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I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.

Like Hollywood movies, MTV and blue jeans, fast food has become one of America's major cultural exports.

So I built my entire career in the United States and that's why it feels like I'm an American actor.

There's an abundance of exposure when you start working in American films. Inevitably you become a brand and that has to be controlled.

I was sick and tired of being an English actor who did a lot of American movies because I was cheap and good.

I've done quite a few big American films.

The great trap for non-American actors trying to play Americans, I think, is to start thinking of American-ness as a characteristic. It isn't. It is no more a character trait than height. It is just a physical fact, and that's all there is to it.

I think the one thing that I've experienced with American films is just that the size tends to be so much bigger, the budgets have been bigger, the size of the sets have been bigger, the number of people working on them is bigger, but that's not to say that I haven't been able to get close to people or develop good relationships.

The American movie, in part because America's a melting pot, the cultural hodgepodge that America makes, generates movies that have appeal across all international boundaries. And that's really not true for most domestic film industries. It's no longer true of France and Italy, less true than it used to be of the U.K.