You would think two Emmy nominations for leading roles in the same year would make the actor Matthew Rhys feel very secure in himself and his career. But as I learned in our conversation, you would be wrong.

Rhys, 51, grew up in Wales, then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, struggled through years of Hollywood fits and starts and first appeared on my radar as the conflicted Soviet spy Philip Jennings in “The Americans” — one of the great shows of the 2010s. In addition to giving a beautifully rendered and critically celebrated performance in that series, he fell in love with his co-star Keri Russell, and the two have been together ever since. Sounds pretty good, right? But Rhys, who comes across as lively and charming in conversation, told me even after that success, he continued to struggle with his self-confidence.

It’s hard to believe that the feeling persists, considering the banner year he has had: Beyond the Emmy nominations, his show “Widow’s Bay” became the breakout hit of the summer, both a critical success and a popular one. His other Emmy-nominated role, in “The Beast in Me,” showed off his ability to be both dark and alluring onscreen, which has become a trademark. In addition to these performances, we spoke about falling in love at work, his deep commitment to his Welsh roots and language — and how the history of his people connects to all that self-doubt.

So, the best description of you that I’ve seen is actually your own. Oh, God. Here we go. Immediately panicked.

You once said that you are “eternally seeking to channel the spirit of David Niven,” referring to the great leading man — who has Welsh roots, I discovered. Can you tell me what you meant by that? I’m always a nervous Nellie: I said the wrong thing! I did the wrong thing! And then I look at Niven, and he was always so quietly self-assured and calm and said the right thing, even when a naked person ran behind him at the Oscars. I just wish I could be that person, and be gracious and effortless.

In terms of his acting, he was a good actor, but I wouldn’t say a great actor. And when I think of your work I think more of the great Welsh actors — Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins and the O.G., Ray Milland, who were brooding, dark characters. Are you saying David Niven in life and perhaps others in work? Absolutely. Richard Burton is on par with Niven, as to who I would aspire to be, because he was the first to be very, very un-Welsh, which was arresting and inspiring.

What is “un-Welsh”? We’re a small country who have suffered for being England’s neighbor, the small cousin who’s always ignored and put into the corner and told what to do by England. Therefore, there’s a great subservience and insecurity nationally. And Burton was one of the first, with this great confidence and hubris, to go: I’m not going to be that. I’ll take Hollywood by storm. I will challenge Onassis for the diamond. To me it was like, Wow, we’re allowed to be that.

You described being a nervous Nellie. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What do you mean? I think that just stems from growing up in a school that was heavily into sports and being the only one who wanted to do acting. Then I went to drama college in London and was the young Welsh person. And now I’m another fish out of water in America. I know it’s the boring actor’s cliché: I’ve never fit in! I don’t say it’s a cross I’ve had to bear. I’ve just never felt that confidence, that self-assuredness that I always wished I had.

You fake it pretty well. [Laughs] In so many ways, not just the acting!

You had early success in a stage play of “The Graduate” on London’s West End, and then you had this period of not being able to find work. Did you ever turn anything down because you wanted to have a certain kind of career? Were you being choosy? I was never choosy. Almost throughout my entire 20s, it was never a choice. There’s only one job I turned down that, to this day, I bitterly regret, which was to play Hamlet. I was 24, and it felt like a mountain I was too young to climb. I was like, I don’t have the emotional maturity to play Hamlet at 24. And now, sadly, the day has passed. I’ll never get that chance again.

You knew that you didn’t have the emotional maturity? Yeah, I remember saying to my agent at the time, I can’t play Hamlet now, I don’t have that in me. And then Ben Whishaw did it at 21. [He was 23.]

Do you think it was low self-esteem? Without question. Any number of other actors would go, Of course I’m going to do it, and I’ll do it well! And I was like, I can’t do that.

You mentioned that you studied at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. What would you say the difference is between American acting and British acting, or the acting that you were brought up in? We were taught by a New York acting teacher. She was from the royalty of New York Acting schools.

So, like, method acting? Yes, that was her ethos, and that was the way we were taught. It was this great subversive moment in RADA history whereby Americans were brought in to teach acting. I loved it because, as much as I was watching Richard Burton, the huge heroes for me were Brando and De Niro and Pacino. So all of a sudden, I felt like I was getting an insight into their world. It was getting away from this idea that [acting] was pretense. It suddenly became very real and — I suppose this is a self-justification for dressing up for a living — more worthy or noble.

There’s a lot of debate now. Female actors have talked about how being a method actor is a male conceit, because men are much more comfortable navel-gazing, and women have to use their brains in other ways. I agree. The term has become this kind of pariah now for bad behavior. And what I loved about the training we had at college is that they stripped the myth from it. They’re like: Look, it’s a tool kit. There’s no self-indulgence, there’s no being rude to people, there is no doing push-ups for a take. If you’re playing Macbeth, you’re not going to become the king of Scotland. We were taught a method, but I’m not in the modern term a “method actor.” I’ve never once stayed in character.

You don’t go home and speak in an American accent? I do sometimes to annoy the kids. Or if I order food on the phone, because it’s just quicker.

I want to talk about your Emmy-nominated roles. Nineteen Emmy nominations for “Widow’s Bay.” Part of what is so unique about the show is this blend of horror and comedy. I saw the casting director recently said that no one knew how good you were going to be in a comedy role, which made me wonder why you were cast. You’d never really done a role like that before. Did you doubt yourself? I met with [the show’s creator] Katie Dippold and [its director] Hiro Murai, and Hiro said: “Look, we’re not playing this as a comedy. It has to be played as a drama, otherwise it doesn’t work. It’ll become self-conscious and farcical, so you have to play it for real.” And I was like, Oh, great! The pressure was taken away, and I didn’t have to think about it being a comedy.

Is that why you’ve steered away from comedy up until now? Because I’ve seen you in roles where you’re yourself, and you’re funny. Well, thank you very much. I also think I have what they call the Celtic lid. I have slightly hooded eyes, like Robert Mitchum. So you don’t have a face for comedy. People think you’re downtrodden and serious all the time. But it’s not something I’ve overtly or consciously avoided. I just think, as in so many times with this profession, you get put into your little category and you stay there.

As in any comedy, you have to be completely committed to the bit, because if not, it seems silly. But this is obviously a fantastical world. So how do you commit to the bit when you’re being chased by killer clowns and horny sea hags? Part of the method I was taught is when you approach a project, your character should have a superobjective. What is the one thing throughout the whole project he desperately wants? So I thought, If my superobjective is “I want my son to flourish, to bloom, to succeed on this island,” every action leading into that superobjective has to be me going, I have to make this island succeed. So it gives you this focused zeal when the madness is around you. And then it makes the playing of it more real.

Do you know anything about Season 2? I can tell you wholeheartedly, I know nothing. I’m not even sure Katie Dippold knows, because they’ve only just gone into the room for Season 2.

This is one of my really big pet peeves as a viewer! We have to wait to know if a series is a hit before it gets picked up again, and then there’s this long lag time, and by that point, you’ve forgotten everything about the thing that you liked. You’re seeing reporting about viewer drop-off for shows like “Beef” and “Running Point” on Netflix because that happens. Isn’t there a better way? There has to be, because this new model is crazy. I’m of the same opinion. You watch one season, then you’re like, Wait, what, how long?

Are you worried about losing momentum? Yes. I just have hope in those editors who do [lowers voice] “Previously on ‘Widow’s Bay,’” but that’s not the best answer.

“The Beast in Me” was your other big hit this year. You play a superrich mogul who is suspected of killing his wife. Have you thought about how often you’re playing a character who’s hiding something? In “The Americans” you were a Soviet spy pretending to be an American. In “The Beast in Me,” you’re a murderer pretending not to be. In “Widow’s Bay” you clearly know more than you let on about what’s happening on the island. Why are you drawn to those particular roles? And why do you keep getting them? Yeah, that’s even more disturbing. I always think when the character has something else going on, it just gives you so much more to play than something slightly shallower. You’ve got so much going on, sometimes in a way that takes you out of the acting, if that makes sense. You’re playing so many things, you start forgetting about the artificiality of it all.

I saw a clip in which you were discussing “The Beast in Me” and you said, Menace and rage is where I like to live. We had a big debate on our team as to whether you were kidding or not. If you look at your career, that’s not untrue. I’m sure the kids will say that’s where I do live, but no, I was making a joke.

Your upbringing seems to have been so happy. You were on the farm and out on the sea and it just seemed like a lovely time. You don’t have some dark origin story. So where does the attraction to darkness come from? It’s in the shadows, the interest lies. I’m a firm believer of that. And I hate to say it, but sometimes I find the rage stuff easy to fake because it’s volume and passion — that’s about it. For men, it’s this weird little tap you can find quite easily.

