The TV series Matthew Rhys has always dreamed of making: “I own the rights”
First off, you can’t talk about Matthew Rhys without mentioning The Americans, which is a TV show that a lot of people inexplicably haven’t ever heard of, or if they have, they haven’t watched or have on their ‘to watch list’ but haven’t got around to it, which is unforgivable.
Rhys, along with his real-life wife Keri Russell, turns in an acting performance for the ages across six seasons of a perfectly written, thrilling, intelligent, engrossing and politically astute series that won countless awards but probably should have just won all of them honestly.
It’s like Stranger Things, only packed full of Cold War spies, sex and assassinations and without any demogorgons. It even has the stylish, hit-packed 1980s soundtrack, and so I implore you watch it, that’s all. Now that we have that out of the way, back to the actor from Cardiff, who is about to star in not just a new Netflix show called The Beast In Me from the creators of Homeland and The X-Files, but also earlier this year made an acclaimed new thriller with Rosamund Pike named Hallow Road.
The former stars Homeland’s Clare Danes as a famous author who can’t help herself but investigate when a new neighbour (played by Rhys) moves into her area who is accused of killing his wife, while the latter is a low-budget nail-biter that tells the story of a married couple who get a panicked call from their daughter and end up helping her cover up a car smash.
But one project that Rhys is yet to bring to fruition is a true tale of drug smuggling in rural Wales back in the 1970s, as he told The Guardian: “I own the rights to a book called Operation Julie, which is based on a true story about Britain’s largest-ever LSD ring. It was out of this tiny farm in Wales. They hand-picked these policemen to deal with it and trained them up. They had to grow beards and learn to skin up!”
There was, in fact, a three-part drama based on the affair made in the 1980s on ITV, plus there have been songs from the likes of The Clash in the form of ‘Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad’, and a second book in 2011 called To Live Outside the Law.
As if that weren’t enough, there was a radio drama based on the scandal in 2014 called Julie, and a third book, Undercover: Operation Julie—The Inside Story, which offered a first-person insider account from one of the police officers involved.
Rhys added, “I just think it’s ripe for a long-form drama. It’s so multifaceted. You have the locals, who are like the Greek chorus. You have the hippy idealists, who are suddenly making all this money because they’re basically supplying the whole northern hemisphere with acid. You have the London underworld sneaking in. And then you have the police, who are slowly converting themselves to become hippies.”
One show that Rhys might well be joining, and it would be brilliant to see, is his other half’s big Netflix smash, The Diplomat, which has just finished a third season on the streaming giant. Russell was recently asked if she’d work together again with Rhys for the first time since The Americans finished in 2018, and said she would love to, but that “he’s pretty busy doing a million other things. He’s got, like, five other jobs or something”. Let’s hope the sixth one sees his lysergic dreams come true.
