There are so many genre performances that call for accented fun, and many of them are excellent or at the very least serviceable. But there are times when you hear a lilt or a diphthong and suddenly everything has gone horribly wrong, and you are stranded for the better part of an hour or two with an eye twitch that acts up every time you hear a hard ‘r.’ These are the accents that have haunted our dreams, from Southern socialites to the awkward Australians.
Here are some of the very worst.
Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Look, David Boreanaz is a great guy or whatever, but those flashback scenes with ye olde Angel? Ouch. They hurt so bad. It’s not just that his brogue is weak, it disappears every three words. Could they not get a dialect coach for the poor fellow? Make him watch Waking Ned Devine on a continuous loop? (A lame fix at best, but he might have gotten closer.) It’s sort of doubly sad when James Marsters is traipsing around for the entire series convincing everyone that he might actually be from London. (Although we know he had ample help from Anthony Stewart Head to that purpose.) And mega-sadder when you watch Aidan Turner on Being Human and realize what Angel was supposed to sound like in those scenes.
Bill Compton (True Blood)
The southern accents on True Blood are all over the place to begin with, but Bill wins this one by virtue of never getting those ‘r’s down pat. He consistently switches to a softer sound on the letter, which is a by-product of Stephen Moyer’s native English accent. Not a single line is spared. Scenery-chewing loses its luster. You’d think someone might have made mention to him, but I suppose that was never intended to be part of True Blood’s charm.
Robin Hood (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves)
Sorry, Costner. This is really not your strong suit. If you’re going to be Robin Hood at any point after Errol Flynn, you might want to curb your chill California vibe. (An anthropomorphic fox managed it better. Come on.) Though I suppose that without his attempt at sounding vaguely British we would have never gotten that sublime potshot from Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights, when Cary Elwes tells Prince John and the Sheriff to beware: “Because, unlike some other Robins Hoods—I can speak with an English accent!”
Conner MacLeod and Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez (Highlander)
This is particularly amazing because the point here basically seems to be: if you hire Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery, you get Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery. It’s funnier because Ramirez shouldn’t sound Scottish and MacLeod should, and neither of them do. Also, we’re supposed to buy Connery as an Egyptian? (He was supposedly born during the Third Intermediate Period of Egyptian history, so it’s not like we could say he’s Greek or Roman to even begin trying to make sense of anything.) Just… make it work in your head.
Ray Vecchio (Due South)
Due South counts because there are ghosts in it, okay? This show has one of the central problems that many series filmed in Vancouver have—it’s so clear that most of the cast is Canadian as soon as they speak. Due South is meant to take place in Chicago, which sets them at a further disadvantage. Enter Benton Fraser’s first partner, Ray Vecchio, who is supposed to be a born and raised Chicagoan… and sounds like he’s from Jersey. Which is hardly surprising because the actor who portrays him was born in Newark, NJ. Look, the rest of the world may think that all American cities produce similar accents, but people in the Midwest sound nothing like people on the East Coast, particularly residents of the New Jersey/New York areas. You’re adorable, Due South, but your one piece of stock footage featuring the El train is fooling no one.
Bert (Marry Poppins)
There’s actually a name for this non-accent—it’s called “Mockney Cockney.” Obviously, Bert is a big part of many of childhoods, but Dick Van Dyke is over-the-top in his portrayal in a decidedly vaudevillian way. He’s still charming as all get out, it’s just a shame that no one had the foresight to ask him to maybe tone it down a notch. This is the reason why so many American children actually believe that saying “‘Ello Guv-na!” makes them so very good that ‘talking like British people.’
Jonathan Harker (Bram Stoker’s Dracula)
It’s not as though anyone was expecting genius from Keanu Reeves here, and his portrayal of Jonathan Harker overall is appropriately vacant considering Stoker’s text. (Though he did end up on Total Film’s list of “50 Performances That Ruined Movies.” Sheesh.) But if Francis Ford Coppola is directing the movie, you kind of expect him to notice? Maybe he just preferred Keanu’s dulcet tones, or was too enamored of Gray Oldman to notice. Gary Oldman is a super distracting individual.
Jar Jar Binks (Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace)
See, this gets kind of awkward: how can an ostensibly “made up” accent be bad? After all, Gungans aren’t real, so their accent isn’t either, right? Except for the fact that it is meant to be a vague mashup of various Caribbean accents, created by actor Ahmed Best. The result makes Jar Jar come off as a racist caricature, and he’s not the only character in the prequels who had this problem—the Nemoidians were similarly panned. By that count, it seems fair enough to call this a bad accent. And that’s without bothering to debate Jar Jar’s relative annoyance to the general population.
Tallulah (Doctor Who, “Daleks in Manhattan”/“Evolution of the Daleks”)
There are so many bad New York accents out there, but this one stands out because it seems almost intentionally horrible. As though the director on these episodes of Doctor Who thought that going all-camp would make everything funnier? Lighter? Distract us from plot holes? It didn’t. All it did was make certain that whenever the words ‘bad New York accent’ come up in sequence, we all hear Tallulah drawl, “Whaddya mean, creatures?”
