It’s not a deliberate thing. It’s not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It’s just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you’re going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that’s what happened.
My accent is… sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English.
I thought it’s very funny that I ended up as a voiceover guy because when I started out as an actor, I had a very strong Long Island accent.
No, no, no. Your accent is so beautiful.
When you say, ‘Southern,’ or you speak about a southern accent, there’s always that drawl, and usually from white people. That’s what people associate with the South. But we’re all different. The black southern accent is different.
I watched a lot of documentaries about North Korean defectors. I also practiced speaking in a North Korean accent with a teacher, and studied a lot.
If I go anywhere where there are people who vaguely look like me, there is always that feeling of, ‘Actually I do look quite similar to everyone else.’ At moments like that, I become very, very British. My accent gets more clipped, and I stride around as if I’ve got an empire.
What I realised is, watching some old home videos, I’ve always had a weird accent. It’s because I spent a lot of time on film sets. But Australia will always be home… I sound like the Qantas ad, don’t I?
In maybe 1963, we had ‘Collier’s Encyclopedia,’ and they sent us their yearly LP. I heard the Beatles talking on there. That was the first time I tried altering my voice, doing a Liverpudlian accent.
When I’m doing