Wealth & Money Quote by Mackenzie Crook

Self-deprecation is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, turning the stale celebrity wealth question into a bit about devotion, dependency, and domestic terror. Crook opens by stripping away the expected trophies ("car", "house") so he can reframe status around something messier and funnier: a marriage that functions like both sanctuary and hostage situation.

The line "I've got a wife, but I didn't pay for her!" is the crucial pivot. It's a punchline built on rejecting a transactional view of relationships while admitting that people still talk about partners like acquisitions. The joke flirts with the language of ownership just long enough to swat it away, letting him appear principled without ever getting preachy. It's also an actor's trick: disarm the room by anticipating the cynicism, then redirect it.

Spending "all my money on my glorious wife" plays like chivalry with a wink, an exaggerated devotion that signals affection and absurdity at once. "Glorious" is deliberately over-the-top, the kind of word you use when you're performing love as much as feeling it. Then the final image - "She's here with a knife at my throat!" - snaps the sentiment into farce. It externalizes a familiar truth (marriage changes your autonomy, your budget, your priorities) as slapstick menace.

Context matters: Crook's comic persona often leans awkward, earnest, slightly cornered. This reads like a stagey interview riff designed to humanize him: not a rich actor, just a guy humorously terrified of the person he most adores. The subtext is simple and modern: intimacy is expensive, but the expense is the point.