What’s the point of being a celebrity if you can’t even go outside, let alone be mobbed by fans or visit late-night talk shows to share gossipy anecdotes or lip sync a song from the 1980s? Sure, being cooped up has been tough for all of us, but what about the stars in our midst? “I’m not a celebrity,” insists Mr Tom Rhys Harries, demurely shaking his pixelated head over Zoom, waggling a dangly earring as he does so. We may just have to agree to disagree with the star of the Netflix whopper White Lines, who currently has more than 76,000 followers on Instagram. First, though, he wants to discuss something far more important than fame. “I’ve been inundating myself with the news,” he says once we sort our connectivity issues. “It’s just fucking mad isn’t it.”

When we speak, national outrage over the tragic death of Mr George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of the Minneapolis police, is developing into a much-needed and long-overdue global campaign for racial equality. In London, Mr Rhys Harries and I – two white people (one 27-year-old Welshman, one age-withheld American respectively) – are reckoning with our own complicity and privilege while we’re supposed to be discussing his eye-catching performance in White Lines. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t want to make this take over our conversation, it’s just so prevalent in my mind. I’ve found it hard to have conversations with people all last week without talking about it, because it’s huge.” In the days leading up to our conversation (and the days following), Mr Rhys Harries has been vocal on Instagram, posting his support of the Black Lives Matter movement and imploring fellow white people to educate themselves.

“If I’m granted any kind of platform with the work that I do,” he says, returning to the subject of celebrity, “and anybody might want to engage with me, then it would be completely remiss of me to not speak about it because it is a white issue, I think. And as a white male I have benefitted from systemic racism. It’s our issue, it’s the white community’s,” he pauses. “We have to sort ourselves out.”

We continue in this vein for about 15 of our allotted 45 minutes, variously nudging each other to move on to White Lines, but it’s hard to make the transition. Finally, with a crash audible over the airwaves, my husband drops something in another room. It feels like the perfect segue. “I’m so used to that shit on these Zooms,” says Mr Rhys Harries sympathetically. And so, we haltingly move on to the topic at hand: a 10-part series that rocketed up to number one in 25 countries on Netflix the weekend of its release.

The series, created by Mr Álex Pina (Money Heist), follows Zoe Walker (played by Ms Laura Haddock), as she works to unravel the mysterious two-decade-old murder of her brother, Axel Collins – Mr Rhys Harries – a DJ who leaves 1990s-era Manchester to try his luck in Ibiza. As Zoe sorts through lies, misunderstandings and drug-addled memories of his friends and enemies, we meet a rather unsavoury cast of characters. Standouts include Mr Daniel Mays, excellent as a DJ/father/banana boat drug-smuggler, who delivers a performance so full of cringey, bad-decision moments that it will lock your jaw right up. Elsewhere, Conchita Calafat (Ms Belén López), the chilling matriarch of an Ibiza club empire, is so dementedly unhinged, you can’t take your eyes off of her – and, also, is she sleeping with her adult son? One of Axel’s friends runs a luxury orgy, another has found enlightenment – everything’s a beautiful Balearic mess.

But according to Mr Rhys Harries, no one is quite so messy as Axel.  “They’re all quite tragic characters, aren’t they?” But the worst?  “Probably Axel,” says Mr Rhys Harries. “I can say that reflectively because at the time I didn’t think he was the worst, but yeah probably him.” At first, we see an idealised Axel through the eyes of Zoe – he’s doting and sweet, a bit of a rebel, but he has dreams. But as the series weaves on, we begin to see that he’s, actually, a bit of a sociopath. Corrupted by fame, surrounded by beauty, things take a turn for ol’ Axel – resulting in his untimely and extremely brutal demise.

There’s one scene in particular that’s – how to put this – very unpleasant to watch. Axel is feuding with a club-owner’s son and they decide to “fuck with” each other one final time. Surrounded by partygoers, Axel is dared to pull out his own tooth. Which he very happily does with a pair of pliers that materialise out of nowhere. While doing research for this conversation, I came across a recent quote from WalesOnline in which he told the interviewer that he had actually pulled out his own tooth for the scene.

“No! She’s misquoted me,” he insists. “I was doing a gag.” I suggest that maybe I just didn’t understand it because I’m still getting the hang of British humour. “I don’t think it’s British humour,” he says, laughing. “It was just me not reading the room. But no, I didn’t pull my tooth out. The dental bill would have been so expensive!”

And so, I’m a little disappointed (but mostly relieved) to learn that Mr Rhys Harries is not more method than Sir Daniel Day Lewis. In fact, it was easy to turn Axel on and off during filming. “I found him really energising to play,” he insists. “He’s almost like a dream, he’s not real, he’s been recalled by different people. It’s like wearing lots of masks.” Masks that get darker and more depraved as the parties get longer. Axel is one man in the first episode and quite another by the end. It’s a feat of character development carried out in just 10 hours of cinematic television.

This isn’t Mr Rhys Harries’s first rodeo, of course. He has several TV shows on his IMDb page, and has worked with Mr Guy Ritchie (in 2019’s The Gentlemen) and Mr Baz Luhrmann (in a short film for H&M). Next up is a turn on stage: before lockdown, Mr Rhys Harries was playing Boris Trigorin in a West End restaging of Mr Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, also starring Ms Emilia Clarke. They went through a month of rehearsals and previews followed by five performances before having to close when lockdown hit. 

“Can you imagine? You think you’re going to be doing it for three months and then it just… ends.” Though he knows the show will definitely be back when theatres reopen, he doesn’t seem particularly optimistic that it will be any time soon.

“I think theatre will be one of the last things to reopen,” he says. “I am concerned to a certain degree about how any live performance – music or theatre – will continue. But financially I’m worried about theatre.”

It may not seem obvious to those who see shows like Harry Potter And The Cursed Child or Hamilton becoming worldwide phenomena, but most theatre operates on excruciatingly tight budgets. “There’s a financial liability to a house that’s not playing at full capacity. I don’t know whether we can go back to the West End, particularly without it being at capacity. But who knows…”

It’s a credit that Mr Rhys Harries can, despite the drawbacks of video chat technology, deliver nearly everything he says with the solemnity and thoughtfulness (he has learnt a lesson, perhaps, from his tooth-pulling joke) of a man who has done his research. But of course, this is the same guy who came to an interview about his hit show, in which he plays a wild-partying DJ in a holiday oasis, prepared to talk about the scourge of white supremacy and white privilege – and who spoke about it with honesty and humility.

“I just don’t think it’s going to go away,” he says of tackling the issue, “and it shouldn’t go away. I was really keen to talk about it. Do you mind putting in the article that there’s a link in my [Instagram] bio to an anti-racism document, it’s pretty thorough. If people – white people – want to engage with that, it’s there.”