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Oscar winning actress Dame Helen Mirren has complained about British actors being typecast as villains. But there's a big wave of British actors in American television, so why is there a transatlantic invasion?The Wire has garnered much praise for its gritty portrayal of social ills and crime in urban American, with cynical Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty at its centre. But how many American viewers know that he is being played by an old Etonian, Dominic West.
The same goes for gangland kingpin Stringer Bell. He's played, with an apparently-convincing sounding accent, by Londoner Idris Elba.
You can also spot British actors in Lost. Naveen Andrews and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje play an Iraqi and a Nigerian respectively.
But perhaps more eyebrow-raising is the regularity with which Britons are recruited to play American characters.
Oldman surprise
House is the best example. Hugh Laurie - perhaps previously best-known for hare-brained, posh, dissolution in Jeeves and Wooster - is now Gregory House, the irascible, eccentric diagnostician.
The show is one of the most popular on US television.
On the big screen there's always been a place for British actors. How many Americans would be surprised to discover that Gary Oldman is not American? And Cary Grant blazed a path many moons ago.
Moreover, anything with a sword-and-sandals theme offers employment opportunities to British thespians. It has often been suggested that American audience expect their Romans to speak like the English. So the HBO/BBC co-production mini-series Rome was people by British and Irish stars.
But the current wave is, anecdotally at least, something more. Well-informed audiences might be wondering why.
Speak to some producers working in US television and they will admit cost is an issue.
West is happy to put it forward for the explanation for his break alongside Elba on The Wire.
Cheap labour
"More value for money that's really what it is. If they wanted someone experienced and I was American they'd pay a lot of money and I'd be better known I suppose. We're cheaper."
English actor James Purefoy, who played Mark Antony in Rome, believes the network of British actors are perceived by their American colleagues as cheap labour.
"We are often referred to in Los Angeles as white Mexicans," he told an audience of British hopefuls at a seminar on how to make it in America.
British producer Andrea Calderwood, who worked on Generation Kill for HBO, agrees that cost is an issue. "American producers are going for the best talent. Obviously there is an element of cost involved.
"Once you become an established actor in the US you can command huge prices so people are looking for fresh talent that doesn't cost that much."
And the accent is not a problem for most trained British actors.
"The advantage that English people have and that I have is that we grow up with so much American television," says West. "We're all used to hearing it all the time and the other advantage is Americans are not used to growing up with television from anywhere else or hearing any other accent so they assume, they are much more forgiving of someone's bad accent."
He believes his turn as McNulty was an illustration of this.
British training
"I mean everyone was convinced I was American even though, my accent it was alright but it wasn't perfect. "Most people don't know anything other than the American accent so they are more forgiving when it comes to people doing their accent. Whereas an American coming here and doing an English accent, we're much more affronted if it's not right because we hear more accents.
"I grew up with Starsky and Hutch and all that so it's much easier for us to learn an American accent because we've grown up with it."
Of course it would be nice to think that British actors are called in because of their training and their solid experience in theatre, television and films.
"Genuinely it's about an acting craft - that British actors have a particular level of training they have, a particular level of technique that they have that American producers and directors are delighted to find," says Ms Calderwood.
There may also be attitudinal issue. Television operates to tight turnarounds and the perception is that British actors are well-behaved and unstarry.
"There's a possibility that we are possibly better in an ensemble or less geared to being a huge star or more resigned to not being a huge star," says West
"Because in America it seems to me that everything is 'you've got your one shot at the top and you've got to make it there, you've got to get there' and in England I think we're more philosophical about that because there's less chance of it here.
"In The Wire there was no star actor, it was an ensemble who were serving the writing and maybe in America agents have become more involved in trying to make a star in whoever was acting in it.
"There's maybe a readiness to be part of an ensemble which it goes slightly against the grain of how the Americans view celebrity and showbusiness."
Authenticity broken
But there is an unexpected factor in the casting of British actors on television, and it's all to do with the way characters are built up from scratch.
When casting for Generation Kill, Ms Calderwood searched across the globe. After much time spent convincing HBO head office, she cast a Swedish actor, Alexander Skarsgard, to play US marine Sgt Brad "Iceman" Colbert.
She believes using a high status actor from the US not only would have been costly but also could have been less convincing for viewers.
"They didn't actually want known actors in the role because it would have broken the authenticity."
To take the example of House, if an actor already big in US television had taken the lead role, or if it had gone to an established movie star, the audience would have been viewing the new character through the prism of the star's previous characters. Instead, with Hugh Laurie in the lead, they just see Gregory House.
It's a particularly important point in ensemble dramas. The point here is that the actors could be from anywhere as long as they're not already familiar, but the British actors have a head start.
Of course, once they're televisual megastars like Laurie, the effect will no longer apply.
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