Actors from other countries who are able to sound totally American

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Freddie Highmore - The Good Doctor
Alan Cummings - The Good Wife

I couldn't figure out where I'd seen Freddie Highmore before until I googled him and was surprised that he was the British kid in the movie Finding Neverland. I would've never know he was British just watching the show.

He was also in August Rush and did a perfect American accent in that too.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Matthew Rhys! I was shocked when I saw him on an interview a few years ago and realized he was Welsh. He does such a good American accent in everything he’s done.

+1 -- Also Damien Lewis -- though he's not quite as good as Rhys. Lewis has said that the hardest American accent sound for Brits to master is an "r" in the middle of a word. He gave an example if dialogue from Band of Brothers where he had to say "It hurts."

DP. Not to derail, because the OP was about American actors doing other accents (despite the thread title) -- but, YES! This is a great example you give. The hard "R" sound in so much American English is tough for Brits and sometimes a less experienced British actor will bear down too hard on the R and over-emphasize it. I think the flip side is true as well; Americans doing various British accents seem to have a hard time being convincing with the softer, "ah"-like R. Think, "It hurts" but with (let's say) an English received pronunciation accent, like, "It huhts" -- so easy to overdo the lack of the hard R.

There is a terrifically interesting dialect coach who works with a lot of actors and who does very informative YouTube videos. Erik Singer. Look up some of his videos. Fascinating. And he does a lot more than just US-British and British-US dialect coaching. He talks about the Leo DiCaprio "Blood Diamond" accent in one of his videos, I believe.

Yes. And the Americans end up sounding like they're from Georgia or Alabama for a minute.

Interesting. Going back to the Brits doing American accents side of things, Lewis's accent in Band of Brothers sounds to me like Jimmy Stewart, who was raised in PA and went to Princeton, but sounded like a generic American everyman (before Tom Hanks became the generic American everyman).

He had that old-fashioned Mid-Atlantic (like literally middle of the ocean, not our area) accent. Like Hepburn, and many others of that social class and era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

Katherine Hepburn had a classic WASP upper-class accent (aka, Larchmont Lockjaw) -- actually quite different form Stewart.

I think Grace Kelly is a better example of “Mid Atlantic.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hugh Laurie is fantastic.
Also, Ben Mendelsohn (an Australian) in Bloodline.

Hugh Laurie to me is the gold standard. I'm a speech therapist by trade and with everybody else, even the really good ones, I have caught at least one error here or there, even if it's a tiny one. I've never heard him slip. I still remember my feeling of utter shock when I heard his real accent in an interview. Unsurprisingly for someone who went to the Dragon, Eton, and Cambridge, he sounds very posh. I know he's said "New York" is his least favorite word because of the medial R.

A more obscure one is Yannick Bisson from Murdoch Mysteries on CBC. He's Canadian but fakes an American accent perfectly. This might sound like nothing until you realize that he's Francophone Canadian and didn't start with English until he was 8. He sounds mid-Atlantic to me but then they had one episode where he quoted a sentence in French and I was like, "Wow, he fakes a great French accent!" No, turns out French is his native language and it's the English accent that's a fake. I was agog. You would think that with an obviously French first name like Yannick I would have figured it out before that but you would be wrong.

[Anonymous]

Daniel Day-Lewis in “Gangs of New York”. Not just an American accent but a Civil War era New York accent. The greatest performance of all time IMHO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This has been happening for years, with Brits taking the roles of Americans. They just seem to be better actors and there are so many of them. But I think OPs original question of which Americans can do the reverse is more interesting and harder to answer since its a much smaller pool. But the mismatch of the title and the OP have made this go wildly off track.

I also think it is just a hard question to answer. The only American off the top of my head I could think of doing a non-British accent is ScarJo in JoJo Rabbit. I know there must be more, I just can't think of any.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Natalie Portman, Peter Dinklage. They are probably convincing to a lot of Americas, but not to Brits. Much like a lot of Brits do non-distinct American accents that you can't quite place where they would be from. Americans don't attempt the specific regional accents of Britain.

Americans are usually bad at other regional American accents, as well. As a person raised in the Southern US, I haven’t heard a “Southern” accent by a non-Southern actor (US or British) that wasn’t cringeworthy. I couldn’t bear to sit through Cold Mountain. People praised Daniel Craig’s accent in Knives Out, but it was more like a Shelby Foote impersonation, not like a real person would speak (Shelby Foote was much more laconic). I’ve heard people from Boston say the same. Watching The Departed, even I can tell the difference between Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio. Maybe “Received Pronunciation” is easier because many people who speak that way learned it themselves (it’s not their native accent)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hugh Laurie is fantastic.
Also, Ben Mendelsohn (an Australian) in Bloodline.

Hugh Laurie to me is the gold standard. I'm a speech therapist by trade and with everybody else, even the really good ones, I have caught at least one error here or there, even if it's a tiny one. I've never heard him slip. I still remember my feeling of utter shock when I heard his real accent in an interview. Unsurprisingly for someone who went to the Dragon, Eton, and Cambridge, he sounds very posh. I know he's said "New York" is his least favorite word because of the medial R.

