Matthew Rhys plays a mysterious neighbor who may or may not have murdered his wife in Netflix’s new drama The Beast In Me. But when Keri Russell, Rhys’s partner of over a decade, learned about the sinister role, she didn’t bat an eye.
“When she saw it, she was like, 'This is tailor-made for you. This is the person you truly are. It's about time the world knew who you are,’” Rhys joked with The Independent at the series’ New York City red carpet premiere Wednesday. “Which I thought was fair."
The 50-year-old Welshman added, “She saw the beast in me a long time ago and wasn’t that impressed then.”
Rhys and Russell began dating in 2014 while co-starring on FX’s spy drama The Americans. The pair share three children and refer to each other as husband and wife, although Rhys admitted earlier this year that they “literally haven’t got round to marriage yet.”
While Russell did not join Rhys on the red carpet on Wednesday (the actor just finished up press for season three of her own Netflix thriller series The Diplomat last month), Rhys met his co-stars Claire Danes, Brittany Snow, David Lyons, and more at the Plaza Hotel for the premiere.
Sporting a navy blazer and black shirt, the Emmy-winning actor cracked jokes with his castmates and took time to introduce himself to attendees — showing some of the disarming characteristics that showrunner Howard Gordon sought out when co-writing Rhys’ bizarrely-named character, Nile Jarvis.
“That was the far more challenging part to cast for,” Gordon said about Rhys’s character in a press release for the show. “For me, the heavy lifting in the show was really, really making that character by turns dangerous, charming, and even vulnerable.”
Danes stars opposite Rhys as Aggie Wiggs, a grieving writer who finds a subject for her next book in her new neighbor Nile, a real estate mogul who was the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance. The two characters then embark on a potentially deadly game of cat and mouse in the original eight-episode drama.
“Matthew happens to be, aside from also another incredibly sweet guy, a fiercely good actor,” Gordon said. “And I have to confess, not only was I surprised by their chemistry, but I was surprised by how virtuosic he was.”
All episodes of The Beast In Me, directed by Antonio Campos, arrives on Netflix on November 13.
