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I don't know but I will say Andrew Lincoln does a good American accent on The Walking Dead. Actually, it'd be southern.....I wonder if it's easier & more convincing for an English actor to do a southern accent as opposed to say the Midwestern accent, which I really can't characterize as an accent at all.
How is it not an accent at all? The accent in the midwest is the accent that the grand majority of the United States has. It IS the American accent.
I would think a British actor trying to do a southern American accent would be very difficult, it's also tough because there are so many different southern dialects. People in southern Louisiana do not sound like people in Alabama, and people in Alabama do not really sound like those in North Carolina, and North Carolina is different from Virginia.
Alan Tudyk - "Death at a Funeral" and "A Knight's Tale."
Great one. I thought Alan Tudyk was British for years until I saw "42" and started wondering, because that Southern accent was so good.
I think American/Canadian/non-British actors can do a good English (or Irish, Scottish, Welsh...) accent if they put a lot of effort into it and actually visit the place where the accent comes from, instead of just relying on a dialect coach. I heard Renee Zellweger was able to fool English people with her accent.
Someone mentioned Leonardo DiCaprio as doing bad accents. I disagree. He was good in The Departed with the Boston accent and good with the South African one too. The Django one was over the top but that was possibly intentional.
On the flipside, a good amount of actors can't do an American accent very well. Watch Aussie Sam Worthington in "Terminator Salvation"...SO TERRIBLE, in the same movie in which Bale does a perfect one. Also, I never thought Ewan McGregor could do a very good American accent. Michael Caine's is bad. The list goes on.
How is it not an accent at all? The accent in the midwest is the accent that the grand majority of the United States has. It IS the American accent.
I would think a British actor trying to do a southern American accent would be very difficult, it's also tough because there are so many different southern dialects. People in southern Louisiana do not sound like people in Alabama, and people in Alabama do not really sound like those in North Carolina, and North Carolina is different from Virginia.
Right, I'm from the Midwest. Newscasters I've seen in various parts of the country usually sound like Midwesterners, it's a bland neutral voice. That's why I said "no accent".
Right, I'm from the Midwest. Newscasters I've seen in various parts of the country usually sound like Midwesterners, it's a bland neutral voice. That's why I said "no accent".
Perhaps I am over analyzing here, but someone from the midwest most definitely has an accent compared with someone from the UK. There's a fundamental different between the standard American accent and "no accent".
I've seen plenty of American actors pull off the British accent with ease, and vice versa. Perhaps one reason why many British actors take to American accents so well is because they've been exposed to US culture via music, movies, and TV shows far more than Americans are to UK shows.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ColdAilment
Perhaps I am over analyzing here, but someone from the midwest most definitely has an accent compared with someone from the UK. There's a fundamental different between the standard American accent and "no accent".
Yes, exactly what I was thinking. What I've noticed is that many European performers resort to the safe, flat, "American accent" which isn't really an American accent at all. There's no nuance to the way they speak, so I wouldn't classify their accent as the standard midwestern American accent at all. It's actually a non accent.
Perhaps I am over analyzing here, but someone from the midwest most definitely has an accent compared with someone from the UK. There's a fundamental different between the standard American accent and "no accent".
Shrug, whatever. I'm not on here to argue about such a small topic. I posted my thought on this, to no one in particular & you seem to be defensive about my post. Weird.
That's true. There are many so-called "British" accents. Someone from London sounds very different than someone from Manchester. The Welsh and the Scots are totally different. I can barely understand a heavy Belfast accent.
But the same thing is true of Americans. Bostonians sound very different from New Yorkers who are different from Virginians who are different from Floridians who are different from Texans who are different from Midwesterners.
It is not true of Americans in the same way.
British regional accents are far older than American regional accents, which of course go back no more than four centuries (most of them considerably less). That long time has allowed far more variation, including very subtle variation, to develop amongst British English than amongst American English. Immigrants to America, even those from Britain, were from various areas, and the effect was the the fine differences in their native speech were filtered out in the subsequent American-born generations. The waves of immigrants to the U.S. that followed which did not even speak English as their mother tongue (Germans, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Scandinavians, Asians, Latin Americans) did even more to buff the accent edges off of American English and to inhibit the degree to which our own regional accents would develop.
As a result, there is far more variation of the English language spoken in England, an area smaller than Louisiana with a population of 53 million, than in the United States, which has 6x the population spread out over and area over 70x as large with far more formidable geographical barries (alpine mountains, vast deserts, tundra, great lakes, vast swamps) that are normally conducive to linguistic isolation and divergence.
He's a television actor, but James Marsters was often lauded for his accent as Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then again, some people thought it sounded pretty fake too.
I'm going to second Spike. It was actually jarring hearing him in other stuff, doing an American accent, like Smallville (don't judge). For the life of me, I can remember if he used a British or American accent for Torchwood.
I think Peter Dinklage is pretty good on Game of Thrones. Funnily, I thought Lena Headley (Cersei) did a decent American accent when she was on The Sarah Conner Chronicles.
I like Sam Worthington, but his accent in Terminator Salvation was godawful, but maybe there's a difference since he's from Australia?
And for a purposely(?) bad Australian/Peacekeeper accent, Ben Browder was hilariously horrendous on Farscape.
I'm going to second Spike. It was actually jarring hearing him in other stuff, doing an American accent, like Smallville (don't judge). For the life of me, I can remember if he used a British or American accent for Torchwood.
Just an FYI: you are my new best friend for mentioning Torchwood. Now I can't remember either, though
I think someone mentioned upthread that British actors must have difficulty pulling off Southern accents. Maybe I misread? (and I can't find it to quote it, of course) Anyway, I think for Brits, Southern accents are probably the easiest to pull off because they have the same non-rhotic "r" sound at the end of words (or is it rhotic? my Linguistics classes were so long ago).
I thought Renee Zellweger did a good job in Bridget Jones's Diary, didn't jar on my English ears at all. Plus of course, the magnificent Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher...... great as always.
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