Ricky Gervais was warned he would never work in Hollywood again after his controversial turn presenting the Golden Globes earlier this year. But the comic defied the critics by revealing he has been invited back to host the film awards for a third time.
The Office and Extras co-creator and star caused outrage in some sections of the US media with his jokes at the expense of Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr, Johnny Depp and Playboy's Hugh Hefner at the Golden Globes ceremony in January.
Gervais said broadcaster NBC had asked him to host the awards again next year but added he was unlikely to take them up on the offer.
"I love NBC, I love the fact they stuck by me through it," Gervais told the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival on Friday.
Asked by interviewer Richard Bacon if he was considering the offer, Gervais replied: "I am but I shouldn't do it. It's a second encore. Don't do a second encore. I don't think I should do it. What am I going back as?"
Gervais said he had "never expected the reaction" to his performance at the ceremony in January.
He told the assembled Hollywood actors and industry grandees: "It's going to be a night of partying and heavy drinking. Or as Charlie Sheen calls it – breakfast."
He mocked Depp and Angelina Jolie's film The Tourist and at the end of the awards thanked God for making him an atheist.
"Just because you are offended doesn't mean you are right," Gervais said of his critics. "People fall into this myth that I'm a shock comedian. I've never been that. People say I crossed the line but I didn't draw the fucking line, you did."
He added that he did the show for the awards' 200 million viewers around the world, not the 200 people in the room.
"It wasn't a roomful of wounded soldiers," he added. "It was the most privileged people on the planet who spend all day pretending to be someone else. I teased them, I ribbed them."
The star, who gave the first preview of his new sitcom, Life's Too Short, a BBC and HBO co-production which will air in the UK on BBC2, also revealed he had been approached about hosting the Oscars, a gig he said he would never accept.
"They said to my agent would he like to be on our list. I couldn't do the Oscars. It's a thankless task for a comedian. They don't want to hear jokes, they want to hear if they have won the most important award of their career," he said.
Gervais also said he had been offered a US chatshow but was not interested. "I have been offered it a few times. I got into this business so I didn't have to put a suit on and sit behind a desk five times a week. It would be strange to do it."
