Top 10 Matthew Rhys Movies, Ranked

There’s a particular kind of actor who does their best work when they’re slightly uncomfortable, when the role asks them to be unlikable, or conflicted, or quietly falling apart. Matthew Rhys is that actor. Whether he’s playing a Soviet spy hiding in plain sight or a wounded journalist who can’t accept kindness, he finds the cracks in people and lives in them. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how much they pulled us in — the moments where Rhys disappeared into a character so completely that we stopped thinking about the actor and started believing the person. Here are his ten best film performances, ranked.

10. The Abduction Club (2002)

James Strang arrives on screen with a grin and a horse, and Rhys commits to the swashbuckling energy of this oddball 18th-century period piece with more enthusiasm than the material probably deserves. Playing a young Irish nobleman who kidnaps heiresses as a marriage scheme (it was apparently a real thing), he leans into the broad romantic-comedy-meets-adventure tone without ever winking at the camera. There are moments where Strang’s bravado starts cracking into something more genuinely nervous, and you can see Rhys finding the human being underneath the costume. The film never quite found its audience, but as an early career curio, it shows a young actor willing to throw himself into genre material before he’d built any kind of screen reputation.

9. Fakers (2004)

Nick Edwards is a fast-talking, small-time art forger who’s always one bad decision away from disaster, and Rhys plays him with a roguish lightness that’s a pleasure to watch. This scrappy British caper never pretended to be anything more than a breezy con-movie, but he brings a real sparkle to the role — particularly in the scenes where Nick has to talk his way out of corners he’s just painted himself into. There’s a charm offensive he runs on an art dealer that’s almost musical in its rhythm, and it’s the kind of performance that makes you wish Rhys had been handed more comedic material over the years. Fans who only know him from his heavier dramatic work will enjoy seeing him in full charmer mode here.

8. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018)

John Lockwood is the kind of colonial-era hunter who believes he’s doing the jungle a favor by hunting it, and Rhys plays that self-righteousness with a cold, unhurried menace. Andy Serkis’s darker take on the Jungle Book mythology needed a human villain who felt like a credible threat rather than cartoonishly evil, and Lockwood delivers that. The scene where he first encounters Mowgli carries a real predatory stillness: Rhys barely raises his voice, which makes the threat feel more credible than any amount of scenery-chewing would. It’s a supporting turn, but it gives the film its real-world stakes in a way the Disney version deliberately sidestepped. The colonial arrogance he brings to every exchange with the local characters adds a layer of historical weight that lifts the whole production.

7. Saturday Night (2024)

Jason Reitman’s recreation of the chaotic first broadcast of Saturday Night Live is essentially a pressure-cooker ensemble piece, and Rhys holds his own in a film that moves at a relentless pace. The movie demands performers who can find a full character in the margins, and he does exactly that. There’s a moment late in the film where Rhys catches news of another backstage disaster and just goes still — no big reaction, just a slight tightening around the eyes before he pivots and gets back to work — and it lands harder than most of the louder performances around him. That small physical choice, in the middle of Reitman’s controlled chaos, is what makes him stand out in a cast full of people competing for attention.

6. Come What May (2015)

Percy is a man carrying grief he doesn’t have the words for, and Rhys communicates that in the way Percy holds himself throughout this quietly devastating French WWII drama. The film barely registered outside Europe, which makes it the most overlooked entry on this list by a significant margin, but the performance deserves more attention than it got. Again and again, he leans into stillness and quiet reactions to let you feel exactly what Percy is holding inside: no big speeches, no tears, just a face doing the work across scene after scene. Paired with an Ennio Morricone score that underlines every ache in the story, his portrayal of dignified, quiet grief elevates what could have been a generic wartime role into something that sticks with you.

5. Cocaine Bear (2023)

Tom is not a man who expected his day to go like this. Rhys plays him with a straight-faced desperation that makes the comedy in Elizabeth Banks’s gleefully absurd creature feature land considerably harder than it would with a less committed actor. Where some cast members lean into the camp and others play it purely for laughs, he finds a register that’s funnier than either approach in ways that actually surprise you: Tom acts like the situation is a real emergency, which of course it is, and that sincerity in the face of absurdity is the engine of his best scenes. Watch the moment he realizes the bear is not going to be reasoned with — the micro-collapse on his face is perfectly timed. Rhys is one of the few performers who understood that the joke gets funnier the less you seem to be in on it.

4. Titus (1999)

Julie Taymor’s audacious Shakespeare adaptation is one of the most visually overwhelming films of its era, and the trap for any young actor in that environment is getting swallowed by the spectacle. Rhys, playing Demetrius alongside Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Chiron, doesn’t get swallowed. He commits fully to the play’s operatic brutality, finding a specific cruelty in Demetrius that goes beyond pantomime villainy: there’s a scene during the assault on Lavinia where the camera catches something cold and unreadable in his eyes, and it’s unsettling in a way that pure theatrical performance wouldn’t be. Watching it now, you can see exactly what he was already doing: something more precise than the material required.

3. The Edge of Love (2008)

Playing Dylan Thomas is a trap for any Welsh actor. The mythology is too large, the accent too familiar, the legend too easy to coast on. Rhys sidesteps all of that by focusing not on the poet’s genius but on his pettiness, his self-destruction, and the specific ways he made life harder for everyone who loved him. He plays Thomas’s manipulative behavior toward the women in his life without softening the ugliness: you see the charm and the calculation operating simultaneously, which is far more interesting than a straightforward portrait of tortured artistry. By the end of the film, you understand completely why Vera and Caitlin both love and resent him, and that’s entirely down to how specifically Rhys constructs the character rather than the icon.

2. The Post (2017)

Before Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks take over Steven Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers thriller, Matthew Rhys opens the film with one of its most electric sequences. As Daniel Ellsberg, he’s making the momentous decision to copy classified documents with the focus of someone who knows exactly what he’s risking. There’s no dialogue doing the heavy lifting here: it’s all physical, all urgency, all the moral weight of a man crossing a line he can’t uncross. Rhys plays Ellsberg’s conviction without turning him into a saint; there’s real fear in the performance, which means the courage reads as earned rather than scripted. He disappears from the film after that opening stretch, but the stakes he establishes in those early minutes are what the rest of the movie runs on.

1. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Lloyd Vogel walks into his first interview with Fred Rogers fully armored: skeptical, sharp-elbowed, ready to write the cynical profile he’s already decided to write. Rhys plays that armor with real specificity: the way Lloyd holds his jaw, the slight lean-back whenever Rogers says something sincere, the almost physical discomfort of being in a room with someone who refuses to be anything other than kind. What makes this performance so affecting is that Rhys doesn’t play the thaw as a revelation. It’s slow, reluctant, and occasionally backsliding, which is exactly how it works in real life. Opposite Tom Hanks, he holds his own completely, and the film’s emotional weight rests on whether we believe Lloyd’s resistance and then his gradual opening up. Rhys makes both completely believable, which is why A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood works as well as it does.

Matthew Rhys has always been more celebrated on television than in cinemas: his work as Philip Jennings in The Americans (2013–2018) is the performance most people think of first, and his run as Perry Mason (2020–2023) proved he could anchor a prestige drama alone. But this list makes a decent case that the big screen has underused him rather than failed him, and the right role, like Lloyd Vogel, shows he can go toe-to-toe with anyone.