Personally, I love to cover the ongoing and years-long debate in the UK about posh actors versus working-class actors. British society and media is so classist, and the whole “we’re proud of people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps” thing doesn’t really exist to same extent as it does in America. Like, in America, if someone with a poor background makes it to Hollywood, they’re celebrated just like everyone else. Think… Viola Davis, who talks about poverty, for sure, but that’s because she’s starting the conversation. But in the UK, if someone working class “makes it,” they’re reminded of it constantly in interview after interview. Meanwhile, all of the posh actors have to constantly defend their poshness. In the past, we’ve covered many interviews from Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne about their poshness… and now it’s time for Tom Hollander, who is costarring with Hiddleston in The Night Manager.

Actor Tom Hollander has said the preponderance of high profile TV and film roles going to privately educated stars such as Benedict Cumberbatch is down to fashion not privilege. The Rev and Gosford Park star said there used to be lots of leading actors who were Scottish, Welsh or “working class heroes” but now it was “fashionable to sound posh”.

Hollander said: “When I started in the profession there were very visible actors who were Scottish, Welsh or regional. Lots of working-class-hero leading actors – it was not fashionable to sound posh. Now I’m middle-aged it’s fashionable to sound posh if you are the generation behind me,” he told the new issue of Radio Times.

Asked about the perceived dominance of the acting profession by public schoolboys such as Sherlock star Cumberbatch, Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne and Damian Lewis, Hollander, who was educated at Abingdon public school, said: “Isn’t it just that three actors who seem to have gone to public school are getting highly visible work? Drama schools say if arts funding is cut people can’t afford to go, but I didn’t go to drama school.”

Hollander said contemporary Britain did not face the same class issues as those portrayed in Doctor Thorne or other Fellowes dramas such as Downton Abbey or Gosford Park (in which Hollander also appeared).

“The barriers most people were facing in that period just don’t exist now,” said Hollander. “There are vestiges, but it’s nothing. Things are not as stratified and regimented as they were then.”

[From The Guardian]

I actually think Hollander has a point, in that he’s trying to say that this is cyclical. When he was coming up, it was cool to be working class and sound working class. Right now, it’s cool to sound like you went to Eton with Prince William. Maybe in ten years, it will be cool to have a working-class Welsh accent. But! I do think there’s a larger problem – and I’m merely an outsider looking in with this – of accessibility for working class actors in Britain. As much as Cumberbatch, Hiddleston and Redmayne want to deny it, their economic privilege helped their careers in enormous ways. And for all of that poshness and education, Hiddleston still didn’t know that you’re not supposed to pee on a jellyfish sting.

Photos courtesy of WENN.