he raised more than $1 billion as Barack Obama’s finance director, Gifford was nominated as the ambassador to Denmark. He accepted, and after being confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he arrived in Denmark on Aug. 30, 2013.
As Gifford recalls it now, someone with the Danish broadcasting company DR — the rough equivalent in Denmark of the BBC in England — had seen his short introduction video produced by the State Department. Intrigued, one of the company’s producers approached the embassy with an idea to create a documentary television series about Gifford.
Gifford’s team agreed, thinking that perhaps a few thousand people would see the show on a small channel in a small country. He hoped it would allow him to connect with Danes and encourage a new, personal-connection brand of diplomacy.
Gifford had no part in the show’s creation and received no payments or royalties from it.
The series, filmed over 2014 and 2015, proved to be a sensation. It drew huge viewership, and Gifford won a Danish television award for, roughly translated, “Big Character of the Year.”
Episodes are loosely structured, but all 10 follow Gifford closely. The embassy did not give the crew access to every event, but filmmakers often spent entire days with the ambassador. He meets with various Danish officials, from the defense minister to a prominent member of an anti-immigrant party to climate-change researchers.
The series depicts more than meetings with officials, though. Gifford was filmed holding a Halloween celebration at the ambassador’s residence, singing showtunes at a high school and hosting a town-hall forum, where he faced unsparing questions about American intelligence surveillance and collateral damage from drone strikes.
“What diplomats do a terrible job of is getting out from their bubble,” Gifford said in a recent interview. “They talk to the diplomatic community, they talk to other ambassadors, they talk to the politicians, all of which is part of the job and that’s fine. But for us to really elevate this work, you need to talk to the public. If you’re going to win hearts and minds, if you’re going to try to build this great connection, you’ve got to get to them.”
Gifford appears comfortable on camera. He interacts charismatically with others and speaks to the documentary crew openly. Many scenes feature him alone, in the car traveling to an event or eating cereal in his pajamas in the morning, answering questions about himself and the goal of his work.
While in Denmark, many scenes feature Gifford answering questions about U.S. foreign policy with both praise and criticism for his home.
“There’s so many things that politically went wrong in the few years after 9/11,” he told filmmakers after attending a Copenhagen memorial on the topic. “But the way the world came together after 9/11 was remarkable. In times like this, when Europe is being impacted in so many different ways from so many different factors, you just really remind people that now is the time to come together.”
He speaks extensively about coming out as gay — how his parents were at first “shocked” but then worked to become understanding and supportive — and about the complex road toward LGBT equality in the United States. In both 2014 and 2015, the filmmakers followed Gifford and his partner, Stephen DeVincent, marching in Copenhagen’s Pride parade.
Some unflattering moments
Gifford’s candor on camera cuts both ways, though, and some portions of the show may not strike the right tone for a congressional campaign. Visiting his family’s home in Manchester-by-the-Sea in one episode, Gifford jokes that he would probably know more people in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., than he would in Boston, having left the area shortly after college.
(Asked this week about the remark, Gifford said he did indeed leave New England for much of his adult life but still considers himself “a Massachusetts boy.” He moved to Concord shortly before launching his campaign.)
Later in that episode, he briefly forgets to remove his hat during the national anthem at a New England Patriots game until his father, the banking giant Charles Gifford, can be heard on camera reminding him to do so.
In 2015, Gifford hosted a viewing of the television series “Homeland” at his official residence in Denmark, something he had done before to promote cultural exchange. But for that event, he wanted to “push the envelope,” so he agreed to add a stunt performance to the occasion. A helicopter flew overhead during the outdoor screening, and flashes and blank rounds fired inside the residence. Gifford and others dressed in tactical police gear fitting the look of the spy-thriller show.
But, as the documentary’s eighth episode depicts, the event did not unfold as planned. Downdraft from the helicopter knocked over the screen on the lawn, which apparently had not been secured properly, and caused one person to sustain minor injuries. Gifford decided to change back into normal clothes, noting to the camera that the armed-troop costumes might have been inappropriate and “freaked out” attendees, before apologizing to the crowd.
Reflecting on the incident this week, Gifford said his decision was “a mistake 100 percent” but that the intentions were good.
“Sometimes you take risks and you fail,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you stop taking risks. And this was a stupid decision, I would be the first to say it, but doesn’t that tell a larger story, in my mind: don’t be afraid of your failures. Show them.”
The underlying, perhaps unexpected, foundation of the show is Gifford’s relationship with DeVincent. They open up not just about how they met, but about losses in their family and the challenges of romance in a high-pressure job.
For much of the series, DeVincent splits his time between Denmark and the United States for work. Gifford is frank on-camera about the emotional strain of the distance and of his struggles to put “real life before the job.”
Almost the entirety of the final episode, as a resolution to that de facto arc, follows Gifford and DeVincent’s wedding. They married at Copenhagen City Hall, in a ceremony officiated by the mayor, partly in recognition of Denmark’s history as the first nation in the world to recognize same-sex partnerships.
“If it wasn’t for you, we may never have seen the Supreme Court rule the way it did and we may not have seen the White House lit up in rainbow colors as a show of support for our community worldwide,” Gifford told the crowd at Copenhagen Pride that year.
Something else stands out from Gifford’s time on the show, a thread especially relevant to his current campaign: how relieved he was, at that point in his life, to be outside the world of electoral politics.
The series’ opening credits feature Gifford describing his ambassadorship as the “best job in the world.” In one episode, after meeting Mitt Romney at an event in Denmark, Gifford tells DeVincent how “liberating” it felt not to be back in the American political machine. When he visits Washington, D.C., in another episode, Gifford describes turning down a job in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for his “own personal well-being.”
“I can’t do that to myself again,” he told the filmmaker. “I don’t want to have that lifestyle any more.”
Now, of course, Gifford is back in that world, actively campaigning every day to win an election in the partisan political system he wanted no part of just a few years ago. So what changed?
When a reporter asked the question, Gifford paused for a moment before replying, “Donald Trump.”
He added, “There’s too much at stake right now. I woke up on Nov. 9, 2016 and it just felt that the values that I associated with, that the United States of America had fundamentally shifted. It was incumbent on all of us, every single person in the country, to step up our level of service. For me, that meant coming home and running.”
For more on “I Am the Ambassador,” go to www.netflix.com/title/80101901.
Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisLisinski.
