From his home in Brooklyn the Perry Mason star Matthew Rhys explains that his fellow Welshman, the director Marc Evans, believes that there are two kinds of Welsh songs. One is “standing on the dock, waving goodbye to the boat”. The other is “standing on the boat, waving goodbye to your homeland”.
All this is apropos “hiraeth”, the Welsh word that Rhys, a 46-year-old living in America who shares his life with a Hollywood actress, defines as a longing for “something that once was and can never be again”. With detectable pride and in his Welsh baritone, Rhys says that if melancholy were an Olympic sport, the Welsh would be gold medal-winners. The problem is I am not sure whether this Cardiff-born actor would make the team. There is rather little hiraeth during our Zoom call. On the other hand, Rhys does have a boat.
It is wooden, built in 1939, a Wheeler Playmate, the same as Ernest Hemingway’s fishing boat, Pilar. He bought it on eBay in 2017 partly because of the connection with a literary hero and even volunteered its use in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s recent Hemingway documentary. “I was all in for pretending to be the old man on the sea,” Rhys says. Unfortunately it soon became clear that the six-hour series would be completed before the restoration of the 38ft craft.
Spending the initial $30,000 on the wreck was doubly irresistible to Rhys because its name was Rarebit. “In my delusional rose-tinted purchase I was, like, ‘Surely a Welshman named it Rarebit and I’m just carrying on this lineage.’ But I’ve tried to research it and there is very little you can dig up.”
The rebuild was the sort of labour of love of which nightmares are made. I say that it sounds like having builders in for four years. “It’s like getting a series of builders in who kind of let you down and then you go, ‘You know what? I’ll finish the house myself.’ And then, ‘Hang on, I don’t know anything about building.’ ”
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With the help of a former skipper of the New York City Ferry, Kelli Farwell, he nevertheless embarked on the project in a New Jersey harbour. They sanded and caulked and epoxied. One day Farwell cut off part of her thumb. To make a railing around the hull they soaked a strip of mahogany for days. In 2020 Rarebit made its first tentative voyage.
“What’s more amazing is she passed the inspection,” Rhys says. “She got signed off as seaworthy. That was the greater moment really. I still am dumbfounded.”
This summer they let it out for charter hire, mostly to Hemingway nuts, with Farwell at the wheel and Rhys, on occasion, acting as first mate or handing out cocktails, “butchering mojitos”.
And what of his family, his partner Keri Russell, their son Sam, and her two children from her previous marriage? “That was the final piece in why I bought this boat. I had this notion that the family would enjoy it. We’d all go out for little day trips and have a picnic underneath the Statue of Liberty. The kids were aboard for about five minutes and went, ‘Are we just going to look at buildings the whole day? Is that what we’re doing? There’s no wi-fi on this boat.’ ”
During the first lockdown the family spent six months in New York state’s Catskill mountains in a hideaway lent by a friend, with Rhys making odd trips to the dock. With work at a minimum, family life by a mountain lake was actually rather pleasant. He recorded a one-man play, Playing Burton, about Richard Burton for Audible and, from a cupboard, recorded additional dialogue down his smartphone for HBO’s Perry Mason reboot. It was aired to general acclaim in summer 2020.
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Rhys starts work on season two in January. Whereas the first series narrated the transformation of a down-at-heel private dick into a trenchant defence lawyer, the next will show Mason fully in court mode. I ask if this means that the Mason we met last year — a drunken voyeur and neglectful father traumatised by the First World War — will now be a clean-cut paragon reborn by taking on an injustice that got to him.
“Oh no, that’s not interesting I think,” he says and confirms that he is about to lose weight to retrieve Mason’s gaunt, jacket-on-a-coat-hanger look.
I read him the opinion of a critic at The Boston Globe who said that the first series was so unlike the 1957-66 Raymond Burr Perry Mason series that the producers should have invented a new character rather than “shoehorn the story of this gumshoe into the famous franchise title that rings bells all across the country”.
Is there anything in that? “No, it’s full of shit.”
I’m glad we cleared that up. “Yeah, that was easy. Next! No, I think if you go back to the source material [Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels, which he began writing in the 1930s] you’ll find Mason was a much rougher character. He’d beat people up. I think the Raymond Burr version everyone remembers was an evolution. Mason in the books was this tougher, slightly more Chandleresque character.”
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Perry Mason is the first American series in which Rhys has starred rather than co-starred. With a busy career in British theatre, television and film, he began travelling to Los Angeles for the television pilot season in January, February and March, partly because its weather beat Britain’s hands down, and partly because of the allure of Hollywood.
