Ireland.com
Michael Dwyer
April 2001
Matthew Rhys might be the hottest Welsh export since Tom Jones, having been seduced by Kathleen Turner in The Graduate and suspended naked and upside down in Titus. Michael Dwyer meets the star of Peaches, a lad-flick opening next month.
After Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins, Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones, Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics, the latest hot cultural export from Wales is Matthew Rhys, the handsome 25-year- old actor from Cardiff who has been touted by Vanity Fair as one of cinema's new rising stars. Rhys features in no less than four movies and a major TV series, all of which will be seen here before the end of the year.
First to arrive will be Peaches, a wry and perceptive comedy of lad culture which, though set entirely in London, was filmed primarily in Dublin. Warmly received at the Cork and London film festivals last autumn, the film is adapted by Nick Grosso from his own hit stage play which one critic said had "the style of a latter-day Oscar Wilde on speed".
Set over one eventful summer, Peaches features Rhys in an engaging performance as Frank, a final-year student intent on shirking responsibility and commitment. "I think Peaches gives a different take on the lad culture," says Rhys. "Its not the same mindset as Lock, Stock or Brothers, where all me lads go to Ibiza. Peaches is not so crude, but it still touches the mark with more detail."
The film has been described by Ronan Glennane, its Irish producer, as "ultra-low-budget". "This might sound snobby," says Rhys, "but I thought I had done some fairly low-budget films until Peaches, which was like guerrilla filmmaking. Time was the real pressure. But it certainly kept the adrenaline pumping. So it was a double-edged sword."
Rhys enrolled at RADA in 1993 and made his film début with Sian Phillips and Steven Mackintosh in House of America, set among a dysfunctional Welsh family. "It was a dark piece, but a great learning curve," he says. Even darker was Julie Taymor's stylish, powerful and violent Shakespearean screen adaptation, Titus, in which he and Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers played the dissolute and sadistic sons of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, who was played by Jessica Lange.
Working on Titus was the most physically demanding role of Matthew Rhys's career to date - he was suspended naked upside down before his character met a gory demise. For all its graphic imagery he notes, it did not attract a whiff of the controversy stirred up by a brief nude scene in Terry Johnson's London stage production based on The Graduate, in which Kathleen Turner played Mrs Robinson and Rhys was cast as Benjamin Braddock, the nervy young man she seduces.
It was daunting, he says, to take on so famous a role and one so closely identified with Dustin Hoffman, whose movie breakthrough it marked. "I was absolutely petrified. Most people over a certain age came to see it with a firm memory of the movie. For me, the comparisons with Hoffman were frightening, but it turned out very well, touch wood. I hadn't seen the film version, which helped, I think. I just took a deep breath and went for it, to make it my own."
There were several auditions before he was chosen for the part. "After quite a few auditions, Kathleen flew over to London and read with me and a few other actors. She had approval over the actor who would be co-starring with her. She's a real taskmaster and a complete perfectionist. She works very hard and really cares about the project she's doing, working on it over again until she's entirely happy with it. I liked that about her."
It was impossible not to be conscious of the audience build-up to That Scene every night. "The scene comes very early in the play, thankfully, which is good because, after all the hype in the press, it causes so much expectation in the audience. It was good to get it out of the way early every night. And, you know, it's only seconds. Just the drop of a towel. It's incredible in the 21st century that a scene like that, and one so brief, can cause such a fuss."
Curiously enough, Rhys got to keep his pants on for the scene. "I don't think it would have generated as much interest if it had been a man who was naked," he says.
From playing Mrs Robinson's reluctant lover, Matthew Rhys teamed up with his flatmate and fellow Welsh actor, Ioan Gruffudd, to play Hob and Nob, a gay couple in the Welsh comedy Very Annie Mary, due here in June. Then, having joined Irish actress Flora Montgomery in the TV series Metropolis, which suffered from comparisons with the superior This Life, Rhys was back in Dublin, to star in The Abduction Club, a romantic drama set in Ireland in 1780 and dealing with young men who raid the great houses and take the daughters away. "There's so much horse-riding and swordplay in the film that it's like being a kid again, except with real toys," he says.
The fourth Matthew Rhys film to open here this year is already creating controversy.
Directed by David Blair, the topical Tabloid is a cutting satire on celebrity television. Rhys stars as a charismatic but deeply insincere talk show host who seeks out the darkest secrets of even his most virtuous guests. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio plays the TV producer who drives him on to further excesses, and the cast also features John Hurt, David Soul and Stephen Tompkinson.
And at Christmas, Rhys will be seen in The Lost World, a big-budget sequel to the hit BBC series, Walking With Dinosaurs, this time with actors added - Rhys, Irish actress Elaine Cassidy and Columbo star Peter Falk. The prolific and versatile Matthew Rhys is immersed in its production in New Zealand at present.