I adore ‘Broad City,’ but the one Latino is queer for jokes. You see queerness of Latinos in this emasculated with an accent or fez on a set ’70s show. It’s always like, ‘Ha, ha, funny emasculated immigrants.’
People are disappointed when they hear my American accent because they regard ‘The Police’ as an English band but I’ve clung to my American-ness all the way.
Vests are flair for men. It’s one of the few ways men can accent themselves in a formal yet fun fashion.
The great thing about not being American is that you don’t assume you know what a Southern accent sounds like, so you have to be specific.
What can often happen when doing accents is that you go too far to one extreme, so it becomes a caricature. It’s important to bring an accent back to a natural organic place so you’re still speaking like you would speak, just the sound is different. But your rhythms are not.
The Norse way of speaking, no one really knew what the Vikings sounded liked, they were Norsemen. The accent is really a combination of a Scandinavian accent, maybe with a Swedish accent and an old way of speaking.
As actors, we get to hide. You can change your hair and your accent, and it’s not you. You have tricks, these masks.
We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer’s accent. That’s just pretending to be something you ain’t.
Unless it’s a specific accent, or something about physicality you have to change, I am generally not such a conscious actor.
I think that’s what’s great about being an actress is you get to learn so many different things like that, like learning a little bit of Tibetan here, learning a Southern accent there.
Everybody wants to say who they are and where they’re from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent.
When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.
Back in the States, they actually liked hearing my Filipino accent. People I meet there found it very endearing.
If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you’re talking to.
My accent remained terrible. It was very hard for me to initiate any conversation with someone I didn’t know.
I picked up the Puerto Rican accent from my father, and my sister picked up my mother’s very clear, concise, and slow Mexican-Spanish. So, when she does speak, she speaks with diction. She pronounces every word.
If I’m not writing, I can download a newer album everybody’s making a fuss about. But when I’m writing, I keep myself in my own zone – I worry about listening to new music that’ll inform me too much. I’m the kind of person who goes to another country and starts speaking in an accent after three days.
Whenever I’m in the U.K., people say I have an American accent. Which is, obviously, funny.
When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you’re judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you’re from.
There aren’t a lot of Portuguese models, so everyone always expects me to be Brazilian because of my features, sometimes even American, as I have a slight American accent when I speak English.
I keep forgetting I’m speaking in an American accent sometimes. The dangerous thing is that you end up forgetting what your real accent is after a while! It’s really strange; I’ve never done a job in an American accent before.
I speak English without an accent, and I speak Spanish without an accent. I really do have the best of both worlds.
I guess when I first started speaking with an American accent, there’s a tendency to create a caricature of the accent because you just exaggerate the pieces that stand out to you.
I like to think my accent isn’t strong enough, but it’s funny: I get people coming up to me in America and saying I sound like Mel B. She’s from Leeds. They just hear a British accent and probably can’t quite work it out.
I love the Midwest accent.
A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.
I applied to Oxford in the ’80s and was invited to an interview. It was like a scene from ‘Billy Elliot.’ People were making fun of me for my accent and the way I was dressed. It was the most embarrassing, awful experience I had ever had in my life.
I’m already really aware and self-conscious of my accent.
I played a Siamese girl from Thailand. I played an Arabian girl. I did a lot of American Indians. I never, ever was able to do a part without assuming some kind of accent.
As a Scotsman, my accent can sometimes be difficult for people to understand.
I could never get cast with an Indian accent. I was not getting cast.
I’ve heard other actors saying they don’t want to play a character with an accent at all. To me, that’s kind of an insult to somebody like me who did have an accent.
My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I’ve got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it’s possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.
We just need more complex, important roles that tell our experiences as an immigrant; as someone with an accent, but also American; but also someone who’s second or third-generation American, born and raised here who actually don’t speak any language other than English.
One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.
Something I realized when I moved to America: people get these general American accents, but when they get angry or upset or excited, their original accents come out. It’s something I noticed with my manager, because he’s from New York, and the first time he got angry, he suddenly had this accent.
The idea of New Zealanders sounding like Americans is not it. You got to rhyme in your language, your accent.
The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I’m a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I’d be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it’s become a habit.
The riskiest thing I have done in my fifties is to do a Polish accent for a new film. I had a great time working on it and two wonderful people to guide me. A dialect coach that I have known for thirty years and a Polish actor.
You know what it is, when I’m playing a role sometimes, I just tend to stay in that role. It’s easier to maintain. We just shot a pilot in a very thick American accent. I feel like the character lives in me. Of course, my family tease me about it.
When Slick Rick first hit the scene, I had to practice that British accent. There’s no other storyteller like this man.
‘Batman’ took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.
Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.
I still keep my accent.
There are certain situations, when you’re in America, when people understand you better without an Australian accent.
You get to a new school, and you’re the new guy, or you’re the foreigner, or you’re the guy with the funny accent. That first day at school was a whole new opportunity to create a new persona.
The first music that came to my ear was gospel… I used to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ with a very strong southern accent and a vibrato already at five years old.
It’s my mission to get the New Zealand accent into a Hollywood show. I’m proud of the way we talk, and I’m here to represent it. Kiwis are everywhere: they’re in every city of the world. I’ve checked. We have a voice… it’s a bit of a funny one at times, but it’s one that I want to promote.
I wouldn’t have been able to move to L.A. if I felt I was going to lose my identity as a New Jerseyian. My accent has gotten thicker since I’ve lived here.
I can have an accent and not have an accent, so it’s really cool. I can play with it. I can be very Sofia Vergara, too, so it’s really cool.
My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn’t know there were any South African poets.
I never worked with a dialogue coach before, but I’d hate it if an American did a British accent and didn’t do it well. It would be insulting.
I am grateful that the people of Telangana supported me when I spoke in the Andhra accent, just as much as the people of Andhra embraced my Telangana dialect.
You know, so many people say TV makes you stupid. But it had the complete opposite effect on me. It kept me from having a really bad Southern accent.
Americans always ask how much I love my accent, and I don’t get that – I think I sound like a school teacher.