A more obscure one is Yannick Bisson from Murdoch Mysteries on CBC. He's Canadian but fakes an American accent perfectly. This might sound like nothing until you realize that he's Francophone Canadian and didn't start with English until he was 8. He sounds mid-Atlantic to me but then they had one episode where he quoted a sentence in French and I was like, "Wow, he fakes a great French accent!" No, turns out French is his native language and it's the English accent that's a fake. I was agog. You would think that with an obviously French first name like Yannick I would have figured it out before that but you would be wrong.

DP. Whoa, someone besides me who knows who Yannick Bisson is! (An aside, but Jonny Harris's own native Newfoundland accent is a hoot to me on "Murdoch." I'd never heard a Newfoundland accent before encountering that show, and at first was puzzled as to where he was supposed to be from, until it was established that the character is from Newfoundland. Excuse me, that should be: NewfoundLAND. And that's Harris's own accent. But I digress....)

If I recall the story correctly, Hugh Laurie did the whole audition process for "House" with an American accent and until he got the role, some of the people producing the show, who shamefully must have been utterly unaware of his brilliant UK TV and film work, believed he was some little-known American actor. That's how good his accent was. Very consistent, too.

I would add to the list a long-ago film with Kenneth Branagh, "The Gingerbread Man." He played an American from Georgia and he nailed not just "American" but a specific regional American accent and did not fall victim to the generic "Southern accent" so many actors -- American ones too! -- employ if they play a Southern character. I'm from NC and loathe it when characters from "the South" all sound alike, as if NC doesn't sound different from deepest Louisiana, etc.

I would pay to see Yannick Bisson in a role where he only spoke French, BTW, PP....

[Anonymous]

I think some of the actors who do great with accents--Lithgow, Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep--are those who spent a lot of time in formal acting training, where you do a lot of work with coaches and practice different accents, etc.-- before becoming famous.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Daniel Day-Lewis in “Gangs of New York”. Not just an American accent but a Civil War era New York accent. The greatest performance of all time IMHO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Daniel Day-Lewis in “Gangs of New York”. Not just an American accent but a Civil War era New York accent. The greatest performance of all time IMHO.

He's another one that has had a lot of formal acting training.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Christian Bale. Had no idea he wasn't American until I heard him in interview.

Christian Bale did Batman interviews with an American accent, and Terry Gross on Fresh Air asked him what happened to his native accent. Its a pretty funny exchange because Gross sounds shocked when he tells that he made a conscious decision to continue with the American accent for interviews.

That's a great story! And not surprising, as he can be pretty intense about roles. I wonder if Daniel Day-Lewis ever did the same kind of thing; he was pretty studied and focused about character details and it seems like something he'd do too....Any idea?

It's not unheard of for actors to maintain accents on the set, if not in interviews. David Suchet, who played Agatha Christie's Poirot for years, spoke in his Poirot Francophone Belgian accent while on set, not just while on camera. When the costume went on, the accent did too. I saw an interview--done on set--in which he was speaking in the character accent, and he said that he found switching from the accent to his own voice and back again was distracting, and it was both easier and kept him consistent to retain the accent. Interesting, and makes sense. Love details like that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Daniel Day-Lewis in “Gangs of New York”. Not just an American accent but a Civil War era New York accent. The greatest performance of all time IMHO.

He's another one that has had a lot of formal acting training.

DP. This gets into another realm--how does one "do an accent" from the past, a lost accent so to speak? There are coaches and specialists out there who reconstruct speech from past eras but it must be quite a challenge. I agree that Day-Lewis's accent is wonderful in that movie. It sounds strange to us, but I figure if we time traveled to the past, many people "speaking English" would sound alien to our ears.

This is really off-topic but accents aside, the art of writing scripts for historically-set shows is also difficult, I think. Hearing people who are supposed to exist in 1870 or 1775 or 1910 who are using vocabulary and constructions that sound like today can be jarring. I know it must be done on purpose a lot, so we can identify with the characters, but it can backfire too. On the positive side, one show we watched had a remarkable "sound" as if the characters' speech patterns and word choices were truly from the 1890s--"Ripper Street."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hugh Laurie is fantastic.
Also, Ben Mendelsohn (an Australian) in Bloodline.

Hugh Laurie to me is the gold standard. I'm a speech therapist by trade and with everybody else, even the really good ones, I have caught at least one error here or there, even if it's a tiny one. I've never heard him slip. I still remember my feeling of utter shock when I heard his real accent in an interview. Unsurprisingly for someone who went to the Dragon, Eton, and Cambridge, he sounds very posh. I know he's said "New York" is his least favorite word because of the medial R.

A more obscure one is Yannick Bisson from Murdoch Mysteries on CBC. He's Canadian but fakes an American accent perfectly. This might sound like nothing until you realize that he's Francophone Canadian and didn't start with English until he was 8. He sounds mid-Atlantic to me but then they had one episode where he quoted a sentence in French and I was like, "Wow, he fakes a great French accent!" No, turns out French is his native language and it's the English accent that's a fake. I was agog. You would think that with an obviously French first name like Yannick I would have figured it out before that but you would be wrong.

Very interesting comment - particularly from speech therapist. Thanks, PP!

[Anonymous]

Sam Neil from Jurassic Park is from New Zealand.

[Anonymous]

Kate winslet

[Anonymous]

I could hear the British accent of Mare leaking through almost every time she got excited or raised her voice. Any time she was speaking quietly and deliberately she did well.