When I arrive, slightly late, at the small restaurant near Paul Rhys’s home in central London, there he is, all in black, camouflaged against the dark walls, a thick journal in front of him. “I have to write every day or my head explodes,” he explains, putting it to one side. He has 30 years’ worth of material, which surely would make a brilliant memoir. I’m picturing witty asides about great co-stars, while he excoriates himself – and the tale of how a working-class Welsh boy became a posh actor, made some eccentric career decisions when Hollywood beckoned, and is now having a well-deserved career boost as he nears 60. He is great company – unguarded, with a warm intensity. It’s not long before I know how he felt about his mother and that his beloved dog is dying. At one point he says: “Can I ask you some questions?” and I hear myself spilling things I haven’t told my closest friends.
Rhys is in two of this year’s most talked-about films, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and this Christmas will be in the BBC comedy-drama Men Up, a fictionalised account of the clinical trial in Swansea in the early 90s that led to the development of Viagra. People keep remarking on his career resurgence, and he isn’t sure how he feels about it. “You’re just stumbling along through life, day on day,” he says. “I tell you what is really nice – to be working, and to have worked with visionary and significant directors.”
He seems to have enjoyed the buzz around both films. Saltburn, in which he plays a butler of few words but striking presence, has been particularly contentious. “I think [Fennell] made it to be divisive,” says Rhys. “I can’t praise her highly enough.” Napoleon, too, has been controversial, unsurprisingly in France. A French actor friend sent him a text yesterday saying she’d enjoyed Napoleon, in which he plays the scheming Talleyrand. A raised eyebrow and a smile. “Really?”
In Men Up, it was a rare opportunity to play, he says, “my own class” after a career spent largely portraying aristocrats and more than his share of vampires (on both counts, I think it’s his height and ghostly pallor). He is Tommy, a gay man suffering erectile dysfunction. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that as Men Up is set in a more homophobic era, there is some necessary deception on Tommy’s part in order to take part in the trial, and he suffers appalling discrimination.
In preparation, Rhys read, talked to a specialist in sexual dysfunction and spoke to several men. “I spoke to this one guy, who was gay, and especially at that time, the importance of virility in gay life was so dominant. When you don’t have marriage, or the expectation of a long relationship as much as you do now, sex is what your currency is based on. So to be impotent in that world, Tommy feels a failure, not a man. He opened my eyes to the suffering of that.”
Among all five main characters, the psychological impact of impotence is huge. “And I do understand it,” says Rhys. “There is so much pressure on men in these areas. Oh, the importance of the phallus! The dominance of this thing, as if sex is just that, and it isn’t.” For a while, he worries aloud about the influx of pornography, with its giant erections. He once saw some boys laughing at a clip on the tube. “Although it was a joke, it’s going into an impressionable mind.”
He didn’t see pornography, he says, until he was “about 24, I didn’t really know what sex was.” Around the time he was graduating from Rada, he had an image, he says, as “a bit of a player. But I hadn’t even kissed anybody. I was so far away from how I was perceived, and that set the pattern for the rest of my life. I’ve had very few partners. You’re not allowed to be that either – [men are] supposed to be promiscuous, or there’s something wrong with you.”
Rhys describes himself as queer. “That’s another thing that was hard to live with [growing up],” he says. “I’m glad the term queer is available, and young people use it so freely, because I think it’s a truth for many people.” Russell T Davies, who produced Men Up, believes only gay actors should play gay characters. Rhys can see that the argument is “a strong one, that gay men and women in the past were marginalised and not given chances to play anything, could not be seen to be playing straight roles. The prejudice was enormous and the lengths they went to hide their sexuality, thankfully those days are mostly behind us.”
But he adds: “An artist must be allowed to explore. I think it’s the beginning of the end if you can only play what you are. I was pretending from the beginning – I had to be posh, I had to be Beethoven, or immortal. Politically, there is part of me that says give gay men a chance of playing their sexuality truthfully, but it doesn’t mean that a straight man can’t do it.”
Generally, he adds, “I’m against very rigid classifications of sexuality altogether.” Rhys’s most defining relationship was with a woman, the actor Arkie Whiteley, who died in 2001 at 37. It took him a long time to recover from the grief. “Almost the last thing in my mind was forming another bond with anybody. My story is one more of celibacy than anything else, which I’m almost ashamed to talk about, because I don’t know how it happened.” The legacy of an unloving, traumatic childhood played a part. “I think if you weren’t brought up with consistent supportive love, it’s not easy to find it later.”
As a child, growing up in Neath, Rhys didn’t want to be an actor, he wanted to be David Bowie. His mother was a cleaner who left school at 13, and his father worked for a company manufacturing gas pipes. He remembers being taken on school trips to a coalmine and factory, to be shown his future, and knowing he didn’t want that. School, he says, “was awful. I remember the level of abuse and violence, and nothing was expected of us. Hopeless situation. Cruel teachers.”
Home life was similarly unhappy. It was dysfunctional – his parents didn’t speak to each other for an entire year – and neglectful. Rhys played truant for two years and nobody noticed. But he was a compulsive reader. Inspired by some cowboy books, and their stories of self-sufficiency, he forged a letter to the local education authority from his mother, saying she had “a very bright child” who needed to be moved to a better school. It worked.
Rada was a similar story. In London to see a concert, Rhys spotted the drama school through the steamed-up windows of a doubledecker. “I thought ‘I want that, what do I have to do to get it?’” He won a scholarship which, though wonderful, came with a lot of pressure. People from home questioned why he was suddenly talking in a posh accent, but “In those days, if you didn’t come across as middle class, you couldn’t get the leading role.” When he graduated, his mother refused to see him perform. “I’m not coming up there, watching you make a fool of yourself,” Rhys mimics.
Rhys never felt worthy of his place at Rada. “I was terrified. I didn’t look terrified – I never do – but I am.” Even now, he adds. “I live in such fear. If you weren’t brought up with some sense of your own right to ‘be’ – this is where the middle and upper classes are privileged – nothing on the outside is going to change that. I will always feel unequal. On every single job I do, I think, ‘why did they ask me?’”
After Rada, he quickly attained success in Robert Altman’s 1990 film Vincent & Theo, playing the brother of Van Gogh. He and Tim Roth, his co-star, were courted by Hollywood; Roth embraced it but Rhys “couldn’t accept a lucky break. I had to go back to the theatre.” It was “gruelling, intense”, but also fantastic, he adds (he has played both Hamlet and King Lear to wide acclaim). He doesn’t know if he would have been leading man material anyway. “I was always so quirky,” he says. “I could just about be passably good-looking, I could just as easily be grotesque, and I was always happier in the grotesque.”
Rhys turns 60 on Tuesday, though to look at him it seems impossible; perhaps he is more vampire than I thought. If it has been a time of professional momentum, it has been personally too. Previously, “I’ve struggled to know who I am,” he says, but recently it has been becoming clearer as the past has less of a hold over him. So forward he goes. “I’m negotiating how to be an older person,” he says. While he doesn’t want to fight age, he knows that he wants to remain engaged. “So you have to construct a model where you do know what music is about now, you do know who’s making great films. It’s my passion – being involved in something that has a resonance with this moment.”
Men Up is on BBC One on 29 December
