As TV Lists, Britannia Sails
Willing and So Very Able, English Actors Begin to Colonize The American Telly

By Lisa de Moraes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 16, 2007; M01

This TV season, you can't throw a brick in the prime-time landscape without hitting a British actor.

Nearly one-third of the new scripted series on the broadcast networks' prime-time slates are led by actors from the United Kingdom, including three of NBC's four new fall series: "Life," starring Londoner Damian Lewis as a Los Angeles police detective; "Journeyman," starring Scotsman Kevin McKidd as a time-traveling journalist; and a remake of "Bionic Woman," this time starring Middlesex native Michelle Ryan as the lab-enhanced uber-chick.

And this trend is not unique to NBC. More than a dozen other U.K.-rooted actors are coming to prime time, including Fox's Lena Headey; CBS's Lloyd Owen and Jack Davenport; and ABC's Frances O'Connor, Anna Friel, Paul Blackthorne and Jonny Lee Miller.

"Everybody's going!" gushed Sophia Myles -- her bags packed and waiting for her work visa to turn up -- recently to an Associated Press reporter in London. Myles (she was Isolde in the 2006 flick "Tristan and Isolde") plays reporter Beth Turner on CBS's new vampire private-eye drama, "Moonlight."

Why do the broadcast networks suddenly crave Brits? Because they're better trained, more open to bouncing back and forth between film and TV, can be had for less than an American actor with the same amount of experience (although that will end as of, oh, now), and any actor who's been around the track a few times and therefore has gobs of acting experience in the U.K. still passes the all-important, Broadcast TV Fresh-Face test stateside.

You know, like Hugh Laurie, star of Fox's "House."

"There are some pretty amazing people who nobody's heard of in America, great talent, out there waiting for someone [in the United States] to 'discover,' " said former BBC executive Jane Root, who now runs Discovery Channel.

"That's what Hugh Laurie told people -- you can find someone who has enormous experience and yet they feel like completely fresh people."

British actors say they're attracted by the ticket to Hollywood and -- they insisted when asked at the July TV critics' press tour -- great scripts. Which came as a total surprise to the critics, who'd asked the question and who are fairly dismissive of this year's batch of new series.

"I've had a lot of meetings with [British actors] who come in and say, 'I want the Hugh Laurie career' now," Fox network casting chief Marcia Shulman says.

"They love the role, they love that he's fooling everyone in America -- because he's a Brit and speaks with a perfect American accent and he's a comic, doing an incredible role, and doing an incredible job in that role."

Most fingers point to Laurie -- best known early in his career as one of the "Black Adder" screwballs and for playing P.G. Wodehouse's bumbling Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry's brainiac butler Jeeves -- for triggering this rush to sign British actors to lead roles in U.S. broadcast series. Imitation being the sincerest form of television, so they say.

Since 2004, Laurie has played irascible, unlikable, emotionally damaged Dr. Gregory House, turning that show into the unlikeliest of Fox hits and, in the process, becoming the rumpled middle-aged man whom American women most want to pet, and fix.

"You have to give Hugh a lot of credit," former NBC Entertainment chief Kevin Reilly recently told the Newark Star-Ledger.

When executives at the broadcast networks saw Laurie in "House," "people realized, 'Oh, actors act. They play all sorts of different characters,' " Reilly continued in one of those quotes that make you want to gouge your eyes out when you read them.

Fox credits Shulman for talking them into signing off on casting Laurie, who, sadly, was then known to the American audience as the father of a mouse in the "Stuart Little" films. That group included Gail Berman, Fox entertainment chief at that time, who once admitted her response to the suggested bit of casting was, in fact: "The father from 'Stuart Little'?!"

"Pound for pound, I would say, 'Yes,' " Shulman said when asked whether British actors were better-trained than Americans.

"We have a star culture -- in Europe, it's a profession."

Case in point:

"Journeyman" star McKidd explained to critics at the press tour that his native Scottish accent is "completely impenetrable." So when he went to drama school in Edinburgh, he was trained in a "very middle-class kind of neutral Scottish accent," after which -- at British drama school, "which is theater-based and Shakespeare-based" -- he learned "what they call 'RP,' which is 'received pronunciation,' which is what the news readers over there speak."

And now, he said, he's learned a "West Coast American accent" for his "Journeyman" role.

"I'm from the East Coast," his American co-star Gretchen Egolf prattled merrily when he was through, flipping her hair. "I haven't thought one minute about changing my accent to the West Coast American accent -- you're doing a much better job than me."

