CURIOUS CASE OF MATTHEW RHYS
The about Perry growing Mason up actor in Wales, talks the little white lie that impressed Keri Russell and the hobby he didn’t expect to take over his life.
Matthew Rhys can’t be serious—or at least he doesn’t want to be. When he’s not being intense on screen, as he is in his current role as criminal defense attorney on the hit series Perry Mason, “I’m the absolute joker,” he says.
The actor, 48, is Zooming with Parade from his home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his partner Keri Russell, 46 (they began dating while costarring in The Americans), as well as her kids River, 15; and Willa, 11, from her first marriage; and their son Sam, 6. He’s in a black-hooded sweatshirt, having just come from a workout in the park. “I take my resistance bands,” he says, “and I resist working out.” There does come a time, laughs Rhys, “where Keri’s like, ‘Stop with the jokes.’ The other day she was like, ‘It’s like a disease with you sometimes. I can see your mind going, How can I make a pun out of what’s being said?’”
What he does take seriously is the place he first called home. Rhys was raised in Cardiff, Wales, with his older sister Rachel—“the brains of the outfit,” he says—by his mother Helen, who taught music to blind children; and his father Glyn, a headmaster at a primary school. “I think you could tip I was possibly headed for a life of performance, because I was a bit of a clown,” says Rhys. “I could impersonate and mimic.” But what also served his talent is a common Welsh trait—“the ferocity at which they will tell you how proud they are of being Welsh,” says Rhys. “Being a very small cousin next door to a very large England, you’ve had to shout and scream for your own identity.” And that strong foundation, “lends itself as kind of a springboard to pretend to be whomever you want.” After playing Elvis in high school and attending London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he’s been pretending professionally ever since.
He performed on stage in London’s West End and starred in Brothers & Sisters and The Americans; in Steven Spielberg’s The Post and with Tom Hanks in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. And now he’s back for the second season of Perry Mason (March 6 on HBO). “It’s not your father’s Perry Mason,” says Rhys of the 1930’s-based show that reimagines Mason as a private investigator with a painful military history, driven to earn his law degree. In season two, Mason builds his new law firm while taking on “thrilling cases in the same vein as season one,” says Rhys. Or, as he wrote on Twitter: “This season is like camping. IN-TENTS.” Settled in until he picks up his son from first grade, Rhys shares how he got to Hollywood and where he’s headed next.
What did you know about Perry Mason before taking on the role? Had you read any of the Erle Stanley Gardener novels or watched the Raymond Burr TV show? I never read any of his novels but I was very aware of the show. It was huge in Britain. I had this very vague, kind of misty memory that, Yeah, that’s the show where they always confess on the stand. It was one of those behemoth shows that just ran for years.
So was that intimidating to be up for such an iconic part? My agent left a message saying,
“You want to remake
Perry Mason?” I was like
Remake Perry Mason?!
No one should remake
Perry Mason! And then I understood it was more a reimagining of the show.
And when I heard the backstory they were going to give him, I was intrigued. It was a very different Mason. I saw it as the building of an antihero. The darker, the more fallible, the more human; the more life problems he has, hopefully the more interesting.
Perry Mason begins in Los Angeles in 1931. What was the most fun about filming in that time period? The clothes always got me. I’ve always had this kind of thing for the ‘30s, I guess. It’s a period of Hollywood that is so romantic and glamorous. It was this incredible moment in L.A.’s history when the entire country was on its knees due to the Depression, and L.A. was flourishing because the one thing that did well was entertainment. People wanted to escape reality, so movies really took off. And walking onto those sets and seeing...HBO, God bless them, has never done things by half, so you’d walk onto a set with four hundred extras and just feel like you were stepping back in time.
A lot of people don’t realize you’re not American. You were born in Cardiff, Wales. What do you most appreciate about how you grew up? We used to roam around like packs of feral children on bikes. We would ride to canals and play on canal locks. It was everything we were told not to do, and it’s a wonder none of us died! What I really treasure from my upbringing is the freedom that place allowed me, and the innocence. And in Wales the performing arts are revered—and I would say, even forced upon children. Three times a year, you compete in these cultural events where you perform, you sing, you dance; from an early age, everyone does it. It’s only at 18, when I said, “I’m gonna do it professionally,” that people were like, “No no no, it’s a hobby! You don’t have to do it professionally!” And then the wheels came off.
Did your path to Hollywood go the way you imagined it or much differently? To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the path was. I was doing a play at the Royal Court and an American agent came to see it before I went to New Zealand to do a job. He said, “On the way back, I’ll set you up with some auditions, see how you do.” So I literally stopped off in L.A. on the way back, and he got me this audition with Julie Taymor for her first movie, Titus, with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. I was 24 and I got the part, and I was like Hollywood’s great! You turn up and get huge movies with huge movie stars. It’s brilliant! And then the next 10 years I couldn’t catch a cold. I worked in theater in London and as a busboy in a kitchen, and I would come back to L.A. every year for pilot season, and I didn’t get anything! I thought, I’m not gonna do this anymore. This is a joke. And then on my last pilot season I got Brothers & Sisters for ABC.
You played Kevin Walker on Brothers & Sisters for five seasons (2006-2011). What are your favorite memories from working on that show? Oh God, it was such a learning curve for me. I remember walking in and seeing Sally Field, and just going [high-pitched] Ah! kind of Oh, there she is! It was a powerhouse, with Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths; then Rob Lowe joined us, Beau Bridges.