Sophia Soto
Matthew Rhys stars in The Beast in Me, which offers audiences a front-row seat to a deadly game of cat and mouse between acclaimed author Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) and her new neighbor, Nile Jarvis.
Aggie finds an unlikely muse for her next book in the successful and powerful real estate mogul who was the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance. As the story unravels, so does the truth behind what actually happened.
“Claire and I always discuss the intrigue they have in each other, and Claire said it far better in that they’re an image of their shadow self with different variants. Also, they both come with a very kind of vibrant backstory. They already know a lot about each other. Nile, having read about her relationship with her father and then, obviously, all the press stuff that she knows about Nile, so they both come with baggage,” he explained. “You’re already into the cat-and-mouse game with them when they meet. There’s already a kind of dense subtext when they meet; they’re both saying, ‘I know shit about you, and you know shit about me, but you don’t know me at all.’”
In the end, Nile is killed in jail by a fellow inmate, arranged by his uncle Rick. But the final scene of Nina (Brittany Snow) looking down at their son leaves viewers with a haunting question: is the beast in you passed down to the next generation?
“The one thing I was interested in him as a character, and the kind of research I did on ‘psychopaths,’ is whether it is kind of formed or can it be genetic? And there’s an argument for both,” Rhys shared. “You have to be predisposed to be able to do this, but if a mitigating set of circumstances magnified that, then there’s opportunity for it to happen. So to me, that kind of final cliffhanger is like, oh, that’s very interesting because it’s the sins of the father again.”
“That’s the gold for an actor; that’s where the interest lies in the gray areas, where you’re like, was that circumstance? Was that genetics? What was that? For me, the interesting stuff is always the motivation. What makes this person do what they do? And so, you can kind of go back. You can look at their past. There’s any number of mitigating factors, and why in this moment do they all align in this one millisecond so that these people do what they do? This show had that by the bucket load, so it was just gold to mine, to dig, and to kind of figure out. It’s like this giant puzzle.”
Watch Awards Radar’s full video interview with the actor below, where we discuss why his interest always aligns with the viewer’s, which scene helped him understand Nile, the importance of the flashback episode, his character’s fate, dancing to Psycho Killer, and much more.
All episodes of The Beast in Me are streaming on Netflix.
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