Most actors are good at deception.
But Matthew Rhys - a Welshman playing a Russian pretending to be American - takes things to extremes in ITV's new US spy thriller, The Americans. He talks to Craig McLean.
It’s a busy day in London for Matthew Rhys.
He’s fresh off the plane from New York where, just last night, he finished shooting the last episode of the first series of the show that’s made him the latest British hit on American TV .
Right now, we’re having a Chinese lunch in Victoria. But this morning the easygoing actor presented himself at the visa section of the Mongolian embassy. Having grown up with horses in Wales, the 38-year-old periodically embarks on epic equine vacations. He’s “done” Patagonia, where he also filmed a documentary on the 150-year-old Welsh community there, and in 2011 rode with Bedouin in Jordan. Next stop: Ulan Bator. Just the currently single Rhys, some Mongolian herdsman and the romance of horseback.
All of which explains the fresh batch of Moleskine journals in his satchel.
“I have rose-tinted visions of myself as Hemingway,” says Rhys, a veteran of the Pamplona bull run and a cowboy camp in Arizona (at the latter, he was smashed in the nose while learning to rope steers).
The last time we saw Rhys on television, he was playing two characters. In the feature-length drama The Scapegoat, the Welshman was both Johnny Spence, a cad of an upper-class factory-owner, and also his unfortunate doppelganger, John Standing, an unassuming schoolteacher. In this adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier’s 1957 novel, Rhys was riveting in the dual roles. “It was a real hark-back,” he says now. “And it was a real gift, that part.” Playing two men - identical, but at the same time, not - in one drama. How many actors have the opportunity to do that?
Nine months on from The Scapegoat, Rhys might have cause to yearn for the simplicity of just the two performances. In The Americans, a slick, gripping new import from the US channel FX, Rhys plays Philip Jennings. On the surface, he’s an ordinary resident of suburban Washington: loving wife, two children, satisfyingly quotidian job as a travel agent.
But this is 1981, the beginnings of the Ronald Regan presidency, and the Cold War is hotting up. Philip and Elizabeth are far from the happy matrimonial couple — theirs was an arranged marriage, brokered by the KGB. They are deep cover Russian spies, implanted in the United States over a decade ago.
Talk about playing multiple roles. Even Rhys’s most high-profile film appearance, in John Maybury’s The Edge Of Love (2008), was more straightforward. And that featured him playing Dylan Thomas as one-quarter of a love quadrangle involving Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller and Cillian Murphy. The Americans is tricksier still. On the surface it’s a high-octane thriller, a series that reboots the enemy-within excitement of Homeland .
But, again like Homeland, it’s the human story the counts.
“That was the greater attraction for me, the relationship,” agrees Rhys in a Welsh accent undimmed by seven years’ full-time living in Los Angeles.“When I first read the script, I just thought, this is insane. I’ve never seen a relationship like this: an arranged marriage where, when we meet Philip and Elizabeth, the boundaries are blurring, in the fog of this ridiculous duplicity of lies — the extremity they have to live in, then balancing that with the domestic tension. It was that multi-layered aspect of it that grabbed me. Then on top of that, you stick a spy thriller, a bit of action. So,” he beams, “it’s got the lot.”
In the pilot episode, the first flashpoint for the Jennings is on the home front. Confronted with orders from Moscow to “deal with” a KGB officer on the verge of defecting to the CIA, Philip admits to Elizabeth that he, too, would like to cross over to the other side. All this time in America, raising a family — even their children are oblivious to their parents’ true identities — has caused him to go native.
On top of that, Philip has developed genuine feelings for his pretend wife. Both revelations are anathema to Elizabeth. She remains stoutly loyal to the Motherland, and to their mission protocols — even if this means sleeping with a government employee in a honey-trap sting, much to Philip’s dismay.
“It’s great,” nods the Rada-trained actor, previously best-known in America for his five seasons on primetime drama Brothers & Sisters, in which he played a gay lawyer. “They set up so much conflict in the first episode.”
The Americans is a period drama, and the early-Eighties setting is vivid and funny at the same time: big hair, terrible knitwear, no mobile phones, spycraft that looks quaint in this era of computerised espionage.
Historical events play pivotal plot points. One early episode revolves around the March 1981 shooting of Reagan. In the show, the Jennings have to quickly find out whether Reagan is going to die, and how close a rattled White House are to blaming the Russians and pressing the button for a nuclear retaliation.
“The truth around that is that [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig took over the nuclear football,” says Rhys of the briefcase containing the orders to launch a missile strike. “But there were also pass-codes that the President had to keep on him at all times. And when they got Reagan on the operating theatre, they cut off his clothes and his shoes. And hours later, they were clearing away his stuff, and they found this bit of card with numbers on it that had been stuffed inside his shoe. And it was the pass-codes to the nuclear football!” Rhys laughs. “And you just think, that’s all there was - this bit of card!”
Some of this insider knowledge within The Americans is courtesy of Joe Weisberg. The series creator, he’s a former CIA agent. Did he come bristling with top-secret intel to aid his leading man? “Yes and no. You can quiz him on it, you can push him on it. And he is open, a bit But he is a very interesting man. Of course, the CIA is about people who blend in — they’re not special forces jocks.
