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"English Bad Guys"

So, the American film makers are obsessed with the English playing evil bad guys, the latest being Alfred Molina (ok, so he had a Spanish father and Italian mother, but he's still English!) in Spider-man 2.

Why? Well, some would see it as the gradual demonising of the English (seemingly spearheaded by Mel Gibson) or just a fad, but I think that the English just make better bad guys.

Think about it, all that theatre training, classical texts and background in melodrama makes a perfect boiling pot to create the ultimate bad guy persona for the screen. In real life the evil guys would just be some nobody, but when you have a screen bad guy, you need them to be a little bit more....dramatic, and that's where the English excel in acting.

Think for a minute of the English hero, more often than not they have a dark streak in them, even before it became trendy for the American hero to do the same. Even Bond, the quintessential English hero has that dark side, so where better to find your evil genius or criminal mastermind?

So, far from being a bad thing, let the evil English villain reign, though perhaps Hollywood could offer us a few more hero roles as well...

It's just America.
They don't like people with different accents playing the hero in films, and an American being the bad guy.
250 million people prefer to see their race agaisnt yours (Hey, some of them are still pent up since the Independance wars).

Yeah, Alan Rickman is great.

Shoot the glass.

I was going to say Anthony Hopkins/Hannibal Lecter but he is of course Welsh, but i don't suppose the Americans know any different.

Anybody ever read Essex Boys?

America, look out. The Brits are coming. (although some are already there)

The best brit villain has to be Molina. He'd teach Tobey Maguire a thing or two.

pb wrote:
> Ultimate English Bad Guy?
>
> Alan Rickman in Robin Hood.
>
> The rest of the film may have been American crap, but he made it
> worth watching.

yeah, he was double-awsome in that movie... :)

pb wrote:
> Ultimate English Bad Guy?
>
> Alan Rickman in Robin Hood.

He was excellent in that role

the thing is us brits can play anything really, an americans are so far up their own a$$es that they would never be seen as evil would they?

Dracula

Well, everyone was supposed (listen up, Kevin Costner) to be English in that film, so it had to be a British bad guy.

I couldn't name a specific film, but Gary Oldman has it nailed.