“The Beast in Me” star Matthew Rhys reveals his inspirations for Nile Jarvis

Key Points

• Matthew Rhys reveals which actors’ work he stole from for his performance in The Beast in Me.

• Roles portrayed by Anthony Hopkins and Joe Morton were on his mind.

• Rhys plays a real estate mogul suspected of killing his late wife.

“I’m just a complete thief at this point.”

Matthew Rhys isn’t talking about any of the questionable characters he’s mastered playing over the course of his nearly 30-year career as an actor. Rather, he’s revealing something about his own process. For The Beast in Me, Rhys had to figure out how to play something new: creepy.

“I read it and I was like, ‘I won’t get this. People don’t come to me for this,'” Rhys previously told Entertainment Weekly. “I have these Celtic eyes. I do downtrodden well, I don’t do megalomaniac or sociopath.” In other words, he said, “I had to persuade them that I can be creepy.”

In the Netflix thriller, Rhys plays Nile Jarvis, a bigwig real estate mogul who has a … complicated history. Translation: Some people suspect Nile of murdering his late wife. So when he moves next door to struggling author Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes), the author sees an opportunity to get through her writer’s block, and it has everything to do with untangling the web of Nile’s past.

As for the theft, Rhys is talking about where he went for inspiration, specifically for Nile’s very still, very unsettling presence. “I stole so much from Anthony Hopkins,” Rhys says with a laugh. “I was reading about him playing [Hannibal] Lecter and he goes, ‘The reason I was very minimal with my movements is because he’s been in a cell his whole life, and I was like, ‘That doesn’t really apply to me.’ Well, I’m gonna steal it anyway.”

Because, as Rhys added, “If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.”

That stillness is a crucial part of Nile’s ability to put others at … unease. Then again, Aggie can seem scared of him in one moment and maybe even friendly the next? “At the beginning, they’ve both endured these enormous moments in their lives,” Rhys says, referencing Aggie losing her son and Nile losing his wife. “And they are attracted and repulsed by each other for different reasons.”

Showrunner Howard Gordon was familiar with Danes because the two had worked together on Homeland. But Rhys was new to him. “He was the epiphany,” Gordon told EW. “He brought something else to it. He’s so charming and funny and charismatic. But he is scary.”

Over the course of the drama’s eight episodes, Aggie unravels the mystery — or rather, finds herself caught in the middle of it as Nile tries to frame her for murder. But with a little help from Nile’s current wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), it’s Nile who ends up behind bars.

But his story doesn’t end there. Instead, it ends with him bleeding out on the floor of the prison after being stabbed. And for that moment? Yeah, Rhys returned to his thieving ways. “I stole that death from Joe Morton,” he says, calling out the moment in Terminator when Morton goes to take his last breath.

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So what if he’s a thief if it makes for a compelling performance? As if coming to a realization, Rhys says, “Maybe what I should do is just stop telling people that like you that I’m stealing these moments.”

Maybe.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly