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British actors are renowned for being great villains in movies, like Bond films, all the rest of it.

You know, the blond guy plays the good guy and I play the bad part, the bad guys. Which is a lot of fun. Playing the bad guy is great. And it's the whole British thing. You know, in so many films the bad guy is British. Gary Oldman makes a living doing that.

British actors behave like Europeans; they are also extremely well trained.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It's not as if people don't know what is going on.

British actors come at acting from a slightly different angle. Because a lot of the films are cast out there, they are so used to the angle from which the Americans, and certainly the young guys from L.A., are coming at it, that I think it's interesting for them to find these English actors who maybe approach acting from a different place.

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.

Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.