Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
PERRY MASON THE PREQUEL
How did the much-loved TV lawyer become the man we know? Find out in a new series that explores his very dark beginnings...
Fictional lawyer Perry Mason has been much-loved for nearly a century. He was created by Erle Stanley Gardner in the 1930s, whose 80plus books spawned several films, a radio serial and a TV series starring Raymond Burr that ran from 1957 to 1966 and was a hit around the world.
But now the forensic genius has been updated for a new TV series, and there’s never been a Perry Mason quite like this. Produced by Robert Downey Jr, this is the ‘origin story’ that reveals who he was before he became the selfconfident lawyer we know him as. And it’s much darker than any other Perry Mason we’ve seen.
When we first meet the character, played by Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, he’s a bit of a loser. Seedy and unshaven, he’s a First World War veteran who’s fallen on hard times in 1930s Los Angeles. He lives on his dead parents’ farm and is eking out a living as a gumshoe. He chain smokes and drinks hard, and his angry exwife is there in the background.
‘He’s a fish out of water,’ says Matthew, 45, who won an Emmy for his role in long-running spy series The Americans. ‘What makes him a good private eye is that he doesn’t fit in anywhere. What the war did, the traumas he suffered, have displaced him.
‘He inherited land from his pioneer family, but it’s now surrounded by the encroaching modernity of this new city. People will remember Perry Mason as this huge show where someone inevitably confesses on the witness stand at the end, but this is a total re-imagining of the character.’
Things change for Perry when he gets involved with the gruesome murder of a child, which leads him into a world involving the cream of LA high society. ‘Los Angeles in the 1930s was such an interesting place. The Depression was crippling the country and the only thing thriving was the entertainment industry, because everyone wanted escapism. It created a boomtown churning out immense wealth, but there was abject poverty too.’
The mix of vintage glamour and seediness gives the series a gritty noir feel. ‘I was raised on James Cagney films and that era of trilbys and fedoras has always attracted me,’ says Matthew. ‘Our director wanted to make it look very real. Mason’s clothes don’t fit properly because they were stolen from corpses [thanks to a pal who works in a mortuary]. He holds his cigarettes turned into his palm, a habit he picked up in France to prevent the Germans across the trenches from seeing the light. I loved that stuff.’
The eight-part series is also far gorier than the original. The opening case is based on the reallife kidnap and murder in 1927 of a young girl, Marion Parker, who was returned to her parents in bits. ‘At first I wondered if we were in danger of losing swathes of our audience because it’s almost too much,’ recalls Matthew. ‘But the initial story was far worse, and it knocked me a little to realise it’s based on real events.’
Another character based on real life is the enigmatic Sister Alice, played by Tatiana Maslany, an angelic figure loosely based on celebrity preacher Aimee Semple Mcpherson. ‘The real Aimee had this incredible ability to hold people’s attention – she was like a rock star of her time,’ says Tatiana. ‘She had her own radio show and was one of the first TV preachers. It was the start of the evangelical movement and it had so much impact because there was a great need for hope at that time.’ John Lithgow, who won acclaim playing Winston Churchill in The Crown, appears as Perry’s surrogate father figure, lawyer Elias Birchard Jonathan, who first gets Perry interested in the law. ‘He’s a mix of swagger and insecurity, success and failure, cocky good cheer and heartbreak,’ says John. ‘He has some wonderful lines – there’s a wit and a crackle to the dialogue.’
Fans will be pleased to see two familiar characters returning too, though they’re quite different here. British actress Juliet Rylance, the stepdaughter of Wolf Hall actor Mark Rylance, is cast as Mason’s long-suffering secretary Della Street, while his normally lighthearted sidekick Paul Drake, played in this show by Chris Chalk, has been reimagined as a black policeman who’s never found the success he deserves because of racism in the force.
Despite all the changes, the series has been endorsed by Erle Stanley Gardner’s family. ‘They’ve been very open to it,’ says Matthew. ‘It’s incredible given this is the fourth-largest-selling series of books in US history. I think they were excited this iconic figure was being reimagined.
‘What this character and the man he becomes share is a powerful sense of what is right. It’s his greatest virtue – but also his Achilles heel.’