Matthew Rhys brings Dylan Thomas back to life.
By Barry Didcock

EVEN today, half a century after his death, Dylan Thomas casts a shadow over Wales and the Welsh. For actor Matthew Rhys, growing up in Cardiff in the 1970s and 1980s, immersion in the poet's work came early: he was dunked in Thomas's words as though they were a baptismal font and he a yelping newborn.

"I was very young when I first became aware of him," says Rhys. "As a Welshie, he's in your psyche from a very early age. And he died the day after my birthday as well, which always used to be mentioned when I was a kid."

Travelling to their habitual summer holiday spot in west Wales Rhys's family would pass Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, where Thomas lived from 1949 and where he wrote one of his most famous poems, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. It's still one of Rhys's favourites.

Then, before he was even at senior school, there was a theatre trip to see Under Milk Wood. "It's a sort of rite of passage for every Welshman," Rhys laughs. Years later, Rhys performed a segment from Under Milk Wood as a budding actor auditioning for RADA. "The guy interviewing me said, That's rather an obvious choice for a Welshman isn't it?'. I remember being shocked in a way because it had never occurred to me that it would seem obvious. To me it was just a beautiful piece."

Understandably, then, Dylan Thomas and his poetry are stitched into Matthew Rhys's life. More curiously, Rhys has now seen himself stitched into Thomas's life - or at least into a film version of it.

In The Edge Of Love, which opens the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Wednesday, Rhys plays Thomas during the period of the second world war, when the poet was alternating between working for the BBC on propaganda films and creating the verse that would form the collections New Poems (1943) and Deaths And Entrances (1946). The film begins in London during the Blitz then moves to New Quay on Cardigan Bay, where Thomas lived in a ramshackle bungalow he once referred to as "a wood and asbestos pagoda". It culminates in the celebrated trial of a neighbour of Thomas's, Captain William Killick, who was charged with attempted murder after he machine-gunned the poet's house.

Sienna Miller, who once dated Rhys, plays Thomas's temperamental and long-suffering wife Caitlin. Kiera Knightley is Vera Phillips, a childhood friend from Swansea with whom Thomas has an unusually strong bond and who he re-encounters in a London pub, where she is working as a singer. Killick, who marries Vera but becomes riven with jealousy over the nature of his wife's relationship with Thomas, is played by Cillian Murphy. Pubs feature heavily, poetry too.

The film is directed by artist and filmmaker John Maybury, who worked with Derek Jarman earlier in his career and who is attracted to charismatic but difficult creative spirits. In Love Is The Devil, Maybury cast Derek Jacobi as the painter Francis Bacon in an unflinchingly bleak portrait of a not very pleasant man. In The Edge Of Love, he revisits that same 1940s Soho demi-monde, a world of bedsits and tap rooms, where you wash in a sink and where breakfast consists of a roll-up and a cup of watery tea. Or, if you're lucky, whisky.

"John is drawn to the dark complexity of characters and I totally get that, it makes for a more interesting watch," says Rhys. "Thomas was so multi-faceted. He was an absolute genius. He wrote some of his best work when he was 19 but he was extremely spoilt by his mother as a child and that carried on into his adult life. But people forgave him because of his huge charm and the talent he had."

Maybury told Rhys early on that he wasn't making a biopic or a documentary. Nor was he particularly bothered about whether or not the role of Thomas was taken by a Welshman. In fact the film, scripted by Knightley's Scottish playwright mother Sharman MacDonald, is based in part on a memoir written by a member of Phillips's family and its emotional drive comes as much from the relationships between Caitlin and Vera, and Vera and Killick, as it does the Thomas and Caitlin bond.

Adding another familial connection is the fact that producer Rebekah Gilbertson is the granddaughter of Vera Phillips and William Killick - not that Rhys knew that when he auditioned for the part.

"Throughout the entire process she didn't say anything and then she just dropped it on set," he laughs. "I fell off my chair. We were filming in the house next door to where the shooting happened, literally in the same field. The courtroom was the same one where the trial took place. And I remember being absolutely dumbfounded as to what she was saying: that it was her granddad that did all this."