On a side note, have you ever heard David Tennant’s American accent? It’s so momentously bad, you will instantly need to wash you ears out with the sound of Doctor (or his actual Scottish burr).
Jim Taggart (Eureka)
Played by Matt Frewer of Max Headroom fame, Jim Taggart was Eureka’s biological containment specialist, which sort of makes him a capturer of wild thingamabobs, which might be why the show’s creators thought it could be clever to make him Australian? He’s sort of like the Steve Irwin of the town? Either way, Frewer’s Ozzie accent was decidedly dodgy… but then, when is an Australian accent ever managed convincingly by a non-native? It’s a rare one to get right.
Chekov (Star Trek)
Walter Koenig’s accent basically amounts to swapping his ‘v’s and ‘w’s. Anton Yelchin (whose parents are Russian) said that he considered adopting a more accurate accent when he took on the role of Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek movies, but decided that the character was so iconic, it was better to just go with what Koenig had set up. As if there weren’t enough reasons to love Anton Yelchin.
Dracula (NBC’s Dracula)
Vampires really seem to have a problem with this, don’t they? Sure, vampires probably need to be able to adapt, to blend into their chosen environments, but why does Jonathan Rhys Meyers need to be southern? He’s about as awesome at it as Bill is. Plus, you’re missing out on allowing this show to be exactly what it wants to be—The Tudors, but with vampires.
Aragorn (The Lord of the Rings)
You’re surprised to see this one here, aren’t you? But the things is, Viggo Mortensen clearly changed his mind about how Aragorn’s accent was going to work while they were filming. At the start he has a sort of hybrid accent that is part elven—which makes sense, given that Aragorn was raised by elves—but he later gives up on it. Which means that throughout Fellowship he’s saying everyone’s names with these weird flips around the vowels; rolling the second ‘o’ in Boromir, drawing out the ‘a’ in Legolas. And then he just stops doing it. Honestly, you can forgive him for it just because it’s so funny.
Storm (X-Men)
It’s sort of an African accent of some kind? Similar to our dear Aragorn, it’s clear that Halle Berry tried this out, decided it didn’t work for her, then dropped it in later X-Men films. Unfortunately, the awkwardness of the accent just makes Storm’s admittedly sad dialogue in the first film sadder. “Do you know what happens to a toad when it gets struck by lightning?” Um, no, but you clearly have some strong feelings on the matter, so have at that.
Herkemer Homolka (Congo)
Tim Curry… what are you doing? What is this? Where are you from? What is happening? How did you decide that Romanians sounded this way? How many times can you say “Lost City of Zinj” in the same movie?
Belloq (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Paul Freeman adorably cops to this in an interview about his audition for the role of Dr. Rene Belloq: when asked if he could produce a French accent for the character (Freeman is English), he simply said yes and gave it a go. And everyone bought it even though he had no idea what he was doing. It’s hard to care overmuch when you recall his stupendous performance as the “shadowy figure” in Indy’s life, but it’s doesn’t change the fact that no English-speaking French person sounds like that. Which just proves that confidence really does get you everywhere.
Practically Every Asian Accent on Film
This one is so awkward because there are just too many examples. From Mr. Wing handing over Gizmo in Gremlins to Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, every actor placed in this position seems to receive the direction “just read the ridiculous chopped up English as it’s written. You know what, could you sound like Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffanys? People will love that!” It’s more impressive to find respectful examples, such as Iroh in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Special Mentions: Dean and Sam Winchester (Supernatural)
Overall, the Winchester brothers do well enough with their vague accents, but because both Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki are from Texas, a twang slips into their speech patterns everyone once in a while. When it does, it’s the most noticeable thing ever. And it’s adorable.
Emmet Asher-Perrin has a tendency to accidentally slip into accents that she hears too often on television—she’s sorry. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Ha…your mention about the problem of things filmed in Vancouver reminded me of an episode of Stargate Atlantis where Sam makes fun of McKay and his sister for having a Canadian accent, but it’s pretty clear that Amanda Tapping is herself Canadian whenever she opens her mouth.
I thought Grayson was speaking in a rather generic western U.S. manner, that has southern, i.e. confederate accents fairly pronounced, as so many southerners headed west after the defeat of the CSA. For instance, the Virginian goes to Wyoming, “White Man’s Country” (I am quoting from Wistern’s novel, The Virginian).
So I’m not having troubles with Grayson’s verbal expression. But he seems to think he’s walkiing like a cowboy, which isn’t working so well for him. (There is a Texan on the team that Saves Minna in Stoker’s Dracula — he dies, but his blood is mingled in her veins with all the others of Save Minna Team; his name is part of the name she and Harker give to their child.)
Emily,
I believe I have Tourette’s but with accents. This weekend one of my guildies starting speaking over our TS server and turns out he is Russian. I find it so hard to keep myself from emulating his awesome accent. I understand your hardship.
I have yet to hear a good French accent in a US production, and in most Canadian productions for that matter. The actors kinda sound like they come from sorta Paris when they speak English (even when the characters are supposed to come from Marseille or Montreal or Haiti, where the accents are waaaaay different), but when they have to say actual French words, this proud language is assasinated and left as a bleeding pulp on the floor. Yes the Belloq incident was horrid, but Rosanna Arquette’s Montreal accent in The Whole Nine Yards was 1000X worse and I hurt just thinking about it. It was truly stroke-enducing.
