Matthew Goode is a young British actor with masses of talent who's flying a bit beneath the radar, but that will probably change.

Matthew Goode's cinema career got off to an inauspicious start. Two years ago he starred opposite teen actress Mandy Moore in 'Chasing Liberty', playing a secret service agent hired to look after the President's daughter. The only film he'd done prior to that was 'South of Granada', in which he played Bloomsbury writer Gerald Brennan. Neither of these pictures were big hits.

UK TV viewers will have seen him over Christmas, alongside Imelda Staunton, as Lawrence Durrell in 'My Family And Other Animals', but now the big screen beckons again. Goode has cast in Woody Allen's latest, widely praised film 'Match Point'. Goode plays Tom Hewett, an upper class young man whose sister is married to his tennis instructor, and whose fiancée is having an affair with that same tennis instructor.

Matthew Goode: "The life of an actor is up and down. I've got many friends who I was at drama school with who haven't really started working yet and they're incredibly talented. I've just been very, very lucky. Films get watched and forgotten, what was nice was there was a little bit of history with that film because it was Woody's first foray in filming in London, and with a great cast. It might be the only film I'm in that has these accolades thrown upon it."

Now Goode is following up 'Match Point' with the film 'Imagine Me & You', a film already being called a lesser 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'. It's a British romantic comedy but with a lesbian twist.

In the film Piper Perabo plays Rachel, who marries Heck, played by Goode. She then falls in love with her florist, Lucy, played by Lena Headey. Although the film has hardly impressed the critics, Goode's performance gets a nod, but some are wondering whether the 29-year-old may be forever saddled with playing charming Englishmen.

Matthew Goode: "That's the nature of the business. A lot of times, especially when you start out, the parts you want to play are filled by a very large name and you have to sort of almost earn that right.

There's a lot of safe casting. It's not like the old reperatory system in theatre where one minute you're playing an 80-year-old man, the next you're playing a young buck 17-year-old lead. People safe cast, and you go in and play a character that is not exactly too far away from what you are."

Goode says he's happy to take what he can get right now because he doesn't yet have directors knocking down his door, but he does admit to hoping to break out eventually.

Matthew Goode: "I don't particularly want to be doing the same thing again and again, I have stuff I want to prove to myself, to my agent and to the audience as well. You want to show what you can do."

Before he can do that, Goode is satisfied with simply getting more screen time. Next up is acting alongside Oscar nominee Ed Harris in 'Copying Beethoven', a film about the last year of the composer's life.