Matthew Rhys on Perry Mason’s Triumphant Season 2 Makeover

A few adjectives to describe Matthew Rhys’s portrayal of Perry Mason, the second season of which wrapped Monday night: Sad, tired, righteous, and certainly irascible—as Assistant DA Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk) wonders about our sour antihero in the season premiere, “Does everyone feel Mason hates them, or just his friends?” Throw each of these descriptors back at Rhys, though, and they’ll elicit a knowing giggle. “That’s my wheelhouse!” the Emmy winner says over Zoom. “It’s a state very close to my heart, that kind of melancholy sadness. I’m like, that’s how I live 24/7. It’s not a stretch to me!” 

The big shift this year occurred as the HBO drama welcomed some heavy doses of acerbity too. “They did say, ‘In season two, we want to open up that humor in him a bit,’ which concerned me slightly,” Rhys says with a smirk. “But just to see the sarcasm that sits so easily on his shoulders—it’s how I live my life.”

The second season of Perry Mason, which HBO initially ordered as a limited series, emerged as an unlikely watercooler smash these past few months, its comfort-TV procedural stylings enhanced by rich noir atmosphere, nuanced characterizations, and a stacked ensemble of top-shelf character actors. As a followup to 2020’s debut season, which was a hit but met with more mixed reviews, season two is sunnier—both literally, in the expansive ’30s Los Angeles locations, and in its protagonist’s new outlook. As the season begins, Mason has a bona fide law practice and a case that takes him and partner Della Street (Juliet Rylance) through the depths of conspiracy and absurdity. 

Rhys’s utter affinity with every aspect of this character is evident both in his performance and in our conversation about the surprising success of this encore season. (Warning: Spoilers about Monday’s finale follow.) “Matthew is so incredibly funny—he’s got that inside of him,” says Michael Begler, co-showrunner of season two with Jack Amiel (The Knick). “And I feel that a show needs to breathe—if you’re just pounding it into somebody all the time, it’s exhausting.”

The relatively upbeat season saw Perry, Della, and friends untangle the mysterious murder of Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), an oil scion with a very bad rap around town. Our heroes wind up defending two Mexican American brothers, Rafael and Mateo Gallardo (Fabrizio Guido and Peter Mendoza), who’d irrefutably pulled the trigger on Brooks—the question is why, and who put them up to it. A chain of red herrings and conflicting motivations lead to baroness Camilla Nygaard (Hope Davis), a business rival, as the big bad. “One of the earliest photographs that I saw while doing the research was of a couple on Venice Beach with this forest of oil derricks in the background,” says Begler. “I was just so taken by that—like, holy shit, this is an oil town. Imagine the power and the wealth that’s behind that.” 

Perry’s shady tactics are successful enough to get Camilla caught and one Gallardo brother off—and, uh, illegal enough to get himself thrown in jail for a bit, marking our final shot of the season. The mood is strangely, appropriately content; maybe even a little comic. “To get to that final image of a guy who is now probably at his best as a lawyer, and as a human being, having done right by his clients, sitting in a jail cell—we just love that irony,” says executive producer Susan Downey. “It feels so perfectly Perry Mason.” 

This feels like the season that the show figured out exactly what that means. The initial run of episodes, developed by creators Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald (neither returned for season two), nicely set the case-a-season, noir-drenched template for Perry Mason, adapted from the character originally created by author Erle Stanley Gardner (and popularized in the 1957 series). Yet it also built toward Perry’s establishment from PI to lawyer, playing like a kind of prestige origin story. Here in season two, we got to see that legal operation in full effect, from the man himself leading the new firm to the vibrant worlds of those with whom he joins forces. Della begins a passionate affair with screenwriter Anita St. Pierre (Jen Tullock), while ex-cop Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) proves himself anew as he works alongside Perry for justice. 

But of course, Rhys’s commanding, tragicomic turn remains the grounding force here. Nobody does downbeat crime-solver better. He rides his motorbike and endlessly chases down leads. He gets into the most gloriously pathetic fistfight with Shea Whigham’s frenemy, Pete. “Shea was smoking so hard,” Rhys recalls of that season highlight. “I was like, ‘Dude, stop smoking those cigarettes.’ It was, like, 97 degrees. It was so hot. We’re smoking and we’re fighting. At the end, we both wanted to puke.” 

Into the wee hours of the night, Perry slumps around a whole lot too. “I worked on my body language to look kind of beaten,” Rhys says. “I wanted his shoulders to be slumped a little more, his heels dragged a little more. Just an overarching sense of defeated. That physical energy only changes really when the momentum gathers.” It’s no wonder, then, that Perry finds true peace only in that jail cell, after a job well-done-enough. Or why Rhys’s work builds to an unexpectedly rousing place in the finale’s closing arguments, as Perry orates the season’s themes concerning what justice actually looks like, between the “haves and the have-nots,” as Begler puts it. “He has a very basic but intense sense of right and wrong,” says Rhys, who’s also an executive producer. “There’s an unsentimentality to him.” 

Rhys reveals that the closing-arguments courtroom scene went through “many, many different versions.” He and the producers would watch Paul Newman in The Verdict, which Rhys calls “the best version of Mason, right there.” The actor kept pushing for something a little smaller, subtler. “It was usually me going, ‘No, less, less. He can’t deliver some kind of dramatic number at the end,’” Rhys says. “It has to be true to who he is from episode one of season one. It was a lot of holding back.” 

That balance—of honoring how Perry Mason began while pushing it in its second season—haunted Begler as he and Amiel got to taking over showrunning duties. “It was very intimidating,” he says. “It’s an aircraft carrier—there’s so much behind it.” The production is deceptively massive. Rhys remembers coming onto the show shortly after wrapping The Americans, the beloved FX drama on which he’d often film an episode within seven days. He learned that a Perry Mason episode takes three to four times that. “I was like, What the fuck are we waiting for? What the fuck is going on?” Rhys says with a laugh. “I was like, I’d have shot two, three scenes by now. I had to slow my own brain down and kind of go, Okay, this is the pace. It’s a big show.’”

Indeed, it’s an undertaking. You see that in the exacting cinematography and lighting, which not only recreates a period and a world, but an era of filmmaking; in Terence Blanchard’s gorgeously transporting score; in the remarkable company of actors, from Hope Davis’s imposing grandeur to Paul Raci’s ruthless tycoon; and in the range of story lines, which boldly explore racial and sexual tensions as a core part of the show’s tapestry of how intractable systems keep certain people down. The romance between Della and Anita marked a sweet, sexy highlight for viewers. “We won it in casting,” says Downey. “The minute we saw them together, we just knew it was perfect.”

Will the renewed word of mouth be enough to secure a third season for the HBO drama? While there’s some spilling on what would come next—don’t count out a Camilla return, but expect a new case to kickstart a new season and Perry to have finished out his brief sentence—Begler has some ideas to further build out the Perry Mason LA lore. “There are so many pockets of this city that have not been explored and go against expectation,” he says. And one senses, talking to Rhys, at least, that the feeling is they’re just hitting their stride. Or maybe that he’s just having too much fun to stop. “The motorbike was fun. The horses were fun. Fighting Shea, swimming in the ocean, being on boats—it was a lot of fun. Like a Boys’ Own adventure for six months.” All thanks to Perry Mason. Who knew?

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