To find bad accents so off-putting?

[FrostyChocolateMilkshake]

Watching a film on Netflix and I cannot get past the terrible American accent of the male character, played by a British actor. His English accent keeps slipping in and it distracts from the storyline.

I just find it so annoying and off-putting - surely they could have cast an American actor as the lead role!? It's one of my biggest bugbears.

Does anyone else find this irritating or has lockdown turned me into an accent-ravaging arsehole?

Arrrghhh

@BashfulClam I can imagine; it would annoy me too if I had a local accent (my accent is rubbish, you wouldn't know where I'm from if you heard me talk) and some actor from a different place entirely had been cast as the main character from that area. I'd feel my area wasn't being represented, or represented incorrectly. Not sure which is worse.

The worst for me was the main female character in One Day. She was meant to be from Leeds....they cast Anne Hathaway. Doing a Southern accent.

The 'Ulster' series of Sons of Anarchy is a class of its own. Like it deserves a special award and other shows can compete for the actual worst show ever every year. One of the priest characters just popped up on something DH and I were watching tonight and we had to pause and just laugh. The corner shop! With the spam! It really does show how little power actors have on a set, because at least 50% of the cast were British and must have been thinking WTF???

The thing about accents is that often an actor is attached to a project on the basis of reputation, star power, etc etc - no one really thinks to do an accent test first.

@LadyJaye Hollywood seem to have 3 British accents - typical London/OTT Cockney, typical Scottish and typical Irish. So many places being represented incorrectly!

I understand the difference with brummie accents, even if I don't distinguish them. I'm a North east incomer and lived in Gateshead for many years and worked in Sunderland. You can pretty much plot the accent to the square mile.

@LadyJaye

I have a particular loathing of non-Scottish actors playing Scots.

For a tiny country, we have a ridiculous numbers of accents and dialectical variations - somebody who grew up 20 miles away from where I did will have a different accent - yet Hollywood persisting its belief in the 'generic Scottish accent'.

Rips my knitting, so it does.

I used to act and bombed a theatre audition bc the director thought I was Glaswegian. I'm east coast but obvs can crank out a weedgie accent if I need to, but no. I didn't sound South Side enough. So that's all fine, you suck it up and roll with it. Then you go to a cinema and watch a 'Scottish' film.... I am now an ex actor...

There is a film on Amazon that's got Rupert Graves as a Serbian gangsta. Its painful.

Gerard Butler's Irish accent in PS I Love You has to be the worst.

@FrostyChocolateMilkshake Why did include a typical Irish accent in your last post? Please tell me you don’t think Ireland is part of Britain???

@JaneJeffer

Gerard Butler's Irish accent in PS I Love You has to be the worst.

I do love a bit of Mr GB but he cannot do any accents. At all

Try being from Norfolk. I don't even HAVE a Norfolk accent, but the wince-inducing attempts by pretty much every actor ever makes me want to cut the county adrift and sail it into the North Sea. It always, always, always ends up as a mangled Zummerzet garble, which is nothing like a generic Norfolk accent (it varies a lot across the county, there are at least four pronunciations of Norwich).

@thatwouldbeanecumenicalmatter Properly laughed at that! I thought Keith Fit's accent was great, but always assumed proper Geordies would hate it

Knives Out was an okay film but Daniel Craig’s attempt at a southern drawl was absolutely awful. It jarred my ears and made it hard work getting to the end of the film 😂

Just finished The Haunting of Bly Manor, agree with a previous poster the accents are shocking. The narrator has the most bizarre ‘English’ accent ever, ruined the whole thing.

Billy Piper does a terrible Belfast accent in Penny Dreadful. I can't stand her anyway so I was pretty happy when she died of consumption, but then Frankenstein brought her back and she switched to a terrible posh accent!

On the other hand, I was surprised that Reeve Carney who plays Dorian Gray in the show is American - his accent is way better than hers.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's Irish accents in Far and Away were terrible! 😂

I couldn't watch Walking Dead for years as I just didn't buy Andrew Lincoln as a good ol boy southerner. I did eventually watch it and actually thought he did a good job with the accent. Samantha Morton's weird 1920s prospector accent was annoying though.

@BashfulClam

Try being Scottish and hearing the accent and dialect being mangled badly!

Casting directors often seem to be blind to the differences in a Scottish accent.

So they cast a family unit and mum has an Edinburgh accent, dad's from Glasgow, one kid from Dundee and the other Hebrides. Even though the whole point of the story is that they all grew up in the same place.

Surely nothing can be worse than Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in "Far and Away"?

Quite liked the Sean Connery approach - whether he was playing Bond, a New York Cop or the English king in Robin Hood you got his Edinburgh accent.

I loved the Poldark remake, but my god the accents were awful. They all sounded like Wurzel Gummidge.

@Eleganz

I agree. I've really struggled to get into "The Boys" because of Karl Urban's "Cockney" accent. Honestly, if it wasn't for Dick van Dyke it would probably be the worst version of that accent I have ever heard.

Thats his actual accent.

Russell Crowe as Robinhood

[quote Anoisagusaris]@FrostyChocolateMilkshake Why did include a typical Irish accent in your last post? Please tell me you don’t think Ireland is part of Britain???[/quote]
Northern Ireland is part of the UK...probably should have made that more clear! I didn't mean Ireland as a whole.

Yes I can't bear Americans doing really bad 'British' accents - most are terrible. Strangely I've tended to assume that British actors are good at American accents - but who's to know what Americans think - they might be cringing. There was certainly a backlash against how many Brits were getting parts in US TV and films - particularly black actors - they were obviously going there because there are more opportunities to work in a larger industry. I love the variety of accents in the UK. But we are also probably very unaware of how many different accents there are in the US (apart from southern v. New Yorker).

For a period of time I went to Australia quite a bit and I couldn't help myself doing the accent. It made me smile. But I stopped after I had to listen to a lot of people thinking they were doing British accents which were really terrible.

SimonJT Karl Urban is actually from New Zealand so has a Kiwi accent, he's pretty though so I'll forgive him for the terrible cockney!

The good and the bad for me - Renee Zellweger, the American actress, as Bridget Jones - superb.
Toby Jones, who seems to be BBC Radio's go-to for any US male, from north,south,east or west - not so good. He's adopted his own version of a generic 'American' accent and never varies from that.

I'm watching The Serpent on BBC at the moment and the leading lady is trying to speak french (Canadian)- it's hilarious, completely distracting. Still a good programme though. Peaky Blinders is really the worst though

The "Aussie" turtles in Finding Nemo completely ruined it for me!

@Katinski I agree about Renee Zellweger. Her accent as Bridget Jones is incredible. Apparently the crew kept forgetting she was American whilst filming.