He certainly doesn’t look like the villainous Hans Gruber in “Die Hard”, nor does he display any of Professor Severus Snape’s Potions Master characteristics from “Harry Potter” films. Alan Rickman could pass for any other British gent visiting Beverly Hills, dressed in dark jeans, white cotton tea and slightly coiffed salt and pepper hair. But at a closer glance, Rickman is a villain extraordinaire with a comedic personality, dry wit and romantic leading man characteristics.

Rickman comes walks into the Four Seasons Hotel which, just an hour ago, shook and rattled to a 5.4 earthquake, one of the largest Southern California had demonstrated in a decade. None worse for wear, the handsome – and jovial - Brit is eager to talk about his new movie “Bottle Shock” in which he plays real-life Steven Spurrier, a snobbish British expatriate trolling Napa Valley, California in search of wine bottles for an upcoming wine tasting event he has arranged in France. Rickman came on board this project after 20 pages were quickly written for his review. He had previously collaborated with Jody Savin and Randy Miller on “Nobel Son”, and decided to join the movie because of their previous creative relationship. In 1976, a small American winery sent shock waves through the wine industry by besting the exalted French wines in a blind tasting, putting California wines on the map for good. Chateau Montelana vineyard and novice vintner Jim Barrrett, along with his son, Bo, risked everything to realize their dreams. What ends up on the screen is a 2008 Sundance Film Festival dramatic comedy based on a true story that quickly became an audience and critic favorite.

Welcome to the land of shake and bake. Is this the first earthquake that you’ve been through.
No, it’s not. I was also here for the 1994 bit one.

This one never compared with that.
I know, but the body doesn’t know that and the body goes `It’s that again!’ (laughs) All natural thought leaves your body, doesn’t it. All.

So if you had to play an earthquake scene in a movie, you’d have it down.
No research required (laughs). Yeah. (fakes wide-eyed terror and hangs onto the table). That’s what I did in ’94. I woke up and just hung on to the bed. How stupid was that? (laughs)

Well, how much do you know about wine now after this movie?
Not a lot more than I knew before, to be honest. I still enjoy it very much. Fortunately, when you talk to great experts like Bo Barrett and we were at Chateau Montelena for the premiere the other night, he said rather encouragingly, well, it’s not so complicated. Wine is somewhere between grape juice and vinegar (laughs).

So what is your alcohol of choice?
It would be red wine, yeah.

Any favorites – is it French?
It depends a lot on what country I’m in and what food I’m eating. I tend to be loyal to the country I’m in. I tend to spend a lot of time in Italy so I would never think of drinking anything other than Italian wine. And similarly in South Africa.

Can you tell us how you got involved in this project?
Yeah, Randy and Jody said `we got this script. There’s a part we think you should play. Here it is.’ (laughs) And it’s an English part so maybe that was a clue.

None of it was shot in the south of France, was it?
No. No, it’s never that sunny in France (laughs). But they did a good job. And I was there with some European know-how to say don’t park the cars so neatly.

What kind of preparation did you do for the role – your character speaks French, knows French culture and knows how to taste wine.
Thank god for school. I took French lessons in school so I was at least able to do that. And because I’m playing that kind of upper class Englishman, it’s a matter of honor to speak French with a terrible accent. (laughs). No concessions would be made at all. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the Queen speaking French. (laughs) You still know she’s the Queen. And I did accidentally as it turns out, meet Steven Spurrier a few years ago in Italy but, of course, at the time didn’t know what any future agenda was going to be. I spoke to him on the phone. I’m so million miles away from being the right casting to play him but in a sense, you’ve just got to go well, it’s OK, he’s called Steven Spurrier and there are facts circulating around this story; we honor those and it is true. It is based on him so in a sense it isn’t an impersonation of him apart from being English and a man in a suit and tie. And we tend not to take our suit and ties off even in 100 degrees (laughs).

You smile at the end when you give the award away…did you ask him how he felt that day when he found out that Napa Valley had won for the best wine?
No. I just thought, there again, it’s a movie and there’s a relationship there so it has to become part of that story. Similarly, the end of the movie is largely because of the conversation with him on the phone because I didn’t know he had restaged the competition in 2006. And he said to me on the phone, I was sure this time that the French wines were going to win and it would rescue my reputation among the French. America won again.