Whatever the film's true focus, the fact remains that Matthew Rhys is playing Dylan Thomas, a literary giant with a reputation to match. Accordingly both he and Maybury wanted the character to look and feel real.

Bizarrely, there is no footage of Thomas, only a still from a film which has been lost. "YouTube let me down," Rhys laughs. Instead he prepared for the role by digging out his recordings of Thomas orating, and re-reading books about the poet, looking particularly for other people's opinions of his character and physique. He even spoke to Thomas's daughter, Aeronwy, now in her mid-60s. She had a small part in the film, though sadly it was cut.

"I spoke at length with Aeronwy, bless her. She gave me a couple of hours and I picked her brains. But she was young when he died. She has some very vivid memories of him, though, but it was the little hints that helped me, the things that she remembered, like him being really slow moving, and never seeing him without a cigarette." Aeronwy, he says, recalls her father moving like "a slug".

One aspect of Thomas's character that Rhys and Maybury did agree to drop was his distinctive voice. "It's weird because a lot of people in Wales have a very strong idea of who Thomas was and who he is to them, and not that many people will have listened to him orate," says Rhys. "So when I say I'm not doing the plummy accent, people go, What plummy accent?' A lot of people think he had a Welsh accent."

Thomas didn't but Rhys does. His accent - low, Welsh, musical - belongs more on a pub landlord than a poet schooled in the dark arts of BBC elocution so, while it has been tempered and flattened, it never sounds as antiquated as Thomas's would to modern ears. Both director and actor were keen to avoid what they call the Capote Trap: Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Breakfast At Tiffany's author Truman Capote won him an Oscar but was criticised in some quarters for the very thing the critics loved: its verisimilitude. Hoffman perfectly captured Capote's unusual speech patterns and mannered voice but cinemagoers found it a turn-off.

"Thomas was so plummy and so much of a specific era that to speak like him would alienate a modern audience," says Rhys. "It would also seem as if you were acting badly in a modern film. So what John wanted was a toned down version of that."

The look, though, is perfect. Rhys put on a stone and a half to play Thomas and, with his wig on, his crumpled suit arranged just so, and his eyes twinkling appropriately, he is utterly believable. Already aware of the responsibility he carried and nervous at the prospect of doing justice to the role, Rhys found the first day of filming a startling prospect. It wasn't made any easier when he caught his reflection in a full-length mirror.

"I was like, Holy Shit'. It was a weird feeling. Dylan Thomas is someone I'd grown up with, he's so iconic, you've seen the iconic pictures throughout your childhood and adult life and all of a sudden - there I am with a Woodbine in my mouth".

Along with co-stars Miller and Knightley, director Maybury and screenwriter Sharman MacDonald, Rhys will attend the UK premiere in Edinburgh this week. It will be a flying visit as he currently lives in Los Angeles where he has a leading role in the award-winning drama Brothers And Sisters, one of several British actors working in US television series.

"I'm sort of loving it now," he says of Los Angeles. "You can spend a long time hating the place but that's just a waste of energy really. It's like anywhere, if you've got good friends and the rest of it you can turn it into anything you want. I see the other British actors all the time and even more so we have a good little Taff pack out here, with myself and Ioan Gruffudd, Andrew Howard and Michael Sheen. There's a good group of Welsh actors."

One Welsh actor who isn't in Los Angeles is Sienna Miller's boyfriend Rhys Ifans, though if tabloid rumours are correct, he may be in Edinburgh this week instead. One newspaper reported recently that Ifans and Miller had argued over the actress's continued friendship with Rhys and that Ifans had said he wanted a face-to-face confrontation with the pair.

"I'm not sure if that's all true and if he said all that," says Rhys resignedly. "It sounds like British tabloid journalism at its glorious best."

It also sounds like the plot line from The Edge Of Love. So what would Dylan Thomas do? Rhys laughs, happy to be back in character. Being "the least physical person in the world", he says, Thomas would calm the situation with "a magnificent, witty put-down or comeback". Then, confrontation avoided, he'd head for the pub until his tea was out.

The Edge Of Love screens at Cineworld, Edinburgh, on June 18. It is released nationwide on June 27