Back when Dirt was still on, I was quite startled to learn that he was that British fellow in the first Harry Potter movie.
Before Fringe came back this fall I tried to watch interviews with the cast. I had to stop, though, because I couldn’t wrap my brain around John Noble and Anna Torv’s natural accents. She doesn’t sound Bostonian but I easily buy her as an American, and Noble sounds enough like someone from Cambridge to me that it seems pretty realistic.
I think that both Anna Paquin and Ryan Kwanten as the Stackhouse siblings on “True Blood” do convincing Southern accents. Kwanten, especially, nails it by not making it too over the top. Paquin grew up in NZ and Kwanten is an Aussie.
Brit actor **Stephen Moyer’**s accent as the vampire Bill Compton is intriguing. I’ve heard him say that he deliberately doesn’t affect a modern Southern accent because his character was born prior to the Civil War, and presumably would have spoken more formally.
I find one of the worst Southern accents to be, surprisingly, Julia Roberts as she was born and raised in Georgia. But her accent in “Steel Magnolias” seemed put on. I think it was hammered out of her and now she thinks about it too much to be convincing.
I also agree that Hugh Laurie does a great American accent.
Gimme back that filet-o-fish topic…
He’s French and American by nationality, grew up in French-speaking Switzerland. He’s not just trying to speak in a different dialect than his own, but in a language that’s not really his primary one. Being born in NYC doesn’t automatically give you an American accent.
There is an allegedly American character on I think Spooks, who sounds like an Ulsterwoman raised in London attempting a Southern accent while having a heart attack. THAT takes the cake.
If you ate a lot of Southern food you’d be having a heart attack most of the time, too, so it’s not that unnatural.