English actors adopting American accents and vice versa

[Biffer_Spice_1]

@Laggard

I thought Kelly Macdonald in No County For Old Men did a fantastic job with a very specific accent.

And I remember some Brits commenting on how Michael and Christopher in Spinal Tap did an amazing job with a very specific London accent. Don’t recall exactly but it may have been east-end.

what i came in to post. it was some time after i first saw that when i found out that christopher guest wasn’t english! his accent was so good i just assumed he was. absolutely perfect accent. michael mckean was very good too. shearer not as good as the other two, to be honest.

[jayjay]

@Biffer_Spice

what i came in to post. it was some time after i first saw that when i found out that christopher guest wasn’t english!

He’s English enough that he’s actually a baron! He just didn’t grow up in the UK. His father was a UN diplomat (and nobleman, the 4th Lord Haden-Guest (Christopher is the 5th Lord Haden-Guest)) and his mother was American.

[SciFiSam]

Chiwetel Ejiofor is another Brit that seems to do American accents very well, and pretty frequently too.

[Biffer_Spice_1]

@jayjay

He’s English enough that he’s actually a baron! He just didn’t grow up in the UK. His father was a UN diplomat (and nobleman, the 4th Lord Haden-Guest (Christopher is the 5th Lord Haden-Guest)) and his mother was American.

yes, but his actual accent is american. still sounds weird to hear him talk normally. i feel THAT’s him putting it on, and that really he’s just nigel tufnel.

what a film

[Troy_McClure_SF]

@cochrane

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” was my first exposure to Bob Hoskins. I was not aware that he was British until I read it in the newspaper. I thought he played a convincing American as Eddie Valiant.

Same here, with Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine. I’d noticed one or two words sounding a little funny but never thought anything of it.

Also, Sons of Anarchy fans: Did you know Jax is British?

[Candyman74]

This one seems an obvious one to me.

1. Yes, as a generality there is a tendency for Brits to be better at US accents than vice versa. This is because:
   a) An American accent is more profitable than a British accent; America has five times the population and more than five times the movie output.
   b) RADA is fairly old-skool in terms of tuition, and specific skills like accents feature more heavily than American equivalents (thus anecdotal, but I’ve heard it from Stephen Fry personally when discussing Hugh Laurie at a signing and I believe him).

[irishgirl]

What about Rose Byrne?

I think her American accent is pretty good.
Pretty odd hearing her Aussie voice on Project Runway, but then I remember her in Heartbreak High.

[Slow_Moving_Vehicle]

@Raguleader

Now, if I know an actor is not American, I will be more “tuned in” for anything that may sound “off” to me, which, as mentioned above, could include any given real American accent if I’m not familiar with it, so even actors who are pulling off flawless accents might still sound weird to me if I know they’re from Wales or Scotland. John Barrowman, for instance.

As noted upthread, John Barrowman’s American accent is flawless because he grew up in Illinois. What’s jarring about him - and I’ve heard it in other British actors protraying Americans - is the use of British vocabulary. One episode of Doctor Who was set in 1930’s New York, and featured a British actor playing a boy from Tennessee. He had a passable generic Southern accent, but he blew it in one scene by talking about “the lift”.

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Coming from the South myself (actually from Shreveport, La, which is a frequent setting of the show), I can usually pick up on fake southern accents immediately (as I think most southerners can)…

Using “y’all” as a singular is a dead giveaway.

@Acsenray

Renee Zellweger’s accent for Bridget Jones wasn’t perfect, but seemed pretty good from my American point of view.

When they were doing the publicity for Bridget Jones’ Diary, one of Renee Zellweger’s co-stars - Colin Firth, I think - wondered why she kept on putting on an American accent.

[Cayuga]

@Slow_Moving_Vehicle

Using “y’all” as a singular is a dead giveaway.

People always say that, and yet I frequently hear actual Southerners do it.

[Raguleader]

@Cayuga

People always say that, and yet I frequently hear actual Southerners do it.

Except that “Y’all” isn’t singular. It’s Collective Singular. (“All Y’all” is the plural, of course.)

The only time a Texan or a Southerner should use “Y’all” to address a single person is if they are talking to the Queen of England.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Bumped.

This is fun:

British Stars on Which American Accent Is Hardest to Do | Vanity Fair

[griffin1977]

The only time it has actually really bothered me is Ed Skrein’s American accent in Battle of Midway (it was meant to be a “new yawwwwk” accent IIRC.)

That was a pretty awful film all round but that accent was so bad it dragged it into “unwatchable” territory.

[FlikTheBlue]

@astorian

To give you some perspective… when British/Irish/Scottish/Aussie actors work in America, they tend to do American accents flawlessly. BUT… if you ever watch a BBC TV production, one made for consumption by a British audience, you’ll regularly see British actors doing comically bad “American” accents. If those British actors thought they had to be good enough to fool Americans, they might work harder… but if they’re appearing in programs watched primarily in the U.K., they figure “My Yank accent isn’t that great, but it’s plenty good enough for THIS gig.”

I’ve been playing a British game called Zombies Run!, which has an American character. I guess some parts of the accent are harder to produce than others. In particular, I can hear her British accent coming through in her pronunciation of words like “idea” coming out like “idear.”

[nightshadea]

I remember after watching house for a while and then hearing Hugh Laurie do one of his comedy bits and I could only understand 6 words in the whole thing …and commenting "his British accents horrible and someone else saying " accent? whaddya mean accent? that’s his normal voice! "

[TriPolar]

With no idea who he was I caught his English accent coming through on an episode of Still Standing. Had no clue up to that point, seen him in movies since then and it’s … odd.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Bumped.

I just saw Hart’s War, a pretty good WWII courtroom drama with Colin Farrell playing a young US Army officer, and his accent was great. Never slipped once. If I didn’t know he was Irish, I’d never have guessed.