Steven Fry, 8-foot-tall gay supergenius and former comedy partner of Hugh Laurie, has resisted the temptation that Laurie fell to. Yes, Fry remains British. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a few nice things to say about the colonists.

“I’ve always believed Americans have one huge, ready-made gift when it comes to acting in front of a camera – the ability to relax. [Take] the supreme relaxed authenticity of a James Stewart or a George Clooney compared with the brittle contrivances of a Laurence Olivier or a Kenneth Branagh, marvellous as they are.”

Yes, we do have this. It’s disturbing to hear this coming so soon after he filmed a cameo in BONES, the Fox forensic drama. Those guys aren’t just relaxed, they’re sleepwalking. Still, nice.

In the Radio Times, the actor asked whether US audiences were “fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there… I mean, would they notice if Jeremy Irons or Judi Dench gave a bad performance? Not that those two paragons ever would, but it’s worth considering.”

My own feeling is the British actors has skillz. I mean, technical skills. They actually learn techniques, man. We just sort through a room of auditioners, pick the ones who we’d f**k, and hand them scripts. It’s not that we’re relaxed – we’re not acting because we don’t know how. Like in all other things American, we succeed by just blundering in, making stuff up, and relying on our sheer charisma to carry us through.

By the way, did you see Irons in THE TIME MACHINE? He was even good in that. And that sucked.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 12:29 am and is filed under Acting, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.