Dodgy British accents in films/tv

[sauvignonbonk]

Watched 2 things on Netflix recently (haunting of bly manor and Juliet, naked) which featured American/Australian actors putting on really dodgy British accents and it was so distracting! Surely just cast somebody who can do the accent correctly or is actually British themselves?

It must happen the other way round as well but I’d never be able to tell if somebody was doing a poor American accent.

@Piglet89

Aaaaah ok! Didn’t know that. Makes sense.

Her American is good in “the Queen’s gambit” too.

LOL.

She's playing someone from a trailer park in Kentucky without the slightest hint of a Kentucky accent.

But I guess on a forum based in the UK, it's enough that she can do an 'American' accent.

@dayslikethese1

Daphne in Frasier makes me cringe; meant to be from Manchester, sounds nothing like.

I'm from Manchester and found her accent pretty convincing.

Then Thomas Brodie-Sangster (born in London) gave us a great American accent as Benny in “The Queen’s Gambit” - interestingly, starting opposite Anna Taylor-Joy.

My American husband spent all of Thomas Brodie-Sangster's scenes wincing at his awful accent.

I was impressed by James Marsters' accent as Spike. I think it must resemble a SE London accent like mine.

Anthony Head as Giles had an RP accent, but his natural accent is southern but not posh. I seem to recall reading somewhere that he worked with James on Spike's accent.

Mmmm Spike...

Julia Roberts' Irish accent as Kitty Kiernan in the film Michael Collins was an absolute embarrassment.

@SlartBartFast she eventually went to a trailer park in Kentucky with her highly educated mother, after the mother leaves then father. She describes the mother as being “from money” and, if I remember rightly from the scene where the mother burns her Doctoral thesis, has a Doctorate in mathematics from Princeton? She spent most of her childhood seemingly exclusively
with that mother, until she goes to the orphanage after the mother kills herself. She tells the head of the orphanage she’s 9 when she arrives there. At that age in particular, accents are informed by the person or people one spends most time with and they tend to set at around 8. I highly doubt she’d sound like Kentucky trailer trash.

There are, indeed, joking references to her being “trailer trash” when she revisits the trailer park with Jolene as an adult - but the background she actually has is the very opposite of actual trailer trash.

Perhaps you should pay some attention to actual chacterisation and how that’d inform a character’s accent before showing such disdain? I imagine the accent and dialect coach on the show did exactly that and that Taylor-Joy, seemingly native RP, spent a fair bit of time with that person so I’m going to trust that she got it right.

Also, you might be from Manchester but you’re wrong if you think Daphne’s accent in Frasier is completely convincing. She’s very obviously someone from the south of England trying on a Manchester accent.

I can clearly hear every single exaggerated vowel. It’s not the worst: but it’s not accurate or really “true”.

Being a native doesn’t always make you automatically able to pick up on those nuances - you must also be able to listen carefully and objectively.

However, from what I can see, you’ve come on solely to disagree with others on this thread:

PP: I think this.

You: My mother’s uncle’s half-sister’s cat is from Orkney and I can tell you that actor’s accent is crap.

I’m sure I read somewhere that the actress who plays Daphne said the producers asked her to exaggerate her accent for comedic effect. Or maybe that’s just her excuse? I don’t know. I’m starting to feel this thread might need a spoiler alert!

This is what I was thinking. His accent is supposed to be terrible. It's part of the show.

It really is. The whole thing is supposed to be about stereotypes and caricatures. Frenchie's accent is also a horrible French accent and he's ridiculously stereotypically French in the comics. They've played it down a bit in the series. Starlight is also supposed to be much more stereotypically Southern.

Honestly Karl Urban (and Homelander) are the only ones getting the characters right.

If you watch Preacher, Jessie is an over the top Texan and Cassidy is an over the top Irishman. Both played brilliantly stereotypically in the series.

Garth Ennis LOVES his stereotypes.

Well, yes, it is a bit like complaining some of the accents on Allo Allo weren’t realistic, but maybe I’m showing my age. Good moaning everyone.

Have we really gotten to page 9 and no one has mentioned Petr Baelish in GoT yet?

Sean Connery’s “Irish” in “Darby O’Gill and the Little People”.

Your man the dad in “Succession” - Logan Roy? although no doubt the Brian Cox will claim it’s because the character is from Dundee.

Cue a whole episode having to be set in Dundee to corroborate this backstory.

Entire cast: do we HAVE to go to Dundee?!!

TheSilveryPussycat

Spike's accent was unusual, but for me, the prise of best English accent by an American in buffy is Wesley Windom-Pryce AKA Alexis Denisof.

Omg I forgot the dude playing Daphne’s brother in Frasier. Absolutely horrific. Dick Van Dyke awful.

@TheSandman hull and East Yorkshire are definitely Yorkshire proper, don’t leave me county-less please 😂😜

Hahaha, you should listen to fake jamaican accents, it would twist you up inside. Americans being the worst culprits.

Daphne’s accent from Frasier sounds nothing like a Manchester accent.
Anne-Marie Duff however pretty much nailed it in Shameless.

OP I really hope you aren't from GB! There's no such thing as a British accent

This is a daft thing to say. Of course there is a british accent, in that there are a huge number of different ones, and each one of them is a British accent. Liverpool: a British accent. Edinburgh. a British accent etc etc.

When yuo say someone speaks with a British accent, you are correct if they speak with ANY british accent. There is no implication that there is only one British accent.
If you think people are saying that (which they are not), then the refutation would be "there is not one single British accent".

Calling others uneducated because you don't understand the above! Cheek of it

@MorganKitten I’m from London, bint is used a lot.

I'm from London, the only person I've ever heard use the term bint is me! After watching a few seasons of Buffy. I'm NW London, never heard it before then.

[quote Oilyoilyoilgob]@TheSandman hull and East Yorkshire are definitely Yorkshire proper, don’t leave me county-less please 😂😜[/quote]
I were joking. I used to live in Hull bottom end of Spring Bank - but Hull never really felt like Yorkshire. Too flat for one thing. My wife is from Sheffield, maybe that coloured it for me.

I'm from the west country and cannot watch anything set there. Cringe. Every time

[quote Piglet89]@Burnthurst187 pretty harsh, superior and unnecessarily insulting comment.[/quote]
Also quite bollocks. It's like complaining because someone's asked for "examples of orchestral music" when there are all kinds of different styles of orchestral music (and indeed several different ways of structuring an orchestra)... well yes that's true, but the questioner is open to all such examples.

Sometimes the casting really doesn't help either — have any of you seen South Pacific?

You have a French character played by an Italian actor, in an English language film. The singing is great, but the accent doesn't really sound like a native French speaker speaking English!

The Scottish terrier in the 1955 Lady & the Tramp, horrendously voiced by American actor Bill Thompson is by far the worst / funniest / most excruciating!

Even Britons doing a different British accent make me cringe, the woman playing Princess Anne in The Crown is utterly dire.
Up until the 60s all British people had the same accent on film, listening to a gritty Northern drama voiced with RP is so funny!