Flawed version of an iconic detective
Matthew Rhys plays a more complex Perry Mason, who is drawn into a sensational child-kidnapping case as he battles ghosts from his past.
PERRY Mason was the wily criminal defence lawyer played by Raymond Burr in the 1957 to 1966 television series of the same name where, every week, he proved his client innocent by finding the real culprit and extracting a dramatic confession.
The character is so iconic, it seemed questionable to try and remake the show and this is why actor Matthew Rhys – the Emmywinning star of spy drama The Americans (2013 to 2018) – hesitated when offered the role in the new reboot.
“Before I read the script, I initially thought that if you’re just going to remake a version of what Raymond Burr did, then I wasn’t interested,” the 45-year-old Welsh performer tells reporters on a video call from his New York home recently.
“And I thought I knew who the character was: this kind of virtuous, justice-at-all-costs martyr that gets everyone to confess on the stand.
So I had reservations about who was the Perry Mason that they were going to present.”
“They”, however, turned out to be two rather persuasive people: Robert Downey Jr and his wife Susan Downey, who were producing the series after having originally intended the part for the Iron Man star.
Their pitch to Rhys was that this version would not simply be the hardboiled, Sphinx-like persona associated with Burr, but a darker, more complex character study and origin story instead.
Here, Mason is not even a lawyer yet but a washed-up private detective living from pay cheque to pay cheque.
Drawing from the original source material – the 1933 to 1973 short stories and novels by Erle Stanley Gardner – the HBO series is set in 1930s Los Angeles during the Great Depression and sees Mason drawn into a sensational child-kidnapping case even as he battles ghosts from his past.
Co-starring are Emmy winners Tatiana Maslany, who plays a celebrity evangelist involved in the case, and John Lithgow as the struggling attorney who hires Mason.
Rhys says that as with any iconic character, returning to the Perry Mason stories was always “going to be tricky – but (creators) Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald had the right idea, which was to redefine who that person is”.
“And what the Downeys were keen on doing was making it about a group of outsiders bonded by their own ostracisation.”
This version also probes the protagonist’s psyche far more than Burr’s version ever did.
“Mason is an incredibly
flawed character and that, to me, makes him infinitely more human and attractive, and hopefully his fallibility makes him more relatable.
“And what was liberating as an actor was that at the beginning, the production and writing team said, ‘This will be our Perry Mason and ultimately your Perry
Mason to build together; this is the redefining of him, so it’s an entirely new one.’
“That stripped away any intimidation very well.”
Rhys was asked if he is worried about filling the shoes of the late Burr, who played Mason in more than two dozen television films as well as the show.
“There’ve been a couple of moments when I’ve played relatively iconic people,” says Rhys, who portrayed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in The Edge Of Love (2008) and Vietnam War whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg in The Post (2017).
“And what it’s opened me up to seeing is that people, myself included, have a very strong or firm idea of who those sorts of characters should be without necessarily having the history to back it up.
“So when they said they were going to do a remake of Perry Mason, I went, ‘Oh, I know who Perry Mason is’, because the show was very big in Britain. But I couldn’t recall actually watching it and it’s been my experience that that’s what people tend to do.”
Because of that, the actor – who is married to his The Americans co-star Keri Russell, 44, and has a three-year-old son – was able to shrug off the pressure of any expectations surrounding the new show.
“You have to let go. And I think the older I get, the less I care, which has helped me.” – The Straits Times/asia News Network
Perry Mason airs every Monday at 9am on HBO Go and HBO (Astro Ch 411).