Does it feel odd, I wonder, when you’re cast against a woman half your age? “I have no problems with that whatsoever! No, I don’t!” He laughs. “But I think I’d feel a little…” He winces. “Actually I did that in a film that’s not out yet, How to Make Love Like an Englishman. In it, Jessica Alba and I are lovers; so when the curtain goes up, everyone knows that she’s far too young; and I as an Oxford professor of the Romantic period know that she’s too young, but it doesn’t matter. So you have a get-out.” Because it’s self-aware, I say? “Yeah. But I do love the notion of the younger woman, as I’m now the older man. You see it in men, that fear that the clock is ticking, the clock is ticking, and women become more and more beautiful, every age group. It just becomes this lustfulness of yearning and want. There are just so many gorgeous women and your attitude to time and the ticking of it, and what could have been.”