Matthew Rhys tackled a thriller and a horror comedy in his latest roles. Robby Klein/Getty Images Matthew Rhys has always been drawn to playing men on the fringes of society.
In the past year, he’s delivered two genre-bending performances that show just how seamlessly he can slip into the skin of an outsider. In Netflix’s The Beast in Me, he brings equal parts charm and menace to Nile Jarvis, a real estate mogul accused of murdering his first wife who takes a perverse interest in his next-door neighbor, grieving author Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes). And in Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, Rhys delightfully toes the line between horror and comedy as Tom Loftis, a beleaguered mayor desperately trying to boost tourism to a New England island — despite the residents’ long-standing belief that the land is cursed.
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Although his approach to acting hasn’t changed, Rhys admits that, over time, the way he chooses his roles has. “You spend your 20s going, ‘Oh my God, what will people think?’ And then in your 30s and 40s, you go, ‘Oh, actually, no one fucking cares what you do or think,’ ” says Rhys, 51. “So I’m like, ‘Learn more. Try an accent. Make a fool of yourself.’ The big performances Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman did, they’re massive swings — and I’m like, ‘I should start doing that because time’s running out.’ “
Rhys takes a particularly big swing in The Beast in Me, tapping into a darker side of himself that he has rarely shown onscreen. Danes, who helped develop the limited series with her Homeland showrunner Howard Gordon, says Nile was always the most difficult character to make sense of. “The actor needed this sense of menace while remaining engaging and charming; you want to feel drawn to him and also mildly repelled by and terrified of him,” Danes tells THR. “That’s a lot of competing forces at play, and not very many people could manage that as deftly as Matthew did.”
Kate O’Flynn, Rhys and Stephen Root hunt down a haunting spirit in Widow’s Bay. Apple TV+ For Rhys, the cat-and-mouse dynamic between Aggie and Nile was “very concretely” established in the pilot, when they are forced to confront their preconceptions of each other during a public lunch. “This unlikely friendship forms between the two of them whereby they’ve both been outed a bit by society and they’re both loners. They’re like a shadow self of each other, but they’re also deeply intrigued by each other,” Rhys says. Nile personally enjoys goading Aggie: “He likes how reactionary she is to him. He enjoys that slightly perversely because she’s trying to present as something, and he’s like, ‘I see you, and that’s not you.’ “
Over eight episodes, Rhys paints a compelling psychological portrait of a man whose “originating wound” was his domineering father (Jonathan Banks) blaming him for his mother dying in childbirth. Carrying that guilt for decades has manifested in a quietly simmering rage that comes out in crimes of passion, including killing his wife. “It’s a self- fulfilling prophecy that the way the rage was created makes him do something that then magnifies that rage again,” Rhys notes.
Rhys wanted Nile’s propensity for maintaining an unsettling sense of calm — even as his world comes crashing down around him amid Aggie’s investigation into his troubled past — to resemble Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. Together with the writers, the actor found little private moments to reveal Nile’s true nature. For instance, in a particularly memorable chicken-eating scene in episode two, “there’s this moment where impulse takes over, where he’s enjoying something so much, where he can’t help himself — which I think happens to Nile a lot,” Rhys says. What Nile does always “becomes something slightly more uncontrolled.”
Nile inevitably gets his comeuppance when his second wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), records him confessing to his homicidal tendencies. But even as tension ratcheted up between the two, Snow marveled at Rhys’ ability to slip in and out of character at a moment’s notice. “Before we would enter a bedroom scene where he would have to scream at me, or we would be getting in a fight, or we would be slapping each other, we would be laughing so hard that I was crying,” Snow says.
Rhys’ natural wit is readily apparent in Widow’s Bay, which pays homage to Jaws, Stephen King and John Carpenter. Rhys had never read anything quite like creator Katie Dippold’s pilot and, like the audience, “wanted to know what happened to these people.”
With Claire Danes in The Beast in Me. Courtesy of Netflix Lacking formal comedic training, Rhys initially was apprehensive about the show’s tone, but he felt relieved when Dippold and producing director Hiro Murai instructed him to just “play the reality” of every situation. “They said, ‘The comedy of the horror should be character- and situation-driven, and if we play it for real, it should evolve from that,’ ” he recalls. “That was a great liberation, and then I was like, ‘I’m just going to do this as a drama, and I’ll be fine.’ “
Much of the first season’s comedy is derived from Tom living in constant denial that the town where he would spend summers with his divorced fisherman father is haunted. Tom’s insistence on finding semi-plausible, scientific explanations for the island’s paranormal activity — especially the infamous Sea Hag in episode three — ultimately comes from a well-meaning, albeit misguided, place. “He’s trying to raise his son as a single parent, and he thinks, ‘OK, I’m going to make the best of this situation. I’m going to turn this town into something prosperous where my son can flourish,’ ” Rhys says. But, naturally, he can’t stay “blinkered” for long.
While awaiting the green light for a potential second season of Widow’s Bay, Rhys recently wrapped production on the new season of Apple TV’s legal anthology Presumed Innocent, and he’s already busy preparing for the new BBC drama Dragon Slayers, in which he will play legendary investigative journalist Harry Evans. Rhys also is hoping to bring his one-man Richard Burton show to New York City next year.
But the actor will always hold out hope for a continuation of Brothers & Sisters, in which he and Luke Macfarlane played one of the first major gay couples on network TV. Rhys even confirms that Tom sounding similar to his B&S character, Kevin, was by design: “I wanted a slightly higher [vocal] register because Kevin was always slightly annoyed and pleading with people in the same way Tom is.”
After ABC abruptly cancelled the drama in 2011 following a leadership change, Rhys reveals he, co-star Dave Annable, and producing director Ken Olin unsuccessfully pitched the new brass a two-hour holiday special to wrap up the story. But with Disney recently reviving both Scrubs and Malcolm in the Middle, Rhys doesn’t see why that conversation cannot be revisited, especially with Oscar and Emmy winner Sally Field at the helm. “One of the reasons we did it was because people still come up and say, ‘I really love Brothers & Sisters,’” he says, “which is why we were like, ‘People would still watch it!’”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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