I talked to Matthew for a story I wrote for THR about “American Bitch” and he was talking about how he thought he got the role because both “Girls” and ‘The Americans” share a script supervisor and they have offices next to each other. Is that how it came about or did he come up in discussions? How did he become part of it?
We started talking about who would be the perfect person to play this role, and there were a lot of names standing about, but that’s all part of the process of casting, you get into like, “Who would be good with this?”. For me, what I wanted, was someone who, obviously, was an excellent actor, but also had an inherent likeability no matter what they did. And from watching ‘The Americans'” Matthew Rhys’ character does some truly outstandingly awful things and you’re constantly liking him, so Matthew’s name was someone we all talked about. And then, when we started getting into the nitty-gritty, our script supervisor was like, “Hey. Matthew Rhys is awesome. I work on ‘The Americans’ and I work on ‘Girls’ and I’m telling you Matthew is the best” and it was like, “Oh my God. We were just talking about him for this role” and that is sorta how it happened. You should always listen to the best idea in the room and we listened to our script supervisor. Her name is Kim Delise, and Kim was right. She picked the right person for us.
He’s fantastic and obviously so is Lena. Clearly, there’s the, er, elephant in the room, the big scene where he pulls out his dick in what was a shocking moment for many. How did you come shoot that scene compared to how it was written?
In the draft that I read she didn’t touch his penis, but many of us believed that she needed to in order to really fully make Chuck Palmer’s point. Lena eventually agreed. It’s always so difficult when anyone’s supposed to be naked or there’s penises or vaginas. Any time there’s anything like that it automatically slows the process of filmmaking down to a grindingly slow thing because you gotta close the set and you gotta deal with people being shy at all of this. In this case, we decided to get a prosthetic penis. Matthew didn’t wanna have to [take out] his own penis, nor should he have. But, for me, cinematically I really wanted to shoot it in a wider shot so that you wouldn’t necessarily immediately notice his penis, that you would, in a way, be looking at their faces and then, almost by nature of what Hanna was reacting to, you would then move your eye down to the bottom of the screen and see his semi-erect penis on her leg. It’s such a strange and funny and dark [moment]. And then, of course, she touches it and she gets up and then Matthew Rhys’ has this big grin on his face that is so fantastic. And he’s basically saying, “I won this argument. You may have had a logical discussion, but society has put you in a situation where someone puts their penis on your leg it’s in your programming to touch it even though you know it’s wrong, and I have the power over you”, and that’s what that moment was. In rehearsals, when Matthew did that scene and I actually took a shot on my iPhone which is exactly what he did when we filmed it because it was such a great shit-eating grin. It couldn’t have been any better in saying what we needed to say.
At the end of this episode where do you think it left Hanna’s character?
I set up and pitch that last shot of Hanna leaving the house and all of these women heading into the house, and I’m very proud of that shot. For me, it was deeply important to add that sequence, ’cause originally it wasn’t there, but I wanted it to basically suggest that Hanna may have been able to leave that apartment relatively unscathed. But, that won’t stop men like Chuck Palmer from continuing abuse their condition of power towards people. I look at it as this is a life experience for Hanna that Hanna basically got out okay, even though not fully. It wasn’t a horrible scenario, it’s a lesson learned in a hard way. But I wanted to visually see that that doesn’t mean that this issue is over, or that there aren’t a lot of other people who easily could have gotten … not gotten out in such an easy way as she did.
“Girls” season six is currently available on HBO GO.