Old dog, new tricks - Matthew Rhys reboots beloved legal drama, Perry Mason on Foxtel

It’s dark and gritty. This is not the Perry Mason you know. The classic TV show has had a makeover and star Matthew Rhys reveals the hard part of taking on the role.

For those not old enough to remember the ‘whodunit’ legal drama, Perry Mason – starring Raymund Burr in the titular role – it set the benchmark for the slate of courtroom and crime thrillers which populate TV programming today the world over.

But as HBO does, its latest iteration takes the beloved classic and turns it on its head, saddling our new ‘hero’ with more baggage than Louis Vuitton.

Dark and gritty, this is not the Perry Mason of yore.

While Welsh-born Matthew Rhys brings some sleuthing experience to the starring role, after six seasons of the award-winning spy series, The Americans, he admits the prequel approach was new ground he was eager to tread.

“When my agent called and said, ‘They’re going to remake Perry Mason,’ I immediately remembered, ‘Oh yeah. That huge show where someone inevitably confesses on the stand.’ It was enormous in Britain. It was the show that your grandparents were always watching,” says Rhys. “That was my relationship with it.

“But when they said, ‘HBO are making it,’ I knew it wouldn’t be my grandparents’ Perry Mason,” he chuckles. “And after the pitch, explaining to me that they wanted to do the origin story [based on the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner] before he becomes a defence attorney … an entirely new Perry Mason reimagined from the boots up … I was in 100 per cent.”

Original … Raymond Burr starred as legal eagle, Perry Mason. Picture: Supplied.

The new series is set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, during which time Mason was a struggling private investigator living hand-to-mouth, pained by a broken marriage and haunted by his experiences as a solder in WW1 France.

It also stars John Lithgow as attorney Elias Birchard and includes an impressive ensemble, including Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), Juliet Rylance (The Knick), and Chris Chalk (Gotham).

Rhys takes on producing credits, along with Robert Downey Jr, who was forced to give up the role when it was first planned for the big screen.

“Originally, it was meant to be a movie starring Robert, but fortunately for me he had scheduling issues so they decided to make it a TV show.”

He smiles: “So, I got to steal it under the table – well, not steal — but gratefully take the offcuts that he wasn’t going to eat anyway.”

There were many aspects of the series Rhys found attractive.

“I’m a huge fan of that time period. I loved Sunday matinees starring Jimmy Cagney wearing fedoras.”

As for his look, he says, “Well, it’s supposed to be very lived-in, very real, especially given that some of the clothes he wears are stolen from dead bodies, so they’re not supposed to fit perfectly,” he says.

“I loved working with a hat — it made me feel I was in The Untouchables. But the smoking was tough because they’re those terrible herbal cigarettes that make you want to puke.”

Team work … husband and wife, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys starred in The Americans.

Given Mason’s profession, Rhys is often surrounded by some visually disturbing scenes.

“It’s fortunate I’m not squeamish in any way. Sometimes I’ll be getting my hair and makeup done next to someone whose face has to look like it had been blown apart by a shotgun. So by the time we’re shooting the morgue scene, it’s not so much of a shock for me and makes it possible to joke around a little.”

He continues: “But I have to say, as a father, some of the scenes in the morgue with a prosthetic child I find incredibly difficult.”

Rhys is speaking to TV Guide from lockdown at home with his actor wife Keri Russell (his co-star in The Americans), and their children.

“I’m up in the Catskill Mountains [New York] with Keri and the kids. We’re very fortunate because we have some very generous friends who have a property that has another house on it. They said look, ‘Come and shelter up here,’ so there are two families on this property in the mountains, which we’re incredibly lucky to be on.”

Rhys began dating Russell in 2014 and they have a son, Sam, four.

Russell has two children from a previous marriage: a son, River, 13, and a daughter, Willa, eight.

“Home schooling has been an eye opener and a definite exercise in patience,” he laughs. “Both my parents were teachers and I’ve recently had a revelation. I have a new-found guilt for the way I treated them and their chosen vocations in such an off-handed matter. Now I have the greatest respect for them … home schooling is its own challenge.

“Honestly, I don’t think children are geared towards virtual learning. I think it’s incredibly hard for them and then the parents become enforcers of making them sit at a screen for hours on end.”

Family ties … Rhys starred alongside Jason Lewis and Rachel Griffiths in US drama series, Brothers & Sisters. Picture: Supplied

He shakes his head: “it’s this hard balance of taking them away from the screen and letting them open their eyes a bit more to the real world, as opposed to the virtual world.”

But his idyllic Little House on the Prairie setting is not without its issues.

“Every night at dinnertime, the kids say, ‘Can we please have a dog?’ and I go, ‘No.’” he laughs. “But a bear came very close to the house last night, so now obviously they’re saying, ‘Well, if we had a dog, it would warn us that the bear was there.’”

Still, he relishes this change of scenery, away from the family home in Brooklyn, where Russell and Rhys are often photographed running errands.

“We’re incredibly lucky that we are in nature, so I try to push the idea of ‘Just take stock of what’s around you, learn from it and we’ll deal with what’s at the end of this tunnel when we emerge.’”

Meanwhile, now that he’s played a spy in The Americans and a private detective in Perry Mason, has he developed an aptitude for either profession?

“I don’t think I’m suited to either of those jobs,” he says.

“When I signed on to The Americans, I worked with a CIA agent and we’d do countersurveillance work on the street. I thought spy work would be easy for me because it’s all about acting, but he’d say to me, ‘You’re terrible!’” he laughs.

“And now with Perry Mason, sometimes I’ll read the script and I’ll ask the writers, ‘I don’t understand how he figures this out without having a single clue.’ They’ll say, ‘Well, it’s because of this and that.’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, of course.’”

In reality, he says: “I think, ‘Oh, thank God I’m not a private detective.’ I think it’s a good thing – for everyone — that I just get to pretend to play these people.”

* Perry Mason, 11am, Monday June 22, Fox Showcase.

BINGE MATTHEW RHYS IN:

* BROTHERS & SISTERS, streaming from August 01 on 7Plus

* THE POST, streaming on Netflix

* A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD, streaming on Amazon Prime

Originally published as Old dog, new tricks - Matthew Rhys reboots beloved legal drama, Perry Mason on Foxtel