Speaking of dark and layered roles, I want to ask you about a role you played in the HBO show “Girls” in 2017. In an episode titled “American Bitch,” you played Chuck Palmer, a famous author who had been #MeToo’d for taking advantage of younger women. Hannah, played by Lena Dunham, goes to his apartment after writing about the allegations. And what follows is this incredibly complex performance. Again, you’re playing this sort of charismatic, powerful, deeply manipulative person. And you have this intellectual argument with her about the agency of women and how you have been misunderstood. Then at the end, you expose yourself to Hannah, physically. The look you give in that scene is really quite something. It was amazing watching it again. Can you tell me what you understood about the character then? Lena was incredible. I hope I’m not speaking out of turn, but she kind of explained what had happened to her. So it was drawn from truth, and she gave me the background on where this piece of fictional writing came from in a very detailed way, which helped enormously. And then we rehearsed it like a play, which I’ve never done before. We went to the location and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. I just remember thinking, Wow, we have all this time to get this right, because it definitely needs to be got right.

Were you trying to honor her memory or interpret the character in your own way? Trying to honor exactly what she’d written. But also, she was interested in the real discussion of it, that he couldn’t just be villainized off the bat. She wanted the kind of push and pull of both sides for it to land in a very real place that would hopefully pay off.

What strikes me seeing it now is that it was this moment in time when we were just starting to have the conversation about consent and power and abuse. Lena and the show’s creators talked in the after-episode discussion about how they wanted the role to be nuanced. But watching it now, for me, he’s just a straight-up bad guy. To me, that’s what the look is at the end: It doesn’t matter what we’ve discussed. Ultimately, this is all I want to do. All that quote-unquote discussion and back and forth is meaningless, because ultimately that’s all he wants.

You also got to choose a prosthetic penis in that role. I actually didn’t. I was given the choice and I thought: I can’t choose my own because I don’t know! Somebody else choose it because then I can’t be judged about my choice.

OK, we’re going to do a weird pivot, because I don’t know how to get out of prosthetic penises. It’s tricky.

I saw a clip of you saying in Welsh, “It’s all downhill from here,” speaking about your Emmy nominations. Give me the context. Are the Welsh very pessimistic? You can’t just be like, I’m amazing and this is wonderful? Oh, my God, no. And I would attribute this to all the Celtic countries. It’s almost like an Olympic sport to take someone down once they think they’re above their station. What does my dad always say? “God — if he was chocolate, he’d eat himself.”

It seems to be very at odds with the American idea of “always be selling,” in particular, yourself. Do you struggle with your own success? Yes and no. I have the parrot that keeps saying: [parrot voice] “It’s all gonna fail! It’s all going to go downhill!” I have that all the time. This sounds like a perverse name drop, but Tom Hanks’s motto is “This, too, shall pass.” He says that about everything. You’ve been out of work for a long time? This, too, shall pass. You win two Oscars? This, too, shall pass. I remember after doing “The Graduate” with Kathleen Turner, thinking I was on an ascent. Like, this is it. And then I was out of work for a long time. I realized the entire journey is the roller coaster. You’re up, and then you’re down, and you’re up. So this is just a moment. It’s a fantastic moment, but it’s a moment.

You told The Guardian in 2014 that the most important thing to you is the survival of the Welsh language. It still is. I grew up in the ’80s, when the language itself was threatened. I remember the protest marches and trying to get a language bill. One of the oldest languages in Europe, you couldn’t open a bank account in the Welsh language. It had no status.

I don’t think I truly understand the history of how the Welsh language and Wales in particular was subsumed under British culture. English. They’re like, If we strip a nation of its language, we can dominate. And that’s what they did. They tried to eradicate the language. But as a result, what it did was create a fire in the Welsh to say, You absolutely will not kill this language. And they fought it for hundreds of years. My grandmother’s generation was the generation where they used to have the piece of wood around their neck, saying they wouldn’t speak Welsh. It was called the Welsh Not. The English did this well. They would turn communities on each other. So a child hearing another child speaking Welsh was allowed to put the piece of wood on their neck and then that child at the end of the day would be flogged. This is how they did it. So there was a zeal to my parents’ going: This language will not die. We’ll make sure it doesn’t.

You’ve talked about one of the reasons you find doing the American accent easy, but the English accent hard, is because of that colonial baggage. Absolutely. That’s when I feel the most fake, when I have to do a Southern English accent.

Fake and also distasteful? Yes, because we grew up in our house mimicking that language in a derogatory way, going, Oh, yes, darling, do pass the cucumber sandwiches. So the connotation of it was wildly negative.

