And certainly then in the 1980s, when the language was threatened enormously, and I saw how my parents and my family and friends around me protested to the point of arrest in order for it to survive, for Wales to remain a bilingual country. And it shaped my identity, because it was a struggle for this language to survive. It's certainly an enormous part of who I am. And then in those moments you can see on their faces like, "Where is this kid meant to be from or where is he from?" I soon gave that up, because I couldn't deal with it. tense, heightened situation - I was just that more prone to making a mistake. When you're improvising in a dialect - in an already.
And also, I was panicked, because you're improvising in an American accent, where usually you say the lines, you learn the lines at the same time you practice the dialect, so you have a fair shot at it. I tried it a handful times and I would fall apart more often doing that than being myself and then going into American. I just felt like I was lying - which I was. On pretending to be American and masking his accent in auditionsĪ number of times my agent said, "Look, just go in as an American, because if you go in as a Welsh person, all they will do when you audition is listen for when you slip up." But it weighed so heavily on my mind, because it felt so fake and I just thought I was gonna be found out.
"I was getting to fulfill a number of romantic notions in my inner child." "He's a man who kind of lives on whiskey and cigarettes," Rhys says of his version of Mason.
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The new series focuses on Mason as a divorced private investigator in the early 1930s in Los Angeles - before he became a lawyer. His version of the iconic criminal defense attorney is younger and more hardboiled than the one Raymond Burr played in the popular TV show from the '50s and '60s. Rhys plays the title role in the new HBO series, Perry Mason. trying to casually throw a one liner," Rhys says. "There were moments when I was pulling the last drag on my cigarette and then.
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"I was getting to fulfill a number of romantic notions in my inner child," Matthew Rhys says of playing the title role in the new HBO series Perry Mason.Īs a child, Welsh actor Matthew Rhys fell in love with old American noir films - so much so that he'd sometimes channel iconic movie stars.