Come on, let’s get a list going, there might even be a winner. Is it Kevin Costner as Robin Hood? Keanu Reeves in Dracula?.. Or is Dick Van Dyke just unbeatable?
Those were supposed to be British accents?!?! I thought they were just speech impediments.
Carrie Fisher in the original Star Wars is pretty abysmal. She makes a half-hearted attempt in a couple of scenes, and then it just melts away.
His attempt in Mary Poppins was bad, but he didn’t even really try in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Urgh. Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones. It’s AWFUL, and hasn’t improved over time.
Don’t get me started on the apologists, “Ohh, it’s a WESTEROSI accent, it’s not meant to be an English accent.” Bullshit. It’s a common fantasy trope, having RP accents signifying upper-class privilege, and working class accents for, well, the plebs.
No wonder. She was trying to do an Alderaanian accent.
Don’t blame us for Keanu Reeves. He’s Canadian.
I was watching Cinema Sins the other day and they sinned Robert Downey for his accent in Sherlock Holmes. This surprised me. I’m not British so I can’t really judge how good his accent is. But my understanding is that even British people found it authentic.
I am sorry, his accent was first rate.
Perhaps a British person should weigh in, but to my ears it definitely sounds decent enough.
Not British, but lived there for quite a while and I did hear some residual foreignness, but little enough that it could be passed off as an affected quirk.
Does it have to be British? Brad Pitt’s Irish accent was horrid in The Devil’s Own.
It was fine. I don’t recall ever noticing it, which is a good sign.
Can we discuss the reverse too? It seems to me that British actors tend to do fine with American accents (House MD). I have trouble thinking of examples of bad fake American Accents.
Is it because there are so many American actors that Brits faking American accents is less common? Or maybe the bar is higher so that to get an “american” role one has to nail the accent?
This is always going to be a matter of opinion. When I parroted TV Tropes on Spike’s “Mockney” accent on Buffy, people came out of the woodwork to disagree.
People did complain about Noomi Rapace in Prometheus, and it did seem like an American doing a bad UK accent … whereas she’s not from the US.
Maybe no high profile examples, but in situations like comedy sketches or radio plays I’ve heard my share of unconvincing American accents by British actors.
If you’re British and you’re good enough to get cast as an American on American television, I bet you’re spectacular. If you’re British and you’re working on British television, I bet they just needed to settle for someone who wouldn’t mangle it too embarrassingly and would show up on time for the latest DOCTOR WHO episode.
My evidence is various DOCTOR WHO episodes.
I would agree with you until I heard Andrew Lincoln call his screen son Carrrrroool. (Carl) - The Walking Dead
Part of the problem with doing an “American” accent is that that’s vague. There really isn’t a standard American accent. The regional dialects sometimes sound fake even to us. I was born in Southern Indiana. Spent my entire life in this area. Yet I consistently get told that I sound like I’m from Michigan (a state to which I’ve never been).
It may be too broad for a Brit to try an American accent, since there are many different variations of that accent to be believable.
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Many American cities have public television stations that run old Britcoms; those from ITV seem particularly prone to having bad American accents on display.
That was truly dreadful. Ridley Scott is at fault for not realizing she simply can’t do a UK accent–he should have made the character Swedish.