The Cardiff actor is is nominated at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards for lead actor in a comedy (Widow’s Bay) and lead actor in a limited or anthology series (Beast in Me) – we caught up with him ahead of the awards
Matthew Rhys is attending the Primetime Emmys on September 14(Image: Getty Images for SAG-AFTRA Foundation)
Cardiff-born actor Matthew Rhys has a big week coming up. The 51-year old star of Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay and Netflix’s Beast in Me is up for two acting awards at the Primetime Emmys on Monday, September 14.
The nominations, in the lead actor in a comedy and limited series, categories, see him complete an historic hat trick at the major TV industry awards.
In 2018 he was nominated, and then won the lead in a drama category for 1980s spy drama, The Americans.
It’s a long way for the former-RADA student, who started his career in the 1990s on Welsh-made film House of America, who, as awards season ramps up, is everywhere.
His tongue-in-cheek reaction to one of our questions saying “I’m bored of myself!” belies a more sensible, refreshing answer about overexposure of actors.
“I grew up loving old movie stars where you knew really very little about them and if you did it would be because of an interview they did with Parkinson or something like that. In this day and age people are taking pictures of their lunch and I’m like: ‘Oh my God, why? We need to scale it back.’” Read our full interview with Matthew, here.
“I’m aware slightly of the overexposure of it at the moment, it makes me wince a little bit. I think publicists think if you’re not always in the news, or if you’re not present, then you’re dead, and I disagree. I think you have to go away for a while so that people can accept you in a different project.
“Actors are overexposed now and people know too much about them and what they do. Ultimately you’re always asking an audience to suspend belief about you, to be able to say, ‘Right, now believe I’m a media mogul mass murderer,’ or ‘Now believe I’m the mayor of a New England town.'”
He says the audience’s leap from someone sharing their lunch on social makes it tougher to swallow an actor portraying someone else.
“The less they know about you, the easier the transition is to kind of go, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll believe he is this person,’ as opposed to going, ‘Oh, I know everything about this person, he’s nothing like this.’”
