Gerard Depardieu played a Frenchman desperate to do anything to live in America in the 1990 movie "Green Card", but in a new interview, he shows little love for the US.

"The US? They're a people who have constantly destroyed others," the 66-year-old actor railed in a broadcast Thursday by Paris radio station France Inter, taken from an interview he gave the day before to Russian journalists in Moscow.

"They fought each other, destroyed the Indians, after that they perpetrated slavery, then there was the civil war," he said.

"After that, they were the first to use the atomic bomb...No, I prefer being Russian."

He added: "If the Europeans stopped listening to the Americans, well, I'd be a lot happier."

Depardieu was given Russian citizenship in 2013 by President Vladimir Putin after publicly criticising France's high taxes and taking up residence abroad.

In recent years he has delighted in causing controversy and backing causes unpopular in France, especially pro-Russian ones. Most recently, he said he was considering selling all his properties in his native country to cut all ties.

In an interview in the French press last month he said he was now living in Italy "and soon in Belarus, with the peasants, because it's beautiful and the president (strongman Alexander Lukashenko) is a nice guy".
Source: AFP