Times Newspapers Limited
Garth Pearce
May 14, 2000
A bar on the Croisette in Cannes will witness some strange sounds tonight - of Ioan Gruffudd and Matthew Rhys offering up a toast to each other, in Welsh. The two young actors have promised themselves a drink to celebrate their movie success. Nothing too flashy, mind. Perish the thought, after an upbringing based on chapel, education and hard work.
Their friendship began at junior school in Cardiff, developed at Rada and continues with a shared flat in London. Will there be a welcome in the hillsides of Hollywood? Perhaps, but there's an irony: the one Welsh-language release that either has been seen in, the Oscar-nominated Solomon and Gaenor, features Gruffudd as a Jewish Welshman.
In his next film, Another Life, the 26-year-old Gruffudd, pronounced Griffith, is playing an Essex-born sailor. His face stares down from a poster 20ft high opposite the Majestic Hotel in Cannes, where this true story of a merchant seaman, Freddy Bywaters, and his fatal affair in the 1920s with the middle-class Edith Thompson is being tipped for impressive worldwide sales. It is a passionate and haunting story - Bywaters murders Thompson's husband, and both lovers, controversially, are hanged - with accomplished acting from both Natasha Little playing Thompson and Nick Moran as her ill-fated husband.
The 25-year-old Rhys, meanwhile, is tackling a Yorkshire accent for the thriller Sorted. He assures me his accent is specifically Scunthorpe, as opposed to Sheffield. He can do that one too, as he is demonstrating twice-weekly at the moment, playing the angry dope-smoking slacker in the TV series Metropolis. And he's also winning fans as an American, playing Benjamin opposite Kathleen Turner's Mrs Robinson in the West End staging of The Graduate. "Being young Welsh actors no longer means we have to play miners," he observes.
It's the same with Gruffudd. He plays a London gangster in another small budget film making its Cannes debut, called Shooters. From his first big-screen appearance, as Fifth Officer Lowe in Titanic, to his latest, playing the dog-loving male lead to Glenn Close's Cruella De Vil in 102 Dalmatians, which is released this Christmas, there's been little in his native tongue. That's for home. The only language spoken in their flat in Kilburn, London, which they bought last year, is Welsh. "If we speak it in the street, people think we're Austrian," Gruffudd says.
They've both been working flat out. So who cooks? Who cleans? "You don't want to see it," reports Rhys. "We have a mattress each, on the floor of our bedrooms, two blow-up chairs in the main room and a little table in the kitchen. Our food is a healthy balance of who goes out to get what takeaway. When it gets too much, one of us eventually cleans or washes up. Our girlfriends don't stay long, because there is never anywhere to sit. When the boys come around they are happy to sit on the floor - we have some carpet - and drink beer." There are planned improvements: "I have a bed arriving any day now, and we've got some furniture on order," Rhys confirms.
The pair met at Melin Gruffudd junior school in Cardiff and attended nonconformist chapel. They transferred to a Welsh-speaking co-ed comprehensive, Glantaf, and after appearing in school productions - Gruffudd even had an occasional role in the BBC's Welsh-language soap opera Pobol y Cwm - were both accepted for Rada. Gruffudd went first; Rhys was accepted a year later, after an audition with Dame Diana Rigg and Richard Eyre that won him the annual free grant.
Since leaving Cardiff, they've been like starving dogs let off the leash. As fast as one has gorged on some tasty roles, the other has had his fill. But for Gruffudd there was an early lesson: Poldark, the remake. "I had the lead and thought I was made," he says. "There was even talk among the cast about getting a house in Cornwall, where we filmed, for the second and third series. But, after the first, which failed, all plans were off. I realised, right at the start, I can't bank on anything."
After playing John Gray in Wilde, he also had the learning curve of Titanic and the notorious demands of the director James Cameron. "I must admit, I was crying in the make-up chair every night for a week. Not because he had a go at me directly - well, only a few times - but because of the atmosphere on the set in Mexico. They had been there for about a month and there were already people who were desperate.
"I felt I had landed in hell, away from family and everything that was dear to me." Even his key scene, in one of the lifeboats searching among frozen bodies for sign of life, had a twist. "The only line in the script was 'Oh, my God'," he says. "James Cameron turned up and told me, 'Improvise.' So I just shouted all day and made it up." But he admires his taskmaster: "He demanded such detail, that even things on the set you would never see had to look authentic. I'd have paid to see that film."
Gruffudd was soon back on the water, this time in Hornblower, playing the 18th-century seafaring hero in a succession of two-hour television dramas. He's done four so far; he will begin the fifth and sixth later this summer. But his proudest moment to date also came in uniform: as Lieutenant John Feeley in the BBC's award-winning Warriors, which was repeated last week. "I was ignorant of how bad things were in Bosnia and that film was a lesson," he says.
Rhys was also learning lessons in small-budget films with other, more senior, Welsh actors. He played opposite Sian Phillips in House of America, and Jonathan Pryce in The Testimony of Taliesin Jones: audiences avoided them like the plague. It's the opposite of the experience he's having with his current co-star, the 45-year-old Ms Turner, whose brief naked scene in The Graduate has fuelled a healthy box office and a less healthy tabloid fascination. There have also been bitchy remarks about her fulsome, womanly shape. "It's a case of the green-eyed monster," says Rhys, gallantly. "She has a beautiful figure and is great to go to bed with. Not that I'm really taking notice, of course. I was far too embarrassed to begin with. It was a case of no acting required. It looked as if I was blushing as the character - and I was in real life. But she's very nice. Very nice indeed."
He also encountered Anthony Hopkins during five months' filming in Rome in Julie Taymor's bloody version of Titus Andronicus, to be released in August. Hopkins has since become a US citizen - will America ever win the hearts and souls of these boyos? "Not a chance for either of us," says Rhys. "To be honest, both Ioan and I feel as if we're going to be found out. Even Hopkins said that. He still expects someone to knock on his door and say, 'We did not mean you - we meant Terry Hopkins.' "
members.tripod.co.uk/jesspage/
So much material on Ioan, it's positively scary
www.angelfire.com/celeb/matthewrhys/
Fledgling site dedicated to 'the other Welsh wonder
