Matthew Rhys on Towards Zero and why working with its all-star cast was "fanboy catnip"

The star of HBO smash Perry Mason, who won an Emmy in 2018 for his role opposite his wife Keri Russell in espionage drama series The Americans, appears to be in rather better condition than his character in Towards Zero, Inspector Leach, who is racing against time to identify a murderer at Gull’s Point.

The complexities of Leach, an ex-soldier with suicidal tendencies medicating his own survivor’s guilt with an ever-present bottle, were enough to attract Rhys to the role: "As an actor, you zone in on the cracks in a character’s personality because that’s also where the life is."

It isn’t hard to warm to Cardiff-raised Rhys, whose default mode when talking about his work is that of a competition winner who has won the chance to live his life for a day.

The big-ticket jobs keep coming — a just-finished series for Netflix with Claire Danes called The Beast in Me, and an upcoming Apple TV+ project entitled Widow’s Bay. Impostor syndrome never quite leaves you, he says, but you have to keep it in check. It’s something he learnt the hard way, when he "over-prepared" for his role in the BBC’s 2012 Dickens’s adaptation, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

"I read the book religiously," he recalls. "When it came to filming, I found myself saying things that weren’t in the script. So, ultimately, it messed me around."

Working with Anjelica Huston and Clarke Peters was, he adds, "fanboy catnip". Upon meeting the latter for the first time: "I said, ‘I remember you playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre in 1996’. It was like he exploded onto the stage, a performance that stays with you for life."

Of Huston, Rhys says he is reminded of Kathleen Turner, with whom he starred on stage in The Graduate in 2000: "They both have a tenacity, a work ethic, they have ambition.

"You realise very quickly why they have become the women they are. And they did it when it was far harder, which I think has inspired the younger actors and directors who grew up watching them."

For Rhys, now 50, home is the apartment beside the Brooklyn Bridge he shares with his wife Keri Russell and their children. Asked if he pines for a permanent move back to the UK — especially Pennal, mid-Wales, where his father was born; Rhys led a campaign to stop the closure of the village pub — he says there’s no point in thinking about that while his kids are in the US school system. “Besides, I truly do love New York.”

Once more, his inner competition winner resurfaces. |I step outside and I’m in a Scorsese movie. I take the kids to play football in our local park, right by the bridge. I told my oldest, ‘You’ll look back one day and say, My God, I played football with that view’, and he went, ‘What view?’ Because it’s all he knows. Heaven help me if I drag them away from that."

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Towards Zero premieres on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 2nd March 2025. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on.

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