Thanks to the readers who sent me this article from the Guardian. The piece (on Hollywood’s distressing tendency to cast Brits as the bad guys) comes complete with the usual Guardian baggage, but it’s worth reading (Derb, you may be an American these days, but I think you will agree that the writer has a point):

“Jesus is usually an American in biblical epics. Judas, meanwhile, is just as likely to be a Brit. In The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus was a Swede (Max von Sydow), but the formula held good for David McCallum’s blond betrayer. And if they’re not playing Judas, then the Brits will be all over the Roman imperial power structure, raining vicious blows down on the heads of Jesus and his 12 Americans.

Heston’s Judah Ben-Hur faced off against Ulsterman Stephen Boyd as the gimlet-eyed Marsalla. Kirk Douglas’s live-free-or-die-tryin’ Spartacus gave Lawrence Olivier what for as the fascistic Crassus, and there was just no reasoning with David Bowie’s Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ. Even in Gladiator the formula was intact, despite the presence of an Australian hero and an American villain. Joaquin Phoenix may be as American as apple pie, but in order to pull off his villainous role he had to be fitted with a lisping English accent to underline his irremediable moral degeneracy…

…From all this it’s a short step to Hitler the Englishman. Was there not a single American actor prepared to play young Adolf in the recent NBC mini-series based on Ian Kershaw’s biography? Of course not, so they called on Robert Carlyle, a grown-up who fancied a challenge. And for Max, a film about Hitler the art student? Noah Taylor got the job. Heydrich in HBO’s Conspiracy, about the Wannsee conference? Kenneth Branagh. You were expecting Alec Baldwin?

And even when it comes to such quintessentially American bad guys as Richard Nixon, they call on us again. Anthony Hopkins will never be topped in the role, but was there really no American actor interested in such a challenging job? Likewise Michael Gambon as LBJ in John Frankenheimer’s excellent The Path to War, or even Emma Thompson as an ersatz Hillary Clinton in Primary Colors. Kennedy is always played by an American, just like Jesus, but Lee Harvey Oswald? Call Gary Oldman… “

Yup.