As Perry Mason replaces the (very good!) first season, Matthew Rhys is fucked in a closet in the Catskills, where the trees are plentiful and wifi is limited. He has spent isolation here with his wife, formerly The Americans co-star Keri Russell, and their mixed family, mostly “try to introduce the children to as much nature as possible.”
When Rhys’s on-screen personas change to dark and brooding – then his Perry Mason is a hard-boiled, hard-drinking private investigator who has flashbacks to World War I; Phillip Jennings op The Americans was a deadly and profound conflict Russian spy – his lively Welsh accent and mop of curls give him the charming air of a bonvivant. (Hosting a wine show, literally called The Wine Show, with actor Matthew Goode certainly has no pain either.)
GQ chatted with Rhys about the darkest moments out there Perry MasonThe first season, he thinks, happened to his The Americans character, and that once he was on the last ever episode of Columbo.
GQ: That, you have a go-to pandemic wine?
MR: Yes. There’s a Pomerol named De Sales. And we drank it through the case.
Related, what is the condition of the quarantine burd now?
Prima min. It’s getting to the point where it’s parting and you look like someone who can not take care of yourself. It always amazes me, those men who have beautifully decorated beards. I appreciate how much work goes into it.
How familiar were you beforehand with the Perry Mason franchise? And have you read the books or seen the Raymond Burr version to prepare?
I was very aware of the scope of it as a show, it was huge in the UK. But I never saw it myself. I had this image of Raymond Burr and someone breaking into the stands all the time. I did not return to the books because I have done so occasionally in the past, and I pinch too heavily on the book. Sometimes the way things are in a book is not necessarily in the script.
So just to keep my head a little clearer, I said, “I’m just going to stick to the script, and play what’s in the script.” I certainly did not go to Raymond Burr because I know I am some kind of unconscious thief who mimics. And whether I was aware of it or not, I knew there was going to be something going on in my little brain that I would kind of relive.
I think a lot of people who watch this are too young to see the original, that you probably have free rein to do what you want.
Yes, and what’s refreshing was that, from the start, producers said, ‘Look, this is a remake of Perry Mason, it has no implications for Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason. The hope is that we will not even be compared, because it is actually a name alone. “We were also happy that the estate was so flexible and resilient to the changes we wanted to make. They were like, ‘Yeah, go for it.’
Are you a noir fan, and has that affected your performance?
A little bit. I was a bit of [Raymond] Chandler fan and a Humphrey Bogart fan. There were these great elements in the show, where I invented children’s fantasies of being those people, or flickering the cigarette. And that was a little bit exciting for me, because I’ve never done anything like that before [set] in the 30s, certainly not on this scale. I feel like I was dreaming of an exotic American childhood.
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