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Non-American actors using American accents

The guy who played Apollo on the Battlestar Galactica reboot did a pretty decent job. There were only a couple of times when his pronunciation sounded funny to me, but otherwise his accent was bang-on.
 
As a non American I can't normally tell if it's a bad accent or not.

Although as a side note, no-one should ever attempt to do a Northern Irish accent. It's not pretty to begin with and done badly it's like proverbial nails down a blackboard. Very few people can get it right
 
Underseer said:
Contrast that with, say, Monty Python. It took me more than a decade to realize that those characters were supposed to be American at all. Every time they appeared in a skit I found myself thinking "What part of England are they supposed to be from, and why are they always dressed up like 19th century carnival barkers?" The sad thing is, they had an American working closely with them (the guy who did the animations), so it's not like they didn't have a ready example of what an American accent should sound like.
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Maybe he had a speech impediment.
 
Here's a funny story about Alan Cumming and Stanley Kubrick being surprised he wasn't American.

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMdVy-nF6cs[/YOUTUBE]



link
 
purple_kathryn said:
As a non American I can't normally tell if it's a bad accent or not.

Although as a side note, no-one should ever attempt to do a Northern Irish accent. It's not pretty to begin with and done badly it's like proverbial nails down a blackboard. Very few people can get it right
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Well Ian Paisley's accent sounds like nails down a blackboard; Is he perhaps a sleeper agent from MI5? Perhaps the DUP were infiltrated by a man whose natural accent is from the English Home Counties... Or maybe he is a secret provo, whose natural accent is from County Cork, or Boston Massachusetts... :p
 
bilby said:
purple_kathryn said:
As a non American I can't normally tell if it's a bad accent or not.

Although as a side note, no-one should ever attempt to do a Northern Irish accent. It's not pretty to begin with and done badly it's like proverbial nails down a blackboard. Very few people can get it right
Click to expand...

Well Ian Paisley's accent sounds like nails down a blackboard; Is he perhaps a sleeper agent from MI5? Perhaps the DUP were infiltrated by a man whose natural accent is from the English Home Counties... Or maybe he is a secret provo, whose natural accent is from County Cork, or Boston Massachusetts... :p
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He's from the same place as Liam Neeson you know
 
purple_kathryn said:
As a non American I can't normally tell if it's a bad accent or not.

Although as a side note, no-one should ever attempt to do a Northern Irish accent. It's not pretty to begin with and done badly it's like proverbial nails down a blackboard. Very few people can get it right
Click to expand...

Don't know about that. Brad Pitt apparently got it good enough in his movie Devil's Own.

I remember one article wondering if Brad got the accent right. The interviewer asked people in Boston if he did and Brad's accent was roundly criticized. THEN the inteviewer got a sampling from a pub in Ireland....the people there said he got the accent spot on. :D

Go figure.
 
I believe David Harewood does a good American accent as David Estes in Homeland, though I've never watched it myself. Heard him do a few sentences on a panel show once, and it sounded pretty authentic.

One thing I know is that nobody who is not Scottish should attempt a Scottish accent. Trust me, I've heard many try, and you'll only make yourself look bad.
 
C_Mucius_Scaevola said:
I believe David Harewood does a good American accent as David Estes in Homeland, though I've never watched it myself. Heard him do a few sentences on a panel show once, and it sounded pretty authentic.

One thing I know is that nobody who is not Scottish should attempt a Scottish accent. Trust me, I've heard many try, and you'll only make yourself look bad.
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As Scottish character Mary Maceachran said to her fellow service people in the movie Gosford Park about the character Henry Denton

"He says he's from Scotland, but not from any part I know." :cheeky:
 
credoconsolans said:
purple_kathryn said:
As a non American I can't normally tell if it's a bad accent or not.

Although as a side note, no-one should ever attempt to do a Northern Irish accent. It's not pretty to begin with and done badly it's like proverbial nails down a blackboard. Very few people can get it right
Click to expand...

Don't know about that. Brad Pitt apparently got it good enough in his movie Devil's Own.

I remember one article wondering if Brad got the accent right. The interviewer asked people in Boston if he did and Brad's accent was roundly criticized. THEN the inteviewer got a sampling from a pub in Ireland....the people there said he got the accent spot on. :D

Go figure.
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I watched the trailer. Hard to tell from that because it's mostly about Harrison Ford. Sounded ok, but he's going for a Belfast accent ie Northern Irish which doesn't sound the same as a (Republic of Ireland) Irish accent
 
purple_kathryn said:
As a non American I can't normally tell if it's a bad accent or not.

Although as a side note, no-one should ever attempt to do a Northern Irish accent. It's not pretty to begin with and done badly it's like proverbial nails down a blackboard. Very few people can get it right
Click to expand...
I think one of the issues is that if you're from a specific area where someone non-native is trying to emulate an accent you're familiar with, it doesn't take much to make it sound horrific.

To me there's no such thing as an "Irish accent" or "British accent". There's Cork, Dublin Donegal, Belfast, Cavan, etc. accents from Ireland. There's West Country, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Liverpool, London, etc. accents from Britain and no doubt people from those regions could even identify local variations of those accents.

I imagine it's similar for people from the southern United States for example who don't recognise a single "deep South" accent but know there's a wide variety of accents from that region from state to state and even within states.

Having said that, Daniel Day-Lewis's Northern Irish accent in "In the Name of the Father" as Gerry Conlon seemed pretty good to my ears.

When I watch Hugh Laurie in House, I've heard he does a really good job at an American accent, but I can't tell you myself how true that is. It could be the same as the horrific attempts at Irish accents I've heard from non-Irish actors myself.

BTW, the worst example by far at an attempt at an Irish accent I've come across myself was Tommy Lee Jones in "Blown Away" where he portrays an IRA bomber escaped from prison. It's fucking horrible in every way. From minute to minute his accent seems to bounce around the island of Ireland where he attempts to butcher every single local accent in the space of a single movie.
 
The "Irish" guy in Charlies Angels Full Throttle. He seemed to be covering the entire British Isles with that one
 
Just watched Karen Gillan(scottish) play an American in the film Oculus. Her Scottish accent in Doctor Who was never really very strong to begin with. Maybe it's the sleep deprivation, but I didn't catch many mistakes in Oculus. However, it seemed to me that she spoke unusually fast.

She'll be playing an American with something like a valley girl accent in the sitcom Selfie. In the trailer, she sounds rather over the top.
 
Carrie Fisher just did an interview where she said trying to make Leia talk in a British accent was a huge mistake that made her sound stupid, so she's not going to bother with it for the next round of films.
 
Personally, I don't care what accent or idiomatic speech and actor uses as long as I believe them in the role.
 
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