Matthew Rhys has done two big performances in the past year: The Beast in Me and Widow’s Bay. He freaked me out completely in The Beast in Me, but he’s wonderfully sad-sack in Widow’s Bay. He’s already an Emmy-winner for The Americans, but it’s more than possible that he’ll end up winning some awards for Widow’s Bay and Beast. As part of his Emmy campaigning, Rhys chatted with The New Yorker, and I found him utterly charming here. He’s a really lovely guy. Some highlights:
On his success & failures: “Tom Hanks always—and, I’m sorry, that’s a flagrant name drop—but he always says, his big motto is “This, too, shall pass.” Regardless of the success or the failure, it’s always applicable.”
He worried how people would react to the comedy and horror of Widow’s Bay: “Yes, I’m relieved—I think relief is the highest form of happiness, isn’t it? And I wasn’t alone, you know. I know Katie [Dippold, the showrunner] and Hiro [Murai, who directed five episodes] felt, like, This is a tough tone to pitch, a tough one to land. So I’m just relieved that people get it. Hiro and Katie were, like, Let’s not play it as a comedy or a horror story. Let’s just make it into a real world and play for real. And, you know—we’ll try and imbue the rest of it with music!
His method for playing someone tripping on mushrooms: “For that one, I literally watched people on LSD on YouTube and kind of mimicked—I try not to do that, but I mimicked things—little things that made me laugh, the way they would turn their heads. So, yeah, YouTube is the great salvation of active research these days. Gone are the days when you’d go somewhere with a tape recorder—a cassette recorder, as I used to say!
Playing Niles Jarvis in “The Beast in Me”: “You know, sometimes now, I’ve become cheap—a cheap shot. In that, when I read Niles Jarvis, I said, I’m just gonna steal stuff from Anthony Hopkins in “Silence of the Lambs.” I’m going to be a little still, intimidating in my open stillness. A whole generation hasn’t seen “Silence of the Lambs,” I can get away with this s–t! So I blatantly just stole—I was, like, Oh, that’ll translate well. A lot of it was on the page anyway.”
His son loves the Knicks: “He does! And he explains to me the rules of basketball—so he was, I suppose, angry that he wasn’t in New York when that happened, so he could have stayed up late and watched it in real time.”
Widow’s Bay reminded him of growing up in Wales: “To me, when I read “Widow’s Bay,” I was, like, This is Wales. Like, sixty-five per cent of the country is coastline. An enormous amount of the population live in small coastal towns. My mother was from there—we lived in one for a while. She’s from a seafaring family, where you throw a stone and there’s a myth or a legend.
He speaks Welsh to his son: “I do, I do. Very much so. He’s still trying to keep that. Although as the conversations become more convoluted or complicated, he does say, Can you say that in English now? Which still breaks my heart.
Whether he wishes he could move his family to Wales: “You know, I have these nostalgic moments, usually when I’m in my cups, that I’m, like, What if we return to the old country, now that we’ve left Europe? No, I don’t, but—yes and no. I suffer very badly from a heavy pair of rose-tinted glasses, or, you know, “grass is always greener.”…Hiraeth. It’s mourning for something that can never be again.”
His Celtic eyes: “I don’t know if you’ve read this, but I met a plastic surgeon in L.A. once, and he went, Oh, are you Irish? I said no. Scottish? I said no. And then he goes, Where are you from? I said Welsh, he went, Oh, the other Celt—and, yeah! [He touches his eyes.] It’s the Celtic lids. I have the Sad Sam eyes, you know. We joke that it rains so much in Wales, you’re always going like this. [He frowns dramatically.] Or you’re so downtrodden by the English, you’re also going, Oh, please give us a break. My resting face is downtrodden.
He loves Richard Burton: “Michael Sheen had taken over the National Theatre, and he was, like, You’ve got to come and do something. I was, like, I’ve got no time! And he was, like, Well, come and do a fund-raiser, do a one-man show. And last year was the centenary celebrations of Richard Burton. So I went and did this show called “Playing Burton,” and then the final performance was in Richard Burton’s chapel, in front of his family—which was kind of terrifying. But Burton meant a lot to me growing up. I started watching his films at an early age. I was thirteen, fourteen—I remember seeing “Look Back in Anger” and going, Oh, my God. And then my dad saying, Well, he was Welsh. And I was, like, Wait, what? And I started reading about him. I read Melvyn Bragg’s “Rich,” and I was blown away because he seemed so un-Welsh. He was like a professional Welshman! He couldn’t have been more proud of being Welsh. And yet his self-confidence was a kind of hubris. There are Welsh people who are almost violently, aggressively confident. Probably overcompensating, I’m sure. But he was—you know, Welsh people don’t outbid Ari Onassis for diamonds! I was, like, who was this person? He was a true movie star, and to me, it kind of said, You Welsh people are allowed. He was, like, I’m gonna go to Hollywood. I’ll conquer it on my own terms. And he did.”
Whether he feels like a New Yorker now: “I do, I do. Weirdly. Yes, I do. And when, I don’t know if you’ve seen that meme—and forgive me, popular culture isn’t my forte…Yes, [J.Lo] —where you’re not a New Yorker if you’re not born here? And I was, like, O.K., but I’ve been here eighteen years now. And when the Knicks won, the celebrations made me feel like a New Yorker. There’s this one incredible guy going “my mayor is Muslim”—who is he? [He’s told about “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four.”] It doesn’t matter because regardless, it is true to his prophecy. And I felt an inherent pride in that, that we do live in this beautifully diverse city.
I love what he says about Burton because it’s so true, and I feel like Richard Burton was truly the first Welsh superstar, the first Welsh guy in the 20th century who really went out into the world, wore his Welsh heritage with pride and just did stardom on his own terms. I also love what Rhys says about feeling like a real New Yorker – it’s wild that he’s been working in America for so long, and he’s married to an American lass (Keri Russell).
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
