· Image Search

When you hear the phrase "British actor" (or "actor whose passport indicates he was born somewhere in the United Kingdom" -- okay, emailing sticklers?), the image that leaps most readily to mind is that of a stiff-backed prig in a morning coat and cravat, scowling on a moor. They're clean-shaven and well-groomed, with impeccable manners and rigid restraint. The harshest piece of dialogue they have to deliver is something along the lines of "Please pass the pork," and may be followed by "I deeply regret my impatience; I pray you might pardon me." You know -- they're all classy and shit. They're the kind of dudes that, if they knew they were in the same professional category as Rhys Ifans, might be horrified enough to hold their their embroidered handkerchiefs delicately up to their noses (the old-timey upper-class British equivalent of throwing up in their mouths).

Rhys Ifans is a different kind of British actor -- the kind who should be playing slumping deadbeats in skintight t-shirts and jeans, smoking on a stoop. Since his breakthrough role -- Hugh Grant's roommate Spike in Notting Hill -- Ifans has embodied Britain's rough, messy, louche, modern man; he has a sunken chest, nicotine-stained teeth, a dirty string vest, and no job, sure, but he's good for a fun, if grubby night, as long as you understand that he's going to say he'll get the next round of pints, and then "happen to be" in the loo or out having a fag when the barmaid actually expects someone to pay her. Oh, and he'll step on your foot when he's drunk, and it'll really kill, because he'll be in Creepers.

Ifans performed slight variations on his Spike persona in The Replacements, as a sloppy doofus of a football (soccer) player hastily imported to play the American version in the middle of a players' strike; it's hard to remember him in an ensemble that also included Jon Favreau, Orlando Jones, and David Denman (Roy from The Office!), but what we recall is that, even under his ugly blond shag, he's strangely handsome. Of course, he's even more strangely handsome in Human Nature as Puff, a boy raised as an ape, who falls in love with an extraordinarily hirsute woman...more or less as one might expect. And he was probably perfectly diabolical in Little Nicky as a son of Satan -- one of the mean ones, not the one we're supposed to sympathize with (...we're guessing? We don't know; the only fact about that one that we have at our fingertips is that it killed New Line or something).

Though Ifans has, in recent years, transitioned from tertiary weirdo to romantic lead (mostly in movies for Britons, by Britons, like Danny Deckchair, Enduring Love, and Once Upon A Time In The Midlands -- movies that require a working knowledge of Geordie accents to get through) in movies set in the present day, he does occasionally recognize his British birthright by appearing in period pieces: for instance, Vanity Fair -- not as the dashing, super-hot cad Reese Witherspoon would ruin her life for, but the nice guy everyone craps on. And this month finds him making (we hope) some decent coin in the misbegotten Hannibal Rising, alongside other performers who should know better, like HBO all-stars Dominic West (using his real accent, perhaps) and Kevin McKidd. What purpose someone named "Grutas," as Ifans's character is called, could possibly serve in turning a well-born young man into a cannibal, but as long as he wasn't actually the person who named the kid "Hannibal," for God's sake, he can only possibly deserve half the blame.