Jeez, how about every portrayal of a Roman or Greek — and half of movie aliens — having a British accent, even when played by non-British actors. There are literally thousands, and the trope is so common that no one even questions it. Otherwise, why isn’t everyone in the theater howling during 300 every time someone yells “Spahh-tahhh!”
I think Dick Van Dyke gets a pass for his accent in Mary Poppins as he’s so good in the movie. My parents, who are Brits, love him in the movie & just roll their eyes at how Bert talks. The expressions he uses, however, are ones my dad knows very well (e.g., “Bob’s your uncle,” “Not Royal Academy but better than a poke in the eye.” etc…)
The utter terribleness of his ‘accent’ is also why it is completely absent in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
As for Sean Connery’s accent, well he’s exempted from accent related questions. I mean hell! he’s been Robin Hood, a Chicago beat cop, James Bond, a Russain sub commander, and a Berber chieftan all with the same accent. ;-)
Kato
PS – Michael Caine has the same accent exemption clause in his contracts.
There’s no shortage of awful American accents in classic Doctor Who. Although the same probably goes for English accents in most American TV.
As for Taggart, I seem to recall a BBS thread where we were discussing his lousy Australian accent and an Australian poster said, “He’s supposed to be Australian? I thought he was South African!”
As for Chekov, Walter Koenig’s parents were also Russian, although they lived in Lithuania before emigrating to the US.
As for the current Dracula series, what’s interesting about it is that effectively none of the regular cast members are using their real accents. You’ve got an Irishman using English and American accents (and why is Dracula’s “real” accent English anyway?), an Australian woman and two Irish women doing English accents, an Englishman doing an American accent, a Dutchman doing a German accent (I think), and even Oliver Jackson-Cohen is apparently doing a different regional English accent than his real one.
How’d I just know Angel’s bad Irish and worse wig would be on here?
Can we spare a moment for Tyrion on Game of Thrones? I love Peter Dinklage, I really do, but he sounds like literally no one in the cast. It’s especially noticable in the first season, when he’s talking about Pip being sent to the Wall because he was caught stealing a “wheel of cheeeeeeese.” The Starks sound like one another, mostly. Jaime and Cersei sound alike. But Tyrion doesn’t. It was a little off-putting at first.
Even though Dick Van Dyke’s British accent was quite good I thought Liam Neeson’s German accent was quite awful.
@9, Even better than Neeson’s German, is Neeson’s American Western accent.
@8, Isn’t Dinklage the only American in the cast? That likely explains it. European actors, for the most part, have to perfect that kinda no-accent phonic that my mom has from her years of speech therapy recovering from a cleft palate. If they can’t do it, they don’t get work in American cinema unless they want to be typecast as “Evil Brit” in everything. Or “Stuffy Brit”
As we all laud James Marsters ability to be Cockney, let’s not forget that it’s canon that Spike’s accent is itself a “Mockney Cockney”
Oh, come on. You’d have a funny sounding French accent too if you ate flies all day. Hey, frogs gotta eat, and bravo to Freeman for his method acting.
Most Southern accents are hard to do. Not even Sir Laurence Olivier could get it right in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
David Tennant is going to play the same role he played in BROADCHURCH in the American version so we are in for a treat.
Neither accent was bad, but I’ve always been amused by the two actors in THE DRESDEN FILES. Canadian Paul Blackthorne played American Harry Dresden and Tennessean Terrence Mann played British noble Hrothbert of Bainbridge, aka Bob the Skull. Talk about accents.
What’s the problem with Tallulah’s American accent? I mean, have you ever heard what Peter Purves think an Alabamian accent is?
Link.
Kenneth Branaugh’s “American” accent in Dead Again was unbelievably bad. Not only did it fade in and out, but it hilariously wandered all over the country. (Emma Thompson, in the same movie, did a great job.) It was such a brilliant film, otherwise – too bad they couldn’t have just let Branaugh use his normal voice.
(Dis-honorable mention to the character of Peri in old-skool Doctor Who. Bad enough that I didn’t realize she was supposed to be American until I read an interview w/the cast.)
Spielberg shoulda hired Truffaut to play Belloq.
I have to admit, I never realized that Belloq had a bad French accent.
@12: Paul Blackthorne is actually from Shropshire, England, so on The Dresden Files we actually had an Englishman playing an American and vice versa.
How could you have left out James Doohan and his awful bogus Scottish accent? My parents were ‘Weegies, and they used to roll about laughing whenever he opened his mouth in any episode of ‘Star Trek’ we watched. True inauthenticity.
I wonder if some of these come about not because of a lack of skill but because of a need to be understood by American audiences. I watch a lot of film and TV from across the pond so I have little trouble understanding thick, authentic Irish but everytime I reccommend one to a friend they always say they couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Perhaps some directors prefer Doohan doing a bad Irish accent that Americans can understand over authentic Irish that turns people off.