You played some very iconic characters over the years and several have been written for just you. Angela Pell made no secret about when she wrote you Alex in “Snow Cake”, Randy designed and retooled Spurrier for you. Does this put a greater burden on you as an actor knowing that you are the man they want?
Not really. In the case of those 2 films, fortunately, neither of those characters has anything to do with the other. And so, that means that they’re expecting you to get a particular color of the character; it means, they’re going to let you free and that’s luxury.

There was also a period of Die Hard and Robin Hood where you had these classic villain performances. Do you still get offered a lot of villains after all these years later?
No. Nor did I really over that period of time. It’s just like they were a couple of movies that had huge publicity budgets, but there was a lot of other stuff in between that…it depends on where you’re looking at it from and what you’re setting it against but you are talking about 20 years.

With Harry Potter, your character….
First of all, I never talk about Harry Potter.

There’s a great line in “Bottle Shock” where Spurrier says “I’m not really an asshole; It’s just that I’m British.” He so succinctly put the other guy in his place. Have you ever wanted to say that to somebody?
No, it’s an appalling thing to say, isn’t it? But it’s an absolutely true line for Steven Spurrier cause it’s got a vaguely, charming honestly to it. It’s very typical of that strand of teabag. We had an empire, we made it. People like him created an English empire; people like him lost it.

Going over the production notes, several crew members worked before with you and Randy, and you’ve been part of another sequel franchise…is it easier for you working with the same people as you go from one film to another?
Well, I’m always wary of words like “easy” because that’s not the point. The point is that it’s gratis and that doesn’t always mean easy.

Well, comfortable perhaps?
Even comfortable. I like it being difficult and uncomfortable but at least it means there’s a conversation that’s possible because there’s a lot of mutual trust and respect but at the same time, nobody’s fawning over anybody. I like breathing that air which isn’t always easy but it’s constructive and creative and rewarding.

What did you like about filming in Napa Valley?
Well, it’s beautiful and it feeds your imagination because you’re in the real thing. It’s not like it’s a film set…Oh, this really exists. It’s not so much fun wearing a wool suit and a tie and socks and shoes in 100 degrees but then again, you just have to make it part of his lunacy. There’s no way his tie comes off because he’s British.

Are you the type of actor that likes to do a lot of research?
It absolutely depends on what you’re doing. For Snow Cake, absolutely none because it was very important I was playing somebody who knew nothing about autism, and I was working with Sigourney Weaver who’d done like six or nine months of research because she needed to know everything. So if you named a project I could tell you how much research had been done, it’s just a question – ultimately what you want to be is free, not trapped, so the knowledge you put in there, in other words research, is only to free you. So it just depends what you need to do.

So many times on movie sets you also see the actor say, ‘Oh we didn’t really drink wine, it was grape juice.’
It was grape juice. First of all I should think it’s probably illegal to have alcohol on set, in fact I’m absolutely certain of that, because the continuity people just said, ‘The insurers would just have our guts for garters.’ And it’s actually dangerous. You’re in a fairly – literally explosive environment, so I don’t think it can happen. They do it in France, of course. They have big lunches, French movies, drink a lot of wine.

What do you look for in the roles that you play? And is there a genre or role that you’d like to play that you haven’t done?
Well, I never thought I’d do a musical and that just happened. You’re a changing unit yourself and so you open a script and it depends on who you are as to what combustion there is between you and a piece of writing. But it’s always the writing, I don’t have any – they are usually tall characters that I play.

Do you miss playing the villain at all, since it’s been awhile since that role has come around?
No, but I don’t put labels on anything I play, I don’t call them that. They’re not that to me, whatever they are, it’s the last word – I would never put any judgmental word on any character, you can’t play it if you do that.

Do you have a preference of theatre or film?
Not really, because the thing is you guys see the finished result. This took five weeks in my life, with a whole bunch of people, so you see the word Bottle Shock and you just remember people and places and –

No alcohol?
Right, just grape juice.