"But yeah, Joe was a big help. He was good about showing us counter-surveillance, which is mainly what our characters would have been doing — making sure you’re not being followed.” Rhys also watched the 24-part 1998 documentary series Cold War, narrated by Kennetth Branagh. “Research has just changed so much since YouTube came about,” he smiles.
Weisberg likes to tell the story of being vetted for the CIA, a process that is, says Rhys, about two years long. “Joe got to the final polygraph test. And one of the last questions from the profiler is: are you interested in joining the CIA in order to gain information to write about it fictionally or otherwise afterwards?”
Weisberg was already an amateur writer, but genuinely hadn’t thought of that. “And in that moment,” continues Rhys, “he went, ‘oh, brilliant idea!’
Then he went, ‘argh!’ His heart started going and he started panicking and he thought he might fail the polygraph because he now had that thought. But he passed it, and he got in, then served his time.
“But all the scripts for our show go to the CIA,” Rhys adds. “They have to, for approval.” This seems to be part of Weisberg’s deal with his former employers. He tells me that he avoided “writing a word about intelligence for about a decade after I left the Agency..” When he eventually wrote The Americans, that was only the beginning of the hard work. Finding an actor who could play Jennings was a tall order.
“This is not an easy part,” says Weisberg. “This character has to be a dedicated KGB officer. He has to be a killer — just able to ruthlessly kill people when necessary. Then he has to be able to turn around and be a loving, warm father. We had to find somebody who could really make that believable — its not some actor doing it on TV, it’s a real person. And that was not an easy thing to find.”
First the Welshman had to audition with Keri Russell. The actress, an American sweetheart courtesy of her role in feelgood JJ Abrams series Felicity, was already onboard in what Rhys describes as a “shrewd” piece of casting by programme-makers FX.
“They didn’t go for archetypal leading actress, which is great. Keri’s loved in the States — and here she’s this cold bitch who kills people. Or, hurts people. Or f---- them then kills them ” Both Weisberg and Rhys recount a key moment in the audition process. During the read-through of a husband/wife argument scene, the pilot’s director quietly told Russell to properly slap Rhys.
“And she whacked him!” laughs Weisberg. “Probably five times harder than you see in the pilot. She hit him so hard that after she did it she sort of leapt back in surprise.
“But anyway, Matthew wasn’t expecting that - and he didn’t even flinch. And it was this kind of electric moment, and you saw that somewhere within him was this incredibly tough character. Just in that moment he looked like a KGB officer. Like a killer. Then in the next moment he was able to be this husband having a fight with his wife. He just had it all, and we knew it was him.”
It’s all a long way from Cardiff, Welsh-language schooling and an abiding passion for rugby. Rhys is the son of chapel-going teachers who encouraged him in his performing arts ambitions. He followed schoolfriend Ioan Gruffudd to London and drama school. The future star of Hornblower, one year older than Rhys, secured a place at Rada a year ahead of him, and the pair later shared a flat in London. Gruffudd is now married to actress Alice Evans, yet Rhys remains a bachelor.
There was a rumoured fling with his Edge Of Love co-star Miller, but of his current singlehood he says with a twinkle, “well, there’s perks to it. It’s not all bad...” he grins. “Much to my mother’s madness.” Eventually, at the urging of an American agent, Rhys decided to make a go of it in Hollywood. Almost immediately he was offered a role in Julie Taymor’s Shakespeare adaptation Titus (1999) with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange.
“I thought, f------ hell, LA’s great — you just rock up and get huge movies with big movie stars. Then that never happened again for years after “ Eventually he landed the role on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters, and became famous enough for the details of his 2008 Los Angeles house purchase to become public knowledge. If you’re interested, the property covers 1321 square feet, and includes a gourmet kitchen with stainless steel appliances, dark hardwood floors, spa-like bathrooms and a wooden deck. And three bedrooms.
“Amazing isn’t it?” he says with a shrug. But he admits it did feel odd and intrusive “and really creepy.” He sighs. “There was a whole brouhaha because your agent says, ‘things are going well’, so I bought a house. And they said, ‘make sure you buy it through your company name, get the realtor to sing something ’ And at the time I was like, ‘shut up! It’ll be fine ’ “Then I had a bit of a moment,” he says carefully, “when I was doing Brother & Sisters, someone found out [my address].” A fan sent things to his home, then he began turning up at events Rhys was attending.
“And Disney, who own ABC, take their security very seriously — they have all these ex-military intelligence men who wear badges with a picture of Mickey Mouse that says, ‘Keeping The Magic Safe,’” he says with a sardonic eyebrow. “They took care of it. They probably killed him...”.
With The Americans a critical and ratings hit, Rhys now has a new kind of fame in America. Rhys, who will soon step into Colin Firth’s breeches as Mr Darcy in a BBC “sequel” to Pride and Prejudice, is but the latest Briton taking a totemic role in a US drama.
Old Etonian Damian Lewis is the traitorous US Marine Sergeant-turned-Congressman in Homeland, and Egg-from-This-Life — Andrew Lincoln — is the gun-slinging southern sheriff battling zombies in The Walking Dead. And now here’s Rhys: another foreigner disguised as an American actor, playing a foreigner disguised as an American. Perfect casting, no?
“Quite possibly!” he laughs. “The last job I did was five years pretending to be a gay American lawyer. So I had that preparation for free.” No agency - not MI5, the KGB, not the CIA; not even the BBC - could have trained him better.
The Americans is on at 10pm, ITV, Saturdays
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