“We’re proud they’ve chosen to live here,” says Crawford. “She’s the beautiful Brooklyn girl [Connelly was raised in Brooklyn Heights] made good who bought the nicest house on the hill, and he’s . . . well, a signpost of blond, gorgeous Englishness.” They’re the kind of couple that would rather go to their son’s school play than Bungalow 8—poster parents for this brave and weird new world of Brooklyn stardom. “Listen, if I turn up to a premiere, it’s because I’m in it or my wife’s in it, and I smile and have pictures taken and do the whole show-business thing. But that’s it: We aren’t courting attention. I don’t feel like if you become an actor you sign some Faustian pact where you give up your private life.”

But like it or not, Bettany still gets noticed. “As a married father, I seem to have become incredibly sexy,” he says. Really? How so? “I can just tell. I can feel it around me. It’s an aura of sexiness,” he says, laughing. “No . . . I say that because I’ve started wearing things like sensible shoes when I go out. Sometimes I take the kids to the park and I’m amazed at the concoction of clothes that I’ve elected to wear. You know, my little boy is up at six and wants to go to the park, and I want to let the wife have a lie-in, and I stumble out in whatever I picked and sometimes I look down and think,What on earth am I wearing? It’s like, you were Elvis doing Jailhouse Rock and suddenly the Army happened and you’re doing Blue Hawaii.”

Related:

• Archive: “Movie Features”
• Articles by Luke Crisell
• Table of Contents: May 22, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!