Rhys lightning
Matthew Rhys is living a fairy tale life that kicked off with a kickball party 17 years ago.
WHILE he doesn’t believe in fairy tales, Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is living one. Not only did he just end his stint in six successful seasons in The Americans, his co-star, Keri Russell, turned out to be the love of his life.
“I met Keri when I was 26 in a park with (fellow actor) Ioan (Gruffudd) actually many years ago,” he says.
He and Gruffudd (another Welshman) were in Los Angeles auditioning for a pilot season. “We were sharing a motel room on Beverly and we had a friend, Jennifer Gray, the actress. She said, ‘We’re having a kickball party.’
“It was in Rustic Canyon, and I met Keri in the parking lot. The kickball barbecue was finishing, and she asked if I could open a beer. She didn’t have an opener.
“I tried to do it with a key and it didn’t work. And then years later I did several auditions for The Americans. And the first day we had fight-training, and during lunch, I said, ‘You know, we’ve met before. We met at a kickball party in Rustic Canyon.’ She went, ‘Ahh, you were the British guy.’
“I said, ‘Welsh.’ So I think that kickball party in Rustic Canyon was a life changer for me because it all kind of stemmed from there.”
What stemmed from there was Rhys’s determination to continue acting, though it didn’t start out so smoothly.
“I first came to LA doing a play with Paul Bettany in the West End, and an American agent came to see him. And I signed with him (the agent).
“I was going to New Zealand to do a job and he said, ‘On the way back, come to LA and do a pilot season.’
“I had no idea what that meant, so I came and got this film with Julie Taymor,” he recalls.
“It was Julie Taymor’s first film (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange).
“And I thought, ‘Oh, LA is the land of milk and honey. You just turn up and get a huge movie! Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?’
“Obviously I didn’t work for the next 10 years,” he laughs.
The son of a school principal and a music teacher for the blind, Rhys had made a pact with his folks when he graduated from high school.
“My parents said, ‘Look, we’ll make a deal. Apply to five universities and two drama schools. If you get into one of the two drama schools, you can go.’
“So I applied to Rada (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) and to the Bristol Vic, where Daniel DayLewis went.”
He was accepted by three of the universities and by Rada.
“I went, ‘Oh, I’m going to go (to drama school)!’
“It was a real turning point where this kind of slightly ethereal thought became a reality, ‘Oh, I’m going to become an actor. I’m going to be defined by my vocation’.”
He worked as a kitchen porter while he was a struggling actor.
“The flip side of me telling my father that I wanted to be an actor was him telling me how to save money,” he smiles.
“And it has been a value lesson that has stayed with me from that day forth.
“He said, ‘The simple rule is, if it’s not in your pocket, don’t spend it.’ He just said, ‘Save, save, save. And when you think you have enough, save some more.’ I stuck by that.”
Still, to this day, Rhys wonders if he made the right decision.
“Weekly (I) feel I made the wrong choice,” he smiles.
“Don’t get me wrong, it feels like I’m browbeating on the profession. But this has afforded me a life that I never thought was possible of such luxury.
And I don’t mean material things, (the luxury) of true experience, and that’s a great luxury to meet the people you meet,” he says.
Even so, he pauses, “Sometimes I feel – I don’t know if emasculated is the word – when you find yourself in some outlandish costume in a group of people and making a performing monkey of yourself, and you go, ‘What am I doing?’ I could justify it in my 20s, even in my 30s, but now I have a son. And I find these moments when truly pretending to be somebody else, I go, ‘Oh, my God!’”
He and Russell’s son, Sam, is two years old. Russell has two other children by a previous marriage.
Rhys thinks the birth of Sam changed him. “My regard for women ... they’re clearly a superior race. I’ve never seen an exercise in grit more intense than the birth of my son.
“She’s incredible,” he sighs. – Tribune News Service