- [on the purchase of his neighborhood cinema by a radical evangelical church planning 'to redeem the arts through Christian discipleship] It's offensive - the arts don't require redemption. The arts exist within a morally complicated zone, unlike an evangelical church which is morally infantile.
- [on his role in The Darwin Awards (2006)] I play a silly drunk rich person who tries to have sex with his wife in his Winnebago and crashes. It's all based on a true story, except that in reality they weren't English. I have a theory that in the US if there's an arsehole in a film doing something stupid they say, 'Make them British, now it makes sense.' If they want a daft idiot nowadays, they just get a British actor in.
- [on making Pride & Prejudice (2005)] Actresses are just professionally lovely, aren't they? Some of the crew are really good at their jobs and also incredibly attractive, which is *really* exciting! ...and that's been joyous... very difficult to focus sometimes. Not on the work, but just on which woman to focus on... So all the men have been blessed by the women on this, for which we are all eternally grateful, I'm sure. They're charming.
- [his theory on why British actors get cast as villains in Hollywood] It's because we are seen in America as baddies as a nation. It's because we were their oppressors once, and they had to fight us off, so the sound of our voices brings all that back and they hear evil. It can't be pronunciation as though anything that sounds a bit different can be seen as negative, it would mean that we'd always have Americans as the villains in our drama, which just isn't the case.
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