PAUL Bettany knows he’s has a few slightly dodgy movies on his CV.

The straight-talking British actor freely admits he’s done plenty for the paycheques, particularly after becoming a father, when the desire to safeguard his family financially outstripped any of his other concerns.

He’s not naming names, but after his initially lauded breakthrough movies such as A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander: the Far Side Of the World, it’s hard not to point the finger at B-grade actioners such as Legion (in which he played machinegun-toting archangel) and Priest (in which he played a vampire hunting man of the cloth).

“There are movies that you do that you don’t like or that you don’t even see,” he says. “There are other movies that you are not ashamed of and then there are movies that you are so proud to have been in,” he says, naming Master and Commander with Aussie master director Peter Weir as one of the titles that fits into the last category.

As a result there he says there was a period that he “fell out of love with acting”. But having set up his future with actor wife Jennifer Connelly and their three children, splitting their time between homes in New York City and their farm in Vermont, he’s now able to pick and choose his projects with more precision.

Slowly, thanks to smaller roles in gritty, low-budget dramas such as Margin Call and Blood, and keeping his hand in the blockbuster world with the likes of Transcendence and the coming Avengers sequel, The Age Of Ultron, not to mention directing his wife in his first feature, he has rediscovered his professional passion once more.

Best of all, landing a key role as Vision in the Marvel Universe after voicing Tony Stark’s artificial intelligence computer JARVIS in the three Iron Man movies will give him a solid base to which he can return.

Though The Avengers sequel’s secrets are ridiculously closely guarded, it would appear that his role as an android created by the villainous Ultron, will be a recurring one.

“That’s the really great thing about the Marvel gig for me,” he says. “I have never known if I have had a job six months out ever in my life. And now I know that they have plans and I can be even more judicious about the stuff that I do outside of that work. I can wait for the right thing and feel really attached to it.”

One of those jobs for love and laughs is his latest movie, Mortdecai, his third collaboration with good mate Johnny Depp. Given that their last two films together, 2010’s critically panned The Tourist and last year’s box-office bomb Transcendence, didn’t exactly set the world on fire, just what was it that made him say yes when Depp asked him to play his one-eyed, sex-obsessed, often shot-at manservant named Jock Strapp?

“It seemed like a really fun thing to do,” Bettany says, adding that Depp gave him the books on which the film is based to read on the set of the distinctly gag-free Transcendence.

“I don’t get to do a lot of comedy and we laugh all the time — him and me. I guess he was thinking, ‘why don’t you ever do comedy?’ He saw it in me and wanted me to be part of the whole thing and I have never had so much fun on a film set.”

“We tend to laugh and giggle whatever we are doing. He is the most relaxed actor you could work with. That’s where a lot of that crazy creativity comes from, the relaxation of a kind I have never seen in another actor.”

Although Mordecai, with Depp in the title role as an shady, art-dealing, upper-class twit Brit who has fallen on hard times, has a very British sensibility, with echoes of the Pink Panther movies or the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Bettany doesn’t buy into the oft-trotted out theory that American don’t get British humour.

“It’s a real cliche the notion that Americans don’t have a sense of irony,” he says. “I have never found that to be the case. The people who say it are usually English actors who live in Los Angeles and the only ironic thing about it is that they have no sense of irony.

“A lot of my all-time favourite comedians are American — Bill Hicks, Doug Stanhope and so forth. I don’t think it’s true and I think those Pink Panther movies played huge in the US, which is why Johnny grew up in f — king Kentucky watching Peter Sellers movies.”

Bettany, the son of actor parents, first dabbled in music before attending drama school in London and steadily rose through West End plays, the Royal Shakespeare Company and British TV and film roles.

His first big Hollywood production was A Knight’s Tale, opposite Heath Ledger, and he retains a wary respect for the show-business mecca, even if he has made his home for the past decade on the other side of the US.

“There is no kindness there but it’s an even playing field,” he says. “Well, if you’re a man it’s an even playing field. It’s absolutely an industry and it makes no bones about it. And it will spit you out. But everywhere I went it was ‘what have you got? Can I make some dough out of you?’ That’s at least honest. It’s like being in a being in a gravel shower — you come out thinking ‘f---ing hell, that hurt but I feel really clean and aware’.”

Bettany recently had a crash course in the cold, hard realities of movie-making in his first feature film as director, a drama about two homeless New Yorkers called Shelter.

Even with his wife on board as leading lady, he describes the process of raising funds, filming and editing a feature as “an obsession that I will never take lightly again’.

Shot over a few short weeks and with a minuscule budget, Bettany says he was venturing into unfamiliar territory for someone who had only ever had to turn up on set on time with his lines learned.

Pre-production, he says, was “a lot of people telling me what I couldn’t do” and post-production was something he “bled into” for a year and a half after the shooting stopped.

“Editing for me was intense and having to leave a scene when it’s not working on a Friday night and take the weekend off and pretend to be playing with your kids when you are actually thinking about how to solve the scene — it’s an obsession that I will never take lightly again,” he says.

“It was amazing and intense and I am still unpacking how I felt about it. It’s a pretty extreme experience and some pretty extreme things that I put my wife through. She is extraordinary in it — as is Anthony Mackie — I am very proud of it.”

Just how much he had to do with so little was put into stark relief once he walked on to the massive London sets of Age Of Ultron. Despite having taken “a huge bag of cash” for a short stint in a studio to record JARVIS, Bettany admits he hadn’t actually seen any of the Marvel Universe films before he was cast as Vision.

“I did a lot of research — and my research was watching all of the films,” he says with a laugh. “I realised they are so interlinked and I wanted to understand the universe I was in. So I did and it was a really amazing, fun experience — especially going from my tiny, 20-day movie with no money and no trailers to this behemoth film was just great.

“Everybody made me feel really at home and I have no bad stories — they are really funny people and really creative. I have never seen sets that big in my whole career. I have never seen set pieces like it — we were in a set that felt like a town.”

Mortdecai opens today. Avengers: Age Of Ultron opens on April 23.