Paul Bettany's Diary

I had Christmas with my family in Vermont. We have a beautiful house in the Green Mountains and every year I fill it with a sometimes uncomfortable mix of Yanks and Limeys. I've lived in New York City for nearly a decade and we bought the Vermont house because I missed my friends from England and wanted to have a place where my wife's friends and family and mine could meet and mix.

Many strays, crazies and eccentrics arrive over the Hanumas period (Christmas + Hanukkah = Hanumas), though chief among these characters is Uncle Hank, who has become my guide in all things American. Hank is full of outlandish proclamations (we call them Hankisms) that are in many ways as profound as biblical quotes, yet too full of expletives to print here. It was Hank who first taught me the 'American' way to fill up a glass of wine. It appears that I had been getting it wrong for years, and that contrary to decades of blind assumption on my part, and most every oenophile and casual imbiber, the correct way is to fill the glass all the way up to the brim. You see, to Hank's mind, the European tradition of only partially filling the glass causes a wasted journey back to the bottle and is 'on the whole, a little effeminate'.

Hank is sort of the diametric opposite of me - in no way effeminate, a veteran of the Vietnam War, a tough guy and really, really 'handy' in a way I can't ever hope to emulate. Some people reading this might think they are resourceful, but I've yet to meet anybody in Hank's league. As I said, our place is up a mountain, and like nearly all houses up mountains in the rural bits of America, it's almost entirely off the grid. On Boxing Day our septic tank began to sound an alarm and I couldn't find a company that could come to fix it for over a week, which when you have 27 people staying in one house has all the makings for a disastrophy of... well... urgent proportions. Anyway, a ghastly evacuation of the house was avoided by Hank managing to reroute the plumbing into a temporary tank of his own making, miraculously fabricated from an old - get this - washing machine he found in the garage. The man is a marvel of ingenuity.

So, the Hanumas/New Year period has passed with its usual mix of dramas and comedies and triumphs and disasters and it's time to get back to work. My plans for the new year so far have me flying into London in a couple of days for the premiere of a film I'm in called Margin Call, which is remarkable for a few reasons: firstly, it's a humane movie about the pretty inhumane world of high finance and the infamous crash of 2008, and secondly, it's a movie I don't hate myself for doing. Which are two really good reasons for me to support it.

I seem to be making something of a career out of promoting it as it feels as if I've been rolling out this movie for about a year since we premiered it at Sundance last January. However, it made quite a big splash in the States for a movie made in 17 days (a relatively tiny schedule for a feature film) and is definitely worth seeing: a clever script, plus it sports a great cast - Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons, Zac Quinto, Demi Moore, Simon Baker, Penn Badgley and, I blushingly mention, me. It also changed the way I think about my career. I loved both making it and the end result so much that it reminded me of all the reasons I first wanted to become an actor. So even though I hate the idea of New Year's resolutions, here's my New Year's resolution: I'm going to try to only make films I'm passionate about from now on. Which brings me to Blood.

Blood is a film I'm going to begin shooting in early February in England. The script, written by Bill Gallagher, is fantastic, and it will be directed by Nick Murphy, and stars (so far) Stephen Graham (my acting crush) as my brother, Brian Cox (my acting hero) as my father, and Mark Strong (when I grow up I want to be as good as him) as a fellow cop. I'm beyond excited - excited to be back home, and to be working with such a dream cast and a brilliant director (all those who missed Occupation should watch it on DVD).

Anyway, that's the beginning of my year, as it's mapped out so far. I'm not sure why it's of any interest, and perhaps it isn't - unless you've got a septic tank on the fritz, in which case you'll also need duct tape and a pickaxe - perhaps you've just got nothing else to read on the Tube. If so, I'm sorry to have bored you, but there it is.
Margin Call is in cinemas from today