You should be glad you’ve never heard Patterson Joseph’s “American” accent on Jekyll
I’m British myself and it made my ears sore.
I did not know this. I assume one dialect is South African, as you’ve talked about that before. What’s the other one?
Also, Hugh Laurie’s accent is so good enough that it fooled the the director on House. Yes, he has a single word here or there that is wrong, but it’s not wrong as in sounding British, just slightly out of place for the accent he is mimicking.
I code-switch between the Cape Flats dialect of South African English and BBC English (more or less, there’s a touch of Estuary in there too, innit?), with the latter being my natural everyday dialect (as in, it’s what I use both at work and at home) and the former only really getting use nowadays when I visit my parents.
Dialects aren’t like languages, they’re not fixed at an early age, I think. I mean, I only started switching dialects from the age of 12 or so (when I first had English-from-England friends), and didn’t complete the switch until I was 18 (when I was in Uni res, and didn’t speak to Cape Flats speakers for weeks at a time). But it’s how I speak now even if I’m talking in my sleep. Apparently.
There are a couple serials from the Patrick Troughton era which also feature horrendous American accents – Space Pirates and Tomb of the Cybermen in particular.
I’ve never been able to watch House because Hugh Laurie’s American accent grates.
Next door to Jodie Foster. I don’t know what accent she was going for in Elysium, but it sure wasn’t American. Or French. Or English.
I heard it. 
And I’d forgotten it until your post!
The Seventh Doctor episode “Delta and the Bannermen” features some truly awful American (Noo Yawk) accents.
I code-switch between a (mild) Florida cracker/coastal southern American accent and a standard mid-Atlantic accent (which my mother has; her family sound very Joisey, though).
When I lived in Jacksonville, almost everyone had some level of a southern accent, so it wasn’t a big deal. But when I moved to the Boston area, I dropped it damn quick to avoid being thought a rube.
When I get together with family in Jacksonville, none of us sound as if we have any education…or teeth…or shoes. A casual listener would not think that everyone has a bachelor’s degree and several people have Master’s degrees, and everyone has traveled outside the US. 
In Boston…the mid-Atlantic accent works, though southernisms slip out. At my last job, several East Indian coworkers started using the phrase, “Bless your/his/her heart!” after hearing me use it. 
But they don’t sound French, either, and people who are Cajun when they are speaking to non-Cajun Americans can, for the most part, code-switch to a dialect that is more understandable. I had a couple of Cajuns in my basic training unit. When they talked to each other, no one else could understand then, but when they talked to other people, they just had a very heavy variant New Orleans accent. And they never sounded French. I’ve been to Paris.
I’m watching Gracepoint now. It’s more than his accent. He’s doing a passable accent, but somehow, he can’t act with an American accent. Or he isn’t trying to adapt his performance to the American production. Does he know anything about Americans or the US? there’s more to playing an American than just getting the accent right. On the ep I watched last night, he called some people “You guys,” and had a look on his face like he couldn’t believe anyone would say that. It is painful, and he’s so good on Broadchurch. They should have cast an different actor. I understand the novelty of casting him, but it’s a shark-jumping trick, and if a show needs it before the first ep has aired, ask yourself if you should be making the show at all.
I don’t think she’s supposed to be American. I’ve never heard her attempt an American accent, and when her estranged husband showed up, he was British.
I didn’t learn my Hoosier accent until I was in high school, but when I’m anywhere in the mid-West, it comes out of my mouth as naturally as my Manhattan-Queens accent comes out when I’m in the East. I even catch myself using rural undertones when I’m talking shop with car mechanics who are a lot of good ol’ boys who live in the country, where you can have a half-assembled car in your yard for four years, and no one cares.
Heck, when I went to international school when I was ten, I even picked up a few Britishisms, like “pardon,” when I didn’t catch what someone said, and I probably still said that for a year after I got back to the US. I had a classmate in the US in high school who had come to the US from London when he was 9. You couldn’t pick up a trace of accent in his speech.
Oh, geez, I hear that all the time in Indiana. I never picked it up, though, because it’s a weird theology I don’t get.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the serial, but I understand the accents used in The Gunslingers count as war crimes. I think this is unfair, compared to the ones mentioned in The Chase and Space Pirates.
Dominic West et al in The Wire make me giggle, as both of my parents are from Baltimore (Patterson Park in Baldymore City for my mother and Essex in East Bawlmer for my dad). Nope nope nope. To be fair, like many regional accents, it’s hard to do one good enough to pass muster with the locals.
Has anybody seen the movie Chappie? Is Hugh Jackman supposed to be doing a South African accent, or is he just shrugging, saying fuck it, and using his native Australian?
The NBC series Dracula starred Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as the title character, who was posing as a wealthy American industrialist because this show didn’t really make a lot of sense. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s fair to judge his American accent too harshly since it was supposed to be phony, but it wasn’t good. It sounded like he was doing impressions of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at the same time. It really undermined the sex appeal and menace of the character.
The show also featured a very non-traditional take on Renfield (a perfectly sane African-American lawyer) played by Nonso Anozie, whose American accent was good enough that I was a bit surprised to learn that he was in fact English.
Unless your “grating” comes from the particular American English dialect (and any slipping thereof) I can’t see, as BigT pointed out, how you would not imagine he wasn’t American born and bred. He nails it 100%.
I see we have all decided to forget Next of Kin
This is a good choice.
I’ve only seen the trailers, where he sounded Australian to me.
This is why I opened the thread. He seems to be doing some sort of bad Foghorn Leghorn impression with a racist twinge. It’s horrible.
BBC is generally terrible at American accents. I’m guessing that we must sound high and sing-songy to British ears because frequently they’ll have someone chirping like a crazy person as an American accent.
Isn’t the simplest explanation that Hugh Jackman’s character is Australian? Most technology companies have employees from around the world.
They don’t say, they just call him an ex-soldier.
I know you speak Sarcasm. That’s all it is–no theology. It helps if you ladle on the syrup, though.