Catherine Zeta-Jones has said no to the same TV show three times

The Welsh actress said she wouldn’t have been able to walk down the street in Swansea if she said yes to going on the show

Catherine Zeta-Jones has revealed that she’s turned down an acclaimed series three times because of her love for Swansea City. She said that had she accepted the role she wouldn’t have been able to show her face in her hometown of Swansea.

In an interview with The Times, the actor said she’d been asked to be on “Welcome to Wrexham”, which charts the exploits of Wrexham AFC, three times but said there was no way she could say yes due to her love for the Swans.

“I am from Swansea. How the hell can I walk down the street if I’m on Welcome to Wrexham?,” said Zeta-Jones.

The Hollywood actress has previously shared her love for the Championship side when she celebrated the Welsh side’s 2-1 win over Manchester United in 2015 by “adopting” a family of inflatable swans for the swimming pool of her New York home.

However, despite her love for her home country, Zeta-Jones told the newspaper that she has no plans to move back to Wales despite her parents, one of her brothers, Lyndon, and some of her nieces, nephews and godchildren still living here.

Although she looks set to stay in New York, her adopted American roots haven’t stopped her having one regret about learning the Welsh language.

She told The Times: “I speak very little Welsh. I was a precocious, obnoxious nine-year-old who said: ‘Why would I need to learn a language that I can only speak here? When I really need to go somewhere else?’

“It rings in my ears because now, yeah, I speak French, I speak Spanish and all my nieces and nephews and godkids all speak in Welsh.

“When you think of the artists who have come from where I was born — Stanley Baker, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, Bonnie Tyler… There’s something in the water there,” she added.

For the first time in her 50-year career, Zeta-Jones will play someone from Swansea, as Jackie Price, the antiheroine in the upcoming Amazon Prime show Kill Jackie. The eight-part series based on a novel by Nick Harkaway will air on October 2.

Reflecting on being able to use her accent in work, Zeta-Jones said: “People were, like, ‘Thank God she’s using her Welsh accent.’ I think the response was that it’s time for me to be Welsh.”

Price, a former cocaine queenpin turned almost above-board art dealer, is wry, dry and unsettling. “She has no filter,” Zeta-Jones says. “There’s a quirkiness of women in Wales that I love.”