Matthew Rhys: “I still blink hard when the young PAs say, ‘We’re doing this period drama’”

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

The Cold War-era espionage thriller "The Americans," which is halfway through its first season on FX (and airs on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. ET), is not the first series to challenge the audience to identify with unsympathetic characters. But this early 1980s drama pushes American views a little harder, asking us to root for KGB sleeper cells living in suburban northern Virginia as Americans — and see CIA and FBI agents as the enemy. Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, who last appeared on U.S. television in ABC's family drama "Brothers & Sisters" as a gay lawyer (and whose TV brood included Rachel Griffiths, Calista Flockhart and Sally Field), returns to the small screen to play Philip Jennings, a Russian spy, who takes all of his roles very seriously, no matter which identity he's assumed. He is an effective strategist when it comes to collecting intelligence — and a scrappy thug when he needs to be. But equally interesting is the domestic drama within "The Americans": Philip is devoted to his wife, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) — despite the fact that theirs is an arranged, sham marriage — and an extremely protective father to their daughter and son, who know nothing of their parents' secret and past lives. And part of Philip wonders if it would just be better for the family to defect, to buy into the American way of life — which would, of course, mean betraying his country and abandoning his life's work.

“Red Dawn”: Dumbest ’80s remake ever?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:20:00 +0000

If I told you I was making a movie about a small group of child soldiers, who use IEDs and scavenged weapons to fight a guerrilla war against a larger occupying force, what would you picture? The war-torn sands of Gaza? The refugee camps of Somalia? The mountains of Afghanistan?

How about the small towns of rural Colorado? That’s the setting for “Red Dawn,” the 1984 piece of militia porn that pitted a group of American kids against the combined might of the invading armies of Cuba, Nicaragua and the USSR. Led by Patrick Swayze, they lived off the land and harvested what seemed to be a never-ending supply of rocket-propelled grenades, with which they blew up tanks and Soviet-American Friendship Centers.

The film was released in the height of the Cold War, and its ludicrous premise (best summed up as “Hey kids, let’s go fight an insurrection!”) fit well with the rest of the decade’s fear-mongering anti-Soviet propaganda and jingoistic paeans to American exceptionalism. Let’s not forget that this was the same year that Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Salon.com > Reagan

Matthew Rhys: “I still blink hard when the young PAs say, ‘We’re doing this period drama’”

“Red Dawn”: Dumbest ’80s remake ever?