You’re voicing Han Solo in the first ever Welsh dub of “Star Wars.” I mean, amazing. Please, please do a scene for me. Oh, my God, what was weird is obviously, they’d had to translate all these things that we’d grown up with, knowing “Star Wars.” I was saying in Welsh things like “pelydr cyrchu ——”

What is that? It’s kind of like “tractor beam.” There were words I’ve never used before, and I was tripping on them. At the same time, it was this wildly familiar thing that I got to do. The whole thing was surreal. And then you go, I can’t voice Harrison Ford!

Did you talk to him about that? No. I’m too scared.

I want to talk about Keri Russell. She’s your partner. Thank God!

You first worked together in “The Americans,” which is one of my all-time favorite shows. What is it like to fall in love with your co-star? I remember at the time going, Oh, no. I wouldn’t advise it. Back in my 20s, I’d done it, and it had ended disastrously and usually doesn’t do the job any favors. I thought, I’m never doing that again. And then in my mid-30s, “The Americans” happens. I was like, Oh, no, this is happening again. And Keri had two kids; it wasn’t something I was going to enter into lightly. But sometimes you can’t fight it. It’s ordained.

Usually our personal worlds and our work worlds are separate. Is there anything tricky about having that merge? Wildly tricky. By the end of “The Americans,” she was pregnant with our child. I’m not good enough or mature enough, because sometimes when we would argue, I’d bring that into the scene and the director’s like, “What is going on? You’re meant to be getting on really well.” So yeah, I found that hard. I struggled with it.

Would you work together again? Without question. One hundred percent. But I want to do something like “Hart to Hart” or “Moonlighting.” Although she’d probably want to be Bruce Willis.

Are you competitive with her? Because my husband’s a journalist, and he’s not competitive with me, but I’m very competitive with him. [Laughs] Brilliant. I’m genuinely trying to think that through properly. No, and I think we’re two very different people, and we have two very different attitudes toward acting as well. She has, I think, quite a complicated relationship with acting. She always goes, “Oh, Matthew’s trained.” I’m like, “What? It makes no difference.”

I saw the actor Samantha Morton say recently that she hasn’t worked at all since doing “The Odyssey,” and it reminded me of what we’ve just talked about, which is those times in your life where you’ve had these fallow periods, where you had to take the Tom Hanks view of this-too-shall-pass. Has this moment right now — nominated for two Emmys, hot show of the summer — finally cemented your status? Do you finally feel safe? I find myself at moments going, Maybe I can relax. And then you go, Oh, that’s the death knell if you do. I’ve just been through the up and down so much, I’m never quite comfortable. And in a way, it keeps you a little bit hungry.

What are you hungry for? Movies to me are still the grail. The Oscars still have the allure to me. That’s another echelon. You always think, especially with the awards, that it’ll fulfill some gaping hole that has been there your entire life. You go, If I just win an award, it’ll fulfill everything, and it does nothing. Whatever hole you’re trying to fill is still very much at the center of your gut.

Is that why you continue to audition? You really wanted to be in the Bob Dylan biopic. You auditioned for a role, and you didn’t get it. Yeah, that’s what drives the need to go and still do that at this stage. And also, if you want something, get after it. Prove to them you can do it. I was kind of relieved that I still had that hunger.

How do you deal with rejection at this stage? I was like, Who got it? And they went, Ed Norton. I was, like, Oh, OK. But it’s terrible. I felt crappy, because it reminds you of everything you used to do. You used to make yourself vulnerable. You used to give yourself all this hope and then you’d be knocked down. It was good. It enlivened me again.

All right, last question. Geography! Capital of Finland!

You talked about having this superobjective in your work. It serves as your motivation no matter what you’re doing. I’m wondering what your superobjective is in life. Well, I mean, we touched on it, because you keep thinking: If I just do this, I’ll feel satisfied. If I win an award, I’ll fulfill something in myself. And I think, ultimately, it’s to do a part where I can look back and go, I’m satisfied with that. That’s what keeps me moving forward: When am I going to do one part that I look at and go, I did it?

Your Hamlet. [Laughs] Yes, my Hamlet at 79 years of age.

And is there a superobjective in terms of the way you live your life? Harking back to your first question about David Niven, I want to get to a place where I just feel calm and confident in myself, where I’m not faking it. When will that come?

I don’t think that you’re alone in that particular struggle. Yes, let us all sail that good ship until we find it.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.

Director of photography (video): Jessica Dimmock