But an experience in Gwydir Castle, the 500-year-old manor house in Snowdonia that has the reputation of being one of the country’s most haunted buildings, made the Emmy-winning star of The Americans a true believer.

The way he tells it, over Zoom call from his adopted home in New York, he and his girlfriend at the time arrived just before nightfall to find the cleaner working maniacally so she could leave before the sun went down.

At first, he just thought it was “a bit” designed to gee up the tourists, but then after observing the owner’s two Irish wolfhounds acting strangely, reacting to and barking at things he couldn’t see, he finally went to bed feeling a little disconcerted.

“Then at two in the morning, I woke up and the room was ice cold, like being inside a refrigerator,” Rhys says.

“I didn’t open my eyes but I went, ‘God, that’s cold’.

And I just remember a very strong tap on my shoulder and, thinking it was my girlfriend, I turned thinking I was turning in towards the bed and I would see my girlfriend and I realised I’d turned out.

“Someone had been next to the bed and that tap will go with me to my grave.” Horror movies had also been a part of his life growing up, although the recognises now that he probably watched some of the classics of the genre such as The Omen, The Exorcist, Amityville Horror and Poltergeist when he was too young.

“They traumatised children and I was certainly part of that gang,” he says.

“Then this slew of Stephen Kings came in, which I loved.

The Twilight Zone, I enjoyed.

I think I had a very healthy dose of it.

I’m more reluctant of it these days – I don’t know if it’s because I have kids or whatever, I’m not seeking that kind of thrill in a way.” Even so, when Rhys’s agent came to him the new horror-comedy Widow’s Bay, created by Parks and Recreation writer Katie Dippold and directed by Emmy and Grammy winner Hiro Murai (Atlanta), his first reaction was trepidation.

Best known for his dramatic work, including gay lawyer Kevin Walker in Brothers & Sisters, KGB sleeper agent Philip Jennings in The Americans and murderous millionaire Nile Jarvis in last year’s outstanding The Beast In Me, Rhys says he rarely gets the chance to do comedy, although he’d like to do more.

“I thought ‘oh God I’ve never done anything like that’,” he says.

“And then when I talked to Katie and Hiro they immediately said ‘look, it’s not a horror or a comedy – this is a very real world, with real characters, we’re going to play for real – it’s a drama’.

And I think that frees you of the pressure of both genres really.

“You’re just playing those very real character-driven situations and the comedy evolves from those situations as opposed to landing gags.

And so you really do feel freed from that.” In the Apple TV ten-part series, Rhys plays Tom Loftis, the mayor who wants to turn the titular town located on a remote island off the coast of New England in the northeast of the US into a tourist haven to rival the ritzy Martha’s Vineyard.

Initially sceptical of the centuries-old curse that the locals try to convince him is responsible for the strange happenings on....