RHYS ON THE CASE
Matthew Rhys turns small-screen legal eagle Perry Mason on his head in an HBO origin story, writes Michele Manelis
FOR those not old enough to remember the 1950s ‘whodunnit’ legal drama Perry Mason – starring Raymund Burr in the titular role – it set the benchmark for the slate of courtroom and crime thrillers which populate TV programming today, the world over.
But as HBO does, its latest iteration takes the beloved classic and turns it on its head, saddling our new ‘ hero’ with more baggage than Louis Vuitton.
Dark and gritty, this is not the Perry Mason of yore.
While Welsh-born Matthew Rhys brings some sleuthing experience to the starring role, after six seasons of the award-winning spy series
The Americans, he admits the prequel approach was new ground he was eager to tread.
“When my agent called and said, ‘ They’re going to remake
Perry Mason,’ I immediately remembered, ‘Oh yeah. That huge show where someone inevitably confesses on the stand.’ It was enormous in
Britain. It was the show that your grandparents were always watching,” Rhys says.
“That was my relationship with it. But when they said,
‘HBO are making it,’ I knew it wouldn’t be my grandparents’
Perry Mason,” he chuckles.
“And after the pitch, explaining to me that they wanted to do the origin story [based on the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner] before he becomes a defence attorney … an entirely new Perry Mason reimagined from the boots up … I was in, 100 per cent.”
The new series is set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, during which time Mason was a struggling private investigator living hand-to-mouth, pained by a broken marriage and haunted by his experiences as a soldier in World War I in France.
It also stars John Lithgow as attorney Elias Birchard and includes an impressive ensemble, including Tatiana Maslany
(Orphan Black), Juliet Rylance (The Knick), and Chris Chalk (Gotham). Rhys takes on producing credits, along with Robert Downey Jr, who was forced to give up the role when it was fi rst planned for the big screen.
“Originally it was meant to be a movie starring Robert, but fortunately for me he had scheduling issues, so they decided to make it a TV show.”
He smiles: “So, I got to steal it under the table – well, not steal – but gratefully take the off- cuts that he wasn’t going to eat anyway.”
There were many aspects of the series Rhys found attractive.
“I’m a huge fan of that time period. I loved Sunday matinees starring Jimmy Cagney wearing fedoras.”
As for his look, he says: “Well, it’s supposed to be very lived-in, very real, especially given that some of the clothes he wears are stolen from dead bodies, so they’re not supposed to fit perfectly.”
Rhys is speaking from lockdown at home with his actor wife Keri Russell (his co- star in The Americans) and their children. He began dating Russell in 2014 and they have a four-year- old son, Sam.
Russell has two children from a previous marriage: a son, River, 13, and a daughter, Willa, eight.
“Home schooling has been an eye- opener and a defi nite exercise in patience,” he laughs.
Meanwhile, now that he’s played a spy in The Americans and a private detective in Perry
Mason, has he developed an aptitude for either profession?
“I don’t think I’m suited to either of those jobs,” he says. “When I signed on to The
Americans, I worked with a CIA agent and we’d do countersurveillance work on the street. I thought spy work would be easy for me, because it’s all about acting, but he’d say to me, ‘ You’re terrible!’ And now with Perry Mason, sometimes I’ll read the script and I’ll ask the writers, ‘I don’t understand how he figures this out without having a single clue’. They’ll say, ‘ Well, it’s because of this and that’. And I’ll say, ‘Oh, of course’.”
In reality, he says: “I think, ‘Oh, thank God I’m not a private detective’. I think it’s a good thing for everyone that I just get to pretend to play these people.”