Compliment in the sense that, generally speaking, British actors have more training and can play villainy without looking like total fools?

Also, everybody knows that villains enunciate more than heroes do.

No, I have no explanation, although I'll offer the idea that perceived social class is also at the root of it. So many Americans hear British and think So Incredibly Cultured, They Have A Queen You Know, and get resentful and all We Are Free And Excitingly Uncultured Heroes, Smashing Free of The Dead Old World, And Did I Mention Free?. (I don't know if this is so for, you know, non-Beeb accents, but historically, Beeb-talk predominated among the actorly imports.)

Maybe because a British character will be perceived to be an intellectual? Couple that with the idea that the US is a rather anti-intellectual country....

I think so. Also, kind of hot.

I think the tradition of Brit villains dates to Die Hard and how AWESOME Alan Rickman was in it, so you can blame him.

Maybe because a British character will be perceived to be an intellectual?

bangs head harder on desk

tries to frame words to express feelings

bangs on desk again

Well, I didn't say it wasn't fucked up.

I was terribly chuffed by how many Brits were in the movie, actually. And not just as villains! Such a delicious novelty. Go Team!

Well, Chris Nolan is half-British, so it's not terribly surprising.

think the tradition of Brit villains dates to Die Hard and how AWESOME Alan Rickman was in it, so you can blame him.

But he was playing a German! Badly, mind you (accent-wise), but still!

But Rickman played the "nondescript, unspecified generic European," in Die Hard, not an Englishman. I'd say Brit villainy dates rather to the early Bond films. Blofeld and Dr. No and Goldfinger and the like.

Yes, but he was awfully good at it.

Those Fanta chicks bellow their theme song so loudly I can't possibly talk during the ad. I could scream, but I think nobody would hear by desperate cry for help.

I hate the Fanta girls. I definitenly do NOT wanna Fanta.

A Brit friend has complained bitterly to me about how the English are always bad guys in American movies. I keep trying to convince him that it's compliment, but I don't think he's buying it.

This is so totally true. All the bloody time. 'We need somebody villainous - quick, let's get a Brit. Or, or at least let's get someone to do an English accent. Yeah. That'll sound evil. And it'll be so satisfying when we kick their ass!'

It's like the US movie industry is constantly replaying the whole bloody War of Independence in some kind of pathetic Oedipal thing again and again and again - watch us defeat those nasty Brits, they think they're better than us with their superior cut-glass accents but we're going to kick their pansy asses into the middle of next week.

Eddie Izzard has a great riff on that, including how French actors are always cast as the seductive, sexy ones.

Yeah. We play bad guys in Hollywood movies because of the Revolutionary War. Yeah, yes, no two ways about it. And the French, who were on your side in the Revolutionary war, they play more esoteric characters. They have characters who turn up and go, "My name is Pierre! I come from Paris. I come to have sex with your family." "Help yourself…because of the debt of honor to General Lafayette!"