“I used to audition on the lots, like Paramount and Warner Bros. I’d drive in and I would get this high: ‘Oh my God, this is where they shot The Godfather Part II.’ It was incredibly exotic to me.”
He moved to Santa Monica after winning the role of the gay lawyer Kevin Walker in ABC’s Brothers & Sisters in 2006. The show ran for five years, after which he relocated to New York having been cast as the co-lead in The Americans, which was largely filmed there. He played a Russian sleeper spy, Philip Jennings, bringing up a family with his wife in 1980s suburban obscurity while recruiting double agents, stealing secrets and assassinating people. His mission also entitled him to sleep with other women and, indeed, marry one of them. Rhys queried with the series’s showrunner, Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer, whether this was quite credible. “He went, ‘Well, whether an audience will believe it or not, it actually happened.’ ”
During filming, there was also real-life romantic intrigue. Rhys and his co-star, Keri Russell, who played Jennings’s wife Elizabeth, fell in love. “I was 36. You know, I had done it a couple of times and sworn off that I’d never do it again. I was no spring chicken at that point,” Rhys says.
I say that the name Sienna Miller, who played Caitlin to his Dylan Thomas in the 2008 movie The Edge of Love, springs to mind. “Yeah. It’s kind of the unwritten cardinal rule that you don’t, and I did, and thank God it worked out.”
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Did Russell and he have a serious sit down and think: “Is this really a good idea?”
“No, we never had that really,” Rhys says. “I think it was a greater concern to the producers because they’re always worried that if it goes wrong it’s not going to make for a very amicable workplace.”
Did it deepen or complicate the acting process having Russell as his co-star? “It does both. There are days when it enhances it and there are days when it makes it that much harder, like if you’ve had a big argument, to be having this great time on screen. It can help and it can hinder. It certainly helps with learning the words back home at night.” He would love to star with her in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Americans ended after 75 episodes in 2018 with Philip and Elizabeth fleeing to Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Russell and he sometimes fantasise about the Jenningses’ future under Putin. “I always say that Philip slipped back into the United States under a pseudonym. He’s opened a chain restaurant or something and is loving life. And, you know, Elizabeth is just doing push-ups in a small apartment in Moscow.”
In 2019 Marielle Heller directed Rhys in the Tom Hanks film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in which Rhys played a cynical journalist won over by the homespun children’s TV host Fred Rogers. Heller said of Rhys: “He’s somebody who I think has found this very healthy medium for working out his inner turmoil, which is acting, getting to inhabit other people.”
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It is a plausible theory to anyone who has seen Rhys play dark in Neighbourhood, The Americans and, still more, Perry Mason. It seems less plausible to Rhys.
“If you do have any inner turmoil — which I think everyone does — does it allow you to sometimes exorcise those things? Yes, and that’s a privileged position to be in because you’re doing these things, you’re analysing the character, you’re applying it to yourself.”
Does that exploration feel dangerous sometimes? “Well, not to me, certainly, because I don’t feel there’s any real feeling or trauma in me that could come out in a dangerous way. There’s nothing in my past that I go, ‘Oh God, I can’t go near that.’ If anything, at times you’re trying to force emotion.
“Ultimately, you have to act. You have to portray that person as realistically as possible. That’s the bottom line. We can psychoanalyse the arse out of acting, but ultimately you have to, at the end of the day, do it.”
How does he switch off? “I drink as much as possible. Well not any more.” It is, however, a Friday when we talk and he envies me being five hours nearer corkscrew time.
I am about to celebrate this fact when I mention that 21 years ago I saw him play Benjamin against Kathleen Turner’s Mrs Robinson in a stage version of The Graduate. I had interviewed her for it and spectacularly omitted to ask whether she would be appearing naked, which it turned out she would. One night an audience member took a snap. For the first time in our chat a chunk of real angst surfaces.
“That is something I regret,” Rhys says. “I think about it so often. I’ll regret it to the day I die. One of the British tabloids sent a photographer, hired the box, one of the royal boxes, and the moment she took her clothes off a flash went off, and she looked at me kind of wide-eyed. I was 25, and for me, 25 was young. I didn’t have my head screwed on, but I should have stopped the performance there and then, and I didn’t. I regret that bitterly.”
This is a different kind of hiraeth, a desire to return to the past to change it. I dare not, however, read too much into it, any more than I would his wish to build a boat and pretend to be Hemingway. Sigmund Freud, he reminds me, thought that Celts could not be analysed. They make very entertaining interviewees, I am glad to say.
Rarebit: before and after
