Matthew Rhys Says Juggling Busy Work Schedules with Keri Russell Can Feel Like 'Ships Passing in the Night' (Exclusive)

Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell may have fallen in love on the set of a TV show, but it's not often that they find themselves in the same workplace these days.

The actors, who met while working on The Americans – on which they starred as a married couple – have been together for more than a decade, but Rhys, 49, tells PEOPLE that it's "incredibly rare" for their work schedules to be aligned lately.

"What we try to do is – how many of our friends do it – one works when the other one doesn't," he says of how he and Russell, 48, stay afloat for the sake of their 8-year-old son Sam, and make sure there's always "a parent in the house."

He admits, though, that "there are moments where you're ships passing in the night to a degree, and that makes it a little tricky."

"But we try not to disrupt home life too much. So that's how we've generally done it. And for the most part, up until now, it seems to work," he says, joking that he'll now "knock on wood."

Despite how the "logistical element of childcare becomes tricky" if Rhys and Russell work together, they're still very much interested in another professional pairing.

"We definitely would work together [again], we've said that before," Rhys says. "We've just waited. We always said The Americans was so special, it would have to be something akin that we're both so excited to do. It shouldn't just be anything."

In May, they teamed up for a play reading at The 92nd Street Y in New York City to bring to life Christopher Monger's Dear Mr. Thomas: A New Play for Voices, which allowed Rhys to portray one of his life-long heroes, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

He enlisted Russell in the project – slightly against her will – as he jokes he "told her she'd be taking part in [the] reading whether she liked it or not" — and she was game. "She knows what Dylan means to me, so she very kindly said, 'Look, whatever you want me to do, I'll do it.'"

Thinking back on the early days of their relationship, which they kept secret for more than a year, Rhys says they both thought they were "never going to follow that well-trodden path of cliché" by falling in love in real life while playing a fictional couple.

"So when we told our producers like, 'Oh, we do have something to say.' They're like, 'Oh, don't tell us you're together.' We're like, 'Actually we're going to have a baby.' They're like, 'Oh my God,' because we'd kept it a secret for so long."

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The Americans can be streamed in full on Hulu.