See what we mean?

British actors are also far more receptive to the idea of shuttling back and forth between film and TV, says Londoner Paul Lee, who was chief executive of cable network BBC America before being named president of Disney's ABC Family Channel in 2004.

"Britain spends a disproportionate amount, against its economic size, on television. That's not true of movies," Lee said.

"Because television is over-invested in the U.K. and movies are underinvested compared with the U.S., U.K. actors actually are more trained, and more comfortable, to bounce between movie and TV than U.S. actors."

"They've done it for years," Lee continued. "Judi Dench has been in hit British half-hour multi-camera sitcoms and movies for a decade or more."

The U.K. actors cast in the new series, most of whom took the "Whither goest British actors?" question in July at the summer TV press tour, almost uniformly said the stampede to U.S. broadcast series is entirely a coincidence.

"There isn't a pattern. . . . There's not suddenly this season, suddenly some fast-track portal that all these British actors are flying through LAX -- it was purely a coincidental thing," said McKidd, demonstrating how you can look great onstage even with your head firmly planted in the sand.

Reilly, who now heads the entertainment division at Fox, was NBC's Entertainment chief when those three new NBC dramas with British leads were developed and cast.

Ironically, before joining Fox, Shulman was a freelance casting director who was hired, she says, to do a job for NBC in the late '90s: helping cast the series "Van Helsing Chronicles" -- after she suggested they do a worldwide search for their star. "I was fired from that job because I couldn't find that person here," she said. The show was cast with Americans (Dan Gauthier and Teri Polo); it was announced for the network's schedule; it never made it to air.

Now, NBC is leading the charge, with British actors taking the starring roles in nearly all of its new fall series.

"One of our casting people from Universal found her in the U.K.," "Bionic Woman" executive producer David Eick says of the show's star, Michelle Ryan, who'd been in deep hiding for five years, doing more than 300 episodes of the extremely popular British show "EastEnders," among her other credits.

"It was like that old Hollywood story where you're finding someone who no one knows. You're making a discovery, and it really felt like that from the very beginning. Even though Michelle's well known in the U.K., we didn't know her here."

Television folk in the United States also credit HBO's BBC co-production "Rome" with putting great British actors under their noses. David Nutter, director of Fox's mid-season "The Sarah Connor Chronicles," starring Lena Headey, was one of those who took notice.

Seeing "Rome," Nutter said, "people are able to see, 'Oh, look at this person, look at this person -- let's try to get them on this show' . . . and fortunately, Lena read the script and thought it was quite special and we were fortunate to get her."

Best we can tell, Headey had no role in "Rome." But she did star as Queen Gorgo, heroic Spartan woman, in the sensationally graphic flick "300" -- a big hit this past March. "Rome" also changed a lot of British actors' attitudes about doing an American TV series, says former BBC executive Root.

"Suddenly, HBO was out there hiring such a lot of British actors to long-term commitments [for 'Rome'].

"In the U.K., actors pop back and forth among theater, indie movies and TV, and nobody wanted to make a [long-term] commitment for anything -- they're all holding out for their big Hollywood movie," she said.

"I think it's a non-story," British actor Damian Lewis, star of NBC's new cop drama "Life," told TV critics in July, regarding the stream of U.K. actors on new broadcast series -- demonstrating how very little he understands critics in pursuit of a trend story.

Fortunately, he's not playing one in "Life." He's playing an American detective sent to the hoosegow for 12 years for a crime he did not commit, who finally is exonerated and released, paid several million bucks for his time and put back on the force -- only now with a done-time/in-your-face attitude and a passion for fresh fruit.

"It's the center of the global film industry out here, not just the American one, and you've had foreigners infiltrating, I'm afraid, ever since it started a hundred years ago," said Lewis, lecturing like Mary Poppins in dumbed-down terms.

"It's where you can come and do very good work; it's where the most talented people come and it's where they're rewarded well for what they do, whether you're Brit, French, Swedish, whoever the hell you are, it doesn't matter," he said. "And that's why it's exciting to be here and to work here."

That's not how Laurie tells it, though. Laurie says Lewis sought his advice as to whether he should take the lead on "Life."

"He said, 'What do you think? What is it like? Should I do this or shouldn't I do this?' " Laurie remembered.

"My overall advice was that if the show succeeds and it's going to be on the air, it will probably be because it is a good piece of work, which you will enjoy," Laurie said. "If you are not enjoying it, it probably means it's not going to make it anyway."