In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
If you only know Emmy winner Matthew Rhys from his performances—say, the murderous real estate exec on Netflix’s “The Beast in Me” or the beleaguered mayor of a haunted town on Apple TV’s “Widow’s Bay”—it will always be a bit of a shock to hear the actor speak in his native Welsh accent. But, artist that he is, Rhys still feels like he’s trying to crack what he (at least to my ears) clearly cracked long ago. “The American accent is still a work in progress,” he says on the latest episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast. “I don’t sit on its laurels and go, ‘Ah, I can do it now.’ It still catches me out. It still throws me.”
Luckily, Rhys has reframed those doubts into a way to stay even more present onscreen. “One massive part of your brain is working on a sound, and before you even say the word, you go, ‘Hang on, what’s the sound for that?’ ” he says. “It almost detracts you from acting, and I always wonder, ‘Is that good or bad?’
“I think it was Uta Hagen who was always saying to start the scene with something real…anything that’ll just begin the scene and stop you from being aware of yourself,” Rhys continues. “I always wonder if doing the American accent does that. Is it an aid to me, in that I’m working so much on something else [that it takes] me out of the artifice?”
In this episode, Rhys dives deep into past projects with names like Peter Falk and Kathleen Turner, navigating the big swings of “Widow’s Bay,” and much more. Listen and subscribe to hear the full conversation:
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