Wire star West slams foreigners for stealing roles

Dominic West, the English actor who rose to international stardom playing Detective Jimmy McNulty in the American cult cop show The Wire, has accused Hollywood actors of "stealing" Britain's great heroes.

The 39-year-old Old Etonian (pictured right) singled out Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp and Renee Zellweger for playing British icons. West revealed he was left "sort of smarting" when director Ridley Scott handed Crowe the lead role in his forthcoming film Robin Hood (above left). He added: "I'd love to play Robin Hood but I'd particularly like to play all those parts Johnny Depp plays that are English people like the Earl of Rochester."

Now West has got his revenge on the Australian Crowe by playing the renowned Aussie scientist Professor Howard Florey in Breaking the Mould, a new BBC4 drama about the discovery of penicillin. "I'd never heard of this guy and I just thought it would be interesting to play this unknown guy and then they said he's the biggest guy in Australia... I felt I was striking a blow back by being a Brit playing a foreigner."

Before he found fame as the Irish-American cop McNulty in The Wire, currently showing on BBC2, the Sheffield-born West had played a number of foreigners including the half-Spanish, half-Ukrainian-Russian son of Pablo Picasso in Merchant-Ivory's 1996 film Surviving Picasso, a French detective in Hannibal Rising and a Spartan statesman in the forthcoming Centurion.

It’s not just Hollywood men West is complaining about: he is also upset that the roles of children's author Beatrix Potter and the fictional heroine Bridget Jones went to Renee Zellweger.

"I suppose for someone who made quite a lot of money out of being in an American TV show, I shouldn't moan really, but it does annoy me when Beatrix Potter is played by a Texan." He asked: "What's wrong with our great Kate Winslet; why wasn't she Bridget Jones?"