The Commitments is one of my all time favorite movies but only half the people I have shared it with seem to be able to understand what anyone is saying.
I thought southerners of the old-fashioned kind did have a soft r sound. “as god is my witness, I will nevah go hungry again” and “nevah you mind” etc. That’s an old south thing, isn’t it? 20th century southern accents seem to be all over the place and some really exaggerate their r’s, but Bill Compton was supposed to hang on to his past.
@19: Doohan did a Scottish accent, not Irish. His character’s name wasn’t Irey. ;) (“Welshie! Noooooo!!!”)
Peter Cook once famously said that Americans should not do British accents for a British audience and vice versa. The only real exception to this I can think of is Hugh Laurie, who is such an excellent mimic that his American accent is nearly flawless. Another possibility could be Michael Caine in only one film: the rather unknown, but very nice Secondhand Lions. I actually didn’t recognize him for most of the movie simply because I assumed the actor was American.
Another bad Who accent would be Nicola Bryant’s American accent for Peri. Horrible and nasal and not at all American.
@22: I think there are a lot of British and Australian actors who do very good American accents. For instance, two of Fringe‘s leads, Anna Torv and John Noble, were Australian, but they both did convincing American accents, especially Torv. Although a lot of British/Australian actors I see playing Americans, including Torv, are tripped up by the word “anything,” which they tend to pronounce as “ennathing” instead of the American “enniething.”
@22
What about Meryl Streep? I seem to recall her doing a convincing upper-crust English accent in The French Liuetenant’s Woman, and then there was her recent role in that biography of Margaret Thatcher.
On this general theme, this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLsVh6Qrpew) is worth watching. Or listening to.
I love that Angel tops this list. Because the only worse accent on the show was Kiendrahh dee Vampyr Slaiyeeer.
That said. I don’t care how bad Belloq’s accent was. He can do me anytime.
@25 Thank you! I can’t believe it took so many comments to get to Kendra’s accent (apparenlty it was decided on last minute and actually an accurate accent that no one recognizes?) but Angel’s made the list.
I always thought Angel’s wandering accent was deliberate, since the character traveled so much for so long.
I would actually not expect a several-centuries-year-old man (Ramirez in Highlander) to sound like the country he came from. He’s had lots of centuries to be around other people and adopt their accents instead.
Also, another example of a good Irish accent would be Moriarty’s in Sherlock. :)
Can I offer two honourable mentions from “Pacific Rim“? Please? I mean, they got an actress from Japan to play the Japanese character. They got actors from the US to play the American characters. Who did they get to play the Australians? Well, the definitely didn’t get Aussies, that’s for sure.
The father sounds like he’s attempting to channel either Steve Irwin or Paul Hogan (both of whom over-played a strong north Queensland accent for the US market – they were more Strine than most Australians manage on a bad day). The son aims for Aussie and hits Mockney fair and square on the head, stunning it as he goes past. The best attempt at an Australian accent came from the woman doing the voiceover on the Australian news report about the wall being breached, and even there… well, Aussie newscasters don’t do Strine – they do Standard Received Australian, the more upper-class variant of the accent. Even the commercial ones.
The thing which really annoys me? It’s not like Australia doesn’t have acting schools, or television productions of our own. Heck, would it really have been that terribly difficult to send a flyer around NIDA (National Institute of the Dramatic Arts, over in Sydney) or WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts, here in Perth) advertising the auditions? Or even passing one around the sets of Neighbours or Home and Away. Or even asking whether there were any extras working on the Hobbit in New Zealand who’d be interested in passing as Aussie for a bit (we accept New Zealanders as a reasonable substitution)?
@24: That Peter Sellers clip is rather amazing.
@28: Thanks to Power Rangers, I’ve probably heard far more Australians and Kiwis badly faking American accents over the years than I’ve heard other people badly faking Australian/NZ accents.
Cary Elwes has it right – english accent. English. ‘Britain’ covers a lot more than just England. And England covers a lot too. (I wonder how many Americans think it’s just cut-glass received pronunciation and mockney-cockney. Ever heard a thick brummie or geordie accent?)
I always thought Patrick Stewart’s fench accent was terrible as Jean Luc Picard…
:p
His French accent was even worse
stupid ipad keyboard…
Mark Addy does a fine American accent – good enough that I was surprised to find out (circa casting in GoT) that he’s actually English.
@28 Good grief the ‘Australians’ in that movie are awful. Almost off-putting if I didn’t love that movie so much.
Actually the best Aussie accent I’ve heard in a movie was from Anthony Hopkins in The World’s Fastest Indian. Except he was meant to be New Zealander so maybe that doesn’t count?
@31: I have always found it amusing that Commander Riker’s pronunciation of “Jean-Luc Picard” sounded more French than Picard’s pronunciation. Although I gather it still wasn’t quite right, since the D should be silent, or something.
Given the ubiquity of transporters in the 24th century, though, it’s easy enough to assume Picard commuted to or boarded in an English school and picked up the accent that way.
For that matter, wouldn’t any truly adept speaker of English speak it without a “foreign” accent? Ideally one should speak French with a French accent and English with an English accent — or American, Canadian, Australian, or wherever you learned it. Sure, some people who speak English as a second language have thick accents, like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan. But there are others who speak it so fluently that there’s almost no trace of a foreign accent — for instance, TV producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, whose only surviving trace of a Cuban accent when he speaks English is a tendency to use an S sound in words where an American would use a Z sound (e.g. “surprising”).
So maybe Picard is just fluent enough in English that he can speak it without a French accent. We’re used to the fictional conceit of foreign characters speaking English with foreign accents because that’s a convenient way of communicating their nationality to the audience, so it seems “wrong” to us when they don’t, but in real life it doesn’t always work that way.
Plus accents change over time. If you listen to interviews with Marina Sirtis today, her real accent is an odd hybrid of Californian and Cockney totally unlike the English accent she usually adopts when acting, because she’s been living in America for the past quarter-century and it’s changed the way she speaks. Sometimes accents don’t fall into rigid boxes, and what sounds like a bad accent may really be the hybrid accent of someone who’s lived in a lot of places. Peri’s accent could’ve been that of an American who’d been living in England for years, though I’m not sure that fits the character’s biography. (In fact, I think that while she was playing the role, Nicola Bryant pretended to be just that. It wasn’t until afterward that the truth came out that she was a lifelong Brit.)
I’ve always wondered what sort of accent Paul Freeman was doing for Ivan Ooze..
Cate Blanchett should have made it to this list. Her pseudo-Texan accent in Hanna was bizarre (when it was present at all), and her pseudo-Russian accent in Indian Jones in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was horrible, though I’m a little reluctant to point that out because it’s not like nailing the accent could have improved the rest of that movie.
As a New Zealander, it’s very rare that I can critique character’s accents. For example, Jack Harkness’ American accent from Dr Who and Torchwood sounds horribly fake to me, but I haven’t heard any complaints from actual Americans, and it seems to be the way the actor talks in real life. So I was interested to hear what Mazer Rackham sounded like in “Ender’s Game”. After hearing it… well, it’s set pretty far in the future, right? Who knows what we’ll sound like?
I actually find John Barrowman’s accent more convincing than Hugh Laurie’s. Much. Laurie has vowel tells. (This does not detract from the joy of listening to him — I appreciate he does not interpret “American” as “nasal and grating” and he’s good with r’s and “anything”.) Barrowman’s sounds are flawless, but he tends toward British usage and idioms. And he has a tendency to act like a stage actor around people who are acting like TV/film actors, which can make him seem dramatic.
Since New Zealand in on the board, I wanna say I think Jemaine Clement is pretty awesome at accents.
Rose Byrne deserves massive props in general. As does Kate Beckinsale’s New York socialite. Lucy Lawless does a great California until called on to say the word “not” –Portia de Rossi has the same vowel tell.
Sally Hawkins blew me away in Blue Jasmine — I didn’t recognize her until a scene where she and Blanchett’s characters had a big blowout and they both dropped their accents for an instant: “Holy crap. That woman ia English and I HAVE SEEN HER BEFORE.” (She did an Austen, I forget which…)
How about Tatania Maslany from Orphan Black! I’m impressed she actually separates her American accent from her Canadian ones, but I can’t judge the others. :)
South African accents are noticeably lacking in science fiction and fantasy movies with the only one being Wickus in District 9 and Sharlto Copley does well with portraying a VERY Afrikaans protagonist but most people in South Africa do not sound like that.
The villains in Lethal Weapon 2 were probably the worst imitation I have ever heard and while DiCaprio tried his best in Blood Diamond it still came across as rather thick.
Peter Cook once famously said that Americans should not do British
accents for a British audience and vice versa. The only real exception
to this I can think of is Hugh Laurie
…and all the others who are so good at it that you think they’re actually American – Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers (and lots of other Easy Company soldiers as well), Idris Elba and Dominic West in The Wire …
Great article, but I dispute your use of James Marsters as an accent done well – Spike is clearly not a real Brit to a real British ear. Alexis Denisof is the unsung accent hero of the Buffy/Angelverse, his Wesley accent is all but flawless, and he’s the one who tends to fool real Brits into thinking he’s one of us, not Spike.
Weirdly, for the longest time I thought that James Marsters was from England, jut not from London, had been asked for a cockney accent and dlivered his finest mockney (a common trope on British telly from non-London native actors). I was genuinely surprised when I heard his real accent.
Peter Cook once famously said that Americans should not do British accents for a British audience and vice versa. The only real exception to this I can think of is Hugh Laurie, who is such an excellent mimic that his American accent is nearly flawless.
Have you ever seen Stuart Little? Laurie’s ‘American’ accent in that is far from ‘flawless’: it improved immeasureably by the time of ‘House’. Hard work, not natural mimicry, is at play there.
@35
Marina Sirtis’ natural speaking voice has always been much more middle-class than her acting voice. That’s actually not uncommon for British actors. Received pronunciation has changed a lot in the last 50 years, but there are still very few who talk that way naturally. Danny John Jules is similar. The way he speaks as Cat is very different from his normal (I think lower-class London) accent.
@39
I’m not sure you can count Barrowman. He grew up in Illinois and went to school there from the age of 8. He didn’t return to Britain until after university.
Gytrash@42
I seem to recall Denisof saying somewhere that his accent as Wesley was fairly close to the accent he developed during the time he lived in England.
@28, Charlie Hunnam, who played Raliegh Beckett, is English. But he plays an American on Sons of Anarchy so he has a LOT of practice.
@33, Addy was on an American sitcom for years and I never even would have guessed he wasn’t. And I’d even seen him in A Knight’s Tale, and never caught that.
Watching ‘Broadchurch’ on BBC America I really had to listen carefully to catch the words the characters were speaking in their native accents. My ears weren’t used to the English and Scottish tones the actors were speaking.
#20: It bugs me how most portrayals of U.S. Southerners use that soft Scarlett O’Hara accent. I think that is more common along the Atlantic coast and I think of it as an “upper class” accent. A more common “country” accent has more exaggerated R sounds and is usually not as drawn out.
Jamie Bamber’s American accent on BSG was amazingly good.
@39: Maslany’s English accent is probably her weakest, which is disappointing since it’s the accent of the lead character. It kind of undermines the reality that the English character pretending to be Canadian has a more convincing Canadian accent than an English one.
(And I’m not sure what you mean by “her American accent.” The show is vague on its setting, like many Canadian shows slated for US airing, but it’s implicitly set in Toronto.)
@45: I’m aware that Sirtis and many English actors speak normally with a less upper-class accent than they use onscreen. But Sirtis’s real accent today is far more American than it was 26 years ago.
@48: When watching Torchwood on DVD, I got into the habit of turning on the captions so I could follow the dialogue more easily. I do that with a lot of British TV these days. I think there’s a lot more natural dialect in use now than there was in the shows of the ’60s or ’70s, where the default was Received Pronunciation or sometimes one of a few stock regional or working-class accents.
@35 – fair points. I’ve often ret-conned his accent the same way in my mind. Was just trying to be funny (which I fail at most times)
Also – isn’t “Will Riker” supposed to be from Louisiana? Would explain his pronouciation of Picard a bit if he’s still a bit creole…
How about Matthew Broderick in LADYHAWKE and that sort of vaguely “British” accent he affected that seemed to come and go at random?
@52: No, Riker’s from Alaska. Ben Sisko’s from Louisiana.
I thought I had posted an addendum/caveat last night, but it didn’t take! — Jemaine Clement’s French accent is NOT good, but that’s the point in that particular Foux du Fa Fa Foolishness situation.)
@@@@@45 — re: Barrowman — I remember hearing something like that. I know he did live in a U.S. environment for a long while, but I was responding to #38, though, who thought he might sound fake — I don’t. (I still think he sounds like a b/w film American from the 1940s while in the Who-verse, but this is not the same as inauthentic, and I also think this is cute, and it makes me happy, so I’m cool with this. :-D)
@@@@@ 51 — There is a small but very clear difference between her accents for Cosima (from Berkley, California) and her ones for Alison and Beth. I’m so impressed she remembers her respective O sounds and glottal stops. (I know the show doesn’t say “Toronto” out loud, but it’s too blatant for me to pretend that it’s just Anywhere, North America, and less fun — especially since to my mind 1. more shows set in/made by Canada ought to get more widely popular, and 2. It saddens me greatly when shows have to pretend to NOT be set in Canada in order to get noticed in the U.S. or when the general public insists on calling Canadian productions “The American Version” — meaning U.S. — as with far too much anime. It seems unfair.)
I’ve heard such varying British opinions on the Marsters’s accents. I do have two friends in the UK who took about ten years to believe me that he was American.
Here’s a controversial one — I saw “Snow White and the Hunstman” with a middle-class English friend who deemed K-Stew’s accent flawless. :-) Not so much Hemsworth’s (which *I* didn’t mind, but I’m not the expert. She thought he was going for Scottish, and I thought he was going for Northern English, but I still confuse those sometimes). And yes, she said “flawless.” Go to. :-) :-)
In general I think Hemsworth’s US accent is better than his various English ones — I think there’s a bit more overlap between Australian and US vowel sounds than between Australian and English (I mean specifically English) ones which gives them a leg up, though Australian and English *consonants* have more overlap. (It doesn’t seem to give us Yanks a leg up, really.)
This isn’t SF, but in addition to Jamie Bamber (who was great) that kid from Revenge who plays the eldest Grayson son does a PHENOMENAL American accent, to the point that when he accidentally drops an R, he just sounds like a New York Italian to my NYC ears (which is appropriate to the location of the show, more or less, if not the social milieu). He was especially good the first season. As time went by both he and Bamber would drop an occasional “EN-nuh- thing” but I *love* those. I am both obsessed and biased.
Oh, and I really loved those behind-the-scenes interviews from Lost where Naveen Andrews (planying Iraqi) and Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje (playing Nigerian-born Nigerian) would both bust out with their identical real-life London accents.
OH, and I finally saw “Sunshine” for the first time last night. I had nightmares, but Cillian Murphy’s American is fab.
@18 Re James Doohan and “Scotty,” I seem to remember reading that Doohan readily admitted that the accent he affected was inauthentic, saying that a “genuine” Scots accent would have been nearly incomprehensible to Americans. Having travelled in Scotland, I would be inclined to agree.
It should also be noted that there’s more than one “Scots” accent, as anyone who’s ever been to, say, Glasgow or Aberdeen would know.
@56, Yeah, if you want to know what Scotty SHOULD have sounded like, watch Tommy Flanagan on Sons of Anarchy(or any other stuff he’s in). He’s Scottish as ALL GET OUT, and while I don’t have a problem understanding him, I know a lot of people who do.
On Roman accents my Latin teacher who spoke RP reckoned that Latin should be spoken with a Northern English accent. I’m not sure what she based that on and I imagine that with an empire the size the Romans had there would be considerable variation.
And on the misunderstanding of accents, I visited California in my early twenties when I still had the classic accent of Oxford, where I was brought up. I had a lot of trouble being understood and on one occasion was asked if I came from Australia. I find strong Geordie or Belfast or weegie etc accents put together with the local idioms very hard to understand so I think it is likely that many accents, British and other, are considerably toned down for wider comprehensibilty.
I’m not too terribly concerned about accents. With Costner’s Robin Hood, I was more concerned about his idiotic dialogue. And my one beef with Dracula’s American accent is that he sounds like Christian Slater.
@20 & @49:
The American South is a huge territory, with a very great range of speaking. Eastern Shore Maryland doesn’t sound like Baltimore. People in West Virginia do not speak the way people born in Richmond speak. People in Richmond sure as heck don’t sound people in Charleston, and white Charlestonians don’t sound like the African Americans who live in Waccama Country. They don’t sound like New Orleanians — within which there are a variety of accents and dialects, back and white. Then there’s western Louisiana that doesn’t sound like any of these either. Go to west Texas and you’re in a whole other sound again. Within Tennessee, Mississippi — and don’t forget the regions of Florida. Georgia — oh, honey!
The whole U.S. is filled with dialects and ideolects and accents.
But whoever brought up Dinklage in GoT, got it. What is he trying to sound like? It is soooooooooo weird!
It’s only borderline genre, but I just saw The Man From U.N.C.L.E.‘s “The King of Diamonds Affair,” which is loaded with dreadful English accents, starting with a Mockney only Dick Van Dyke could love. In fact, the bad guys, who are Italian mobsters putting on fake English accents, do a better job with the accents than most of the characters who are supposed to be English.
But the prize goes to Nancy Kovack, who does what has got to be The Worst English Accent I Have Ever Heard. It meanders freely between Prim English Governess and Scarlett O’Hara, with various unidentifiable stops along the way, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. I mean, I’ve heard some lousy accents, many of them in this episode, but at least they were usually consistent in what they were trying to be. Kovack couldn’t even narrow it down to the right continent.
@15, Peri an American? I know!
I was amazed when I heard it the first time – maybe just during BBCA’s special. And each time I have heard it since, I am again surprised. She absolutely has a British accent.
At this point, I refer to Closed Captioning as “Closed Captioning for Americans who can’t understand a British accent.” Although I am pretty picky about understanding everything on American shows and use CC alot there too, I watch Doctor Who, Broadchurch, and other BBC shows with CC on all the time. And now that you mention it, I do think it has gotten worse in recent years.
I lived in Belgium for a while and went to London for a class. Both me and my English classmates had trouble understanding another classmate with a very thick (Irish or Scottish) accent. Can’t recall, but I do recall being happy to find it wasn’t just me and that other Brits were just as unable to understand her as I was.
Oh, and I’d like to say that Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ “Grayson” accent on Dracula stopped bugging me the instant I realized he sounded exactly, exactly like Johnny Galecki does on “The Big Bang.”
There have been a few comments about Peter Dinklage’s accent and, while it isn’t very good, it’s hardly the worst on the show. I’d say that has to go to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. He tries hard, but his Danish accent is constantly breaking through. It’s very disconcerting.
It’s not as bad as Halle Berry’s “African-ish” accent, but Anna Paquin’s generic southern accent comes and goes a lot over the course of the X-Men films. Hugh Jackman’s American is generally pretty good (I don’t have a problem with a character who’s lived in the US for decades dropping the Canadian), but the Aussie slips in occasionally.
@66: Coincidentally, in the first X-Men animated pilot in the ’80s, Wolverine had an Australian accent for some reason.
Vampire Bill’s accent on Tue Blood is just laughable, but as a Louisianian, I have to give major kudos to Aussie Ryan Kwanten playing Jason Stackhouse. His is the best fake accent on the show.
Dan Akroyd’s southern accent in “Driving Miss Daisy” sounded more like Foghorn Leghorn than any real person I’ve ever met down here.
The Highlanders are not from Earth anyways, so who cares about their accents. In Game of Thrones, it isn’t even our Earth. Why do they have to have European accents? I think Peter Dinklage sounds fine. He doesn’t need an accent. Nikolaj from Dracula is very disconcerting in general. I watched one of his movies where he was a cannibal. All I can say is, “ugh”. I love the variety of accents and how closely some are to each other. I didn’t realize there were several different British accents (just like American accents). I was watching ‘The Heat’ with Melissa McCarthy. The scene with her family was hilarious. Their accents were so thick you couldn’t understand them. My little sister married a British man more than 7 years ago and has picked up an accent. She doesn’t fake it but happens to naturally pick up whatever accent is used the most around her. Unfortunately, she is not treated kindly in the U.K., because she is American.
@70: That was only in the first sequel which every subsequent Highlander production has ignored, and there’s a 1995 director’s cut (reworked again in 2004) which removes all references to the alien origin.
Bob Hoskins is good at American accents, especially in Roger Rabbit. Toons!
My favorite part of the Dracula’s terrible American accent is that it’s supposed to be fake. The REALLY atrocious accent in that show is the “Romanian” accent he uses when he’s alone with Van Helsing.
@73: I’m only aware of Dracula using American and English accents. I haven’t noticed a third one in use with VH.
Some of these bad accents work *because* of their badness. Indiana Jones made it clear to everyone that Belloq had constructed his identity when he said, “You mean Bell-OCK!” Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery indicated the crazy direction of their film by being themselves, and it made the movie better: KatoCrossestheCourtyard is right about the Accent Exception Clause and Sean Connery. Practically every bad Asian accent in film counts, but a few don’t – every bad accent in Big Trouble In Little China seems like a deliberate attempt to play up to our buffoon trucker’s ideas about his place in the story (and not everybody in the film has one).
That concept leads me to Jonathan Rhy Meyers in Dracula. I suspect he went for a broad accent because he’d done an even broader southern accent in the Elvis movie he did for television. But it plays nicely in the series precisely because we’re meant to know it’s fake. We see that, as the accent gets broader and worse, it plays into the expectations of the assorted group of high class Brits he’s trying to con. Now, as for the British accents in that series? I can’t tell you about those. I’m an American who’s spent too long listening to televisual SBA and Texabethan to tell you what’s authentic sounding. I couldn’t say, “Innit?” to save my life.
Oh, one more honorable mention (though you can argue the genre): Gina Bellman in Leverage. She is such a mistress of accents that she was typically great, but obviously the show either made her prep some accents way too fast, or else she had fun making fun of people’s expectations. The most famous example of the latter case was when she, a New Zealander, was asked to play a fake-sounding Aussie accent. I think she and the writers shoved in every throw-another-shrimp-on-the-Barbie-ism that she could think of.
And one more: Jeffery Donovan, who plays Michael Weston on Burn Notice. He speaks so deliberately that I was surprised to discover that he is American.
@76: Sophie was supposed to be a master of accents, but I rarely found Bellman’s accents all that convincing.
Speaking with a British accent is hardly a recommendation to play Robin Hood, who is supposed to be living in the 12th century England, at the time when English language as we know it did not even exist (no one today would be able to follow a film in Middle English without subtitles), let alone the British accents of today. Not to mention that noblemen spoke French (i.e. the medieval, Norman version of French). Just sayin’.
@5: I know! The insistence on everyone speaking in posh British accents in any period drama, no matter where and when it takes place (unless they’re criminals, cutpurses, prostitutes etc., in which case they’ll speak cockney or some other “base” accent) is pretty annoying to me, too. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem if a production adopts this convention to make things easier or because they like it that way. But what’s annoying is that so many people seem to believe that this is obligatory and somehow makes the film/show more “authentic”, and complain when actors don’t speak in RP.
One of the many funny examples is the fact that many people seriously complain about John Doman’s American accent in the role of Rodrigo Borgia on “Borgia: Faith and Fear” as something that just ruins it for them – while they weren’t bothered by the fact that all other actors speak in a variety of European accents (the show is in English, and everyone was allowed to speak in their own accent – because, why not? The fact everyone is speaking English already means there’s no “authenticity”.) While Jeremy Irons’ posh British accent on Showtime’s “The Borgias” is deemed more appropriate. Because, not only is it important to speak English with the posh Brit accent when you’re pretending to be someone in 15th century Rome who’s actually speaking a contemporary variant of Italian, but a posh British accent totally makes most sense for a character who’s supposed to be a Catalan foreigner living in Rome and looked down on by the Italian noble families, right?
@78/Annara Snow: What I find interesting about English productions of period pieces or science fiction is how they use various different British accents to reflect characters’ class even when they’re supposed to be from other cultures or eras. For instance, in The Musketeers, all the characters are supposed to be French or Spanish, but they all use English or occasionally Scottish accents, with the nobles using RP and the commoners using working-class accents. There was an episode late in season 2 where a couple of Spanish characters actually spoke with Spanish accents, and it was surprising because that had never happened before.
And then there are all the various accents that crop up among aliens in Doctor Who. I learned recently that in the ’60s serial “The Krotons,” the voice artists gave the villainous alien monsters South African accents, allegedly as some kind of protest of apartheid.
How can you write an article like this without even a mention of Tom Hanks? Ever since Forrest Gump, it’s been a parade of one terrible accent after another. He may be the nicest guy in Hollywood, but directors need to tell him to stop.