Interview with "Brothers & Sisters" Matthew Rhys

AE: I follow the show pretty closely and I have a lot of favorite scenes. One of them for me was, early on, you were in a hotel room with Sally Field's character, and you flipped on gay hotel porn, and she was in there and you passed it off as a meerkat documentary.
MR: [Laughs.]

AE: I thought that was a hilarious scene. Are there any particular Brothers & Sisters scenes that stand out to you as personal favorites?
MR: Yes, that one was because we shot it quite a few times, and we had so many different endings. Sally would say so many different things. It's always a shame that, you know …

AE: You could only air the one take.
MR: Yeah, when there's like four or five different ones, and they're all so funny.

AE: Was she [Sally Field] ad-libbing?
MR: Absolutely!

AE: So does a lot of ad-libbing get into the show?
MR: What tends to happen is that at the end of a scene, if they're still rolling, then it does tend to kick off. And in scenes like that, where the end is slightly witty, then there's a lot of ad-libbing. Also there was the one scene where we went into the desert and stayed at the army base with all the soldiers in the bar, and the soldier comes up to me in the bar. That was one where we shot it four or five different ways.

AE: That was a great scene, too. So, one thing I'm really impressed with is how you manage to completely suppress your native Welsh accent. How hard is that for you? Do you work with a dialect coach on the show or do you pretty much have the accent down pat now?
MR: No, no, I still have to put the hours in on the accent. It still manages to flip me and throw me. But we get a dialect coach that puts all our words down on a CD for us, so I'm continually working on it. It's the rhythm and the cadence and the intonation rather than the actual sound that is always tripping me up. And the emphasis on all the wrong words that make you stick out sometimes.

AE: The show really seems to have a political edge to it, with Calista Flockhart's character being a conservative political pundit. Were you into politics before you joined the show, and did your involvement in Brothers & Sisters make you want to get more involved?
MR: Obviously not with American politics. But I was very happy when I read the pilot and subsequent episodes where they do put in thought-provoking scenes or statements.