Politics & Power Quote by Ian Hart

A polite shrug that lands like a critique of an entire entertainment economy. When Ian Hart says, "I'm not usually attracted to big-budget American films", the key word is "attracted" - not "impressed", not "entertained". He frames it as taste, almost bodily instinct, which lets him sidestep snobbery while still drawing a line between spectacle and substance.

Coming from an actor whose reputation is built on character work, the sentence reads less like anti-American posturing and more like a defense of craft. Big budgets often mean big obligations: franchise continuity, test-audience smoothing, brand risk-management. For an actor, that can translate into fewer sharp edges on the page and less room to make idiosyncratic choices on screen. Hart's "usually" is doing diplomatic heavy lifting; it leaves the door open for the occasional prestige exception while signaling a pattern: he's drawn to projects where performance isn't just one more asset in a corporate portfolio.

There's also a cultural context baked in. British and Irish acting traditions, especially in theater-adjacent circles, still prize transformation, language, and psychological specificity. Hollywood's big-budget machine can treat those virtues as optional features, subordinate to IP and global legibility. Hart isn't attacking ambition; he's questioning whose ambition gets served. The line is a compact way of saying: I'm here for the human scale, not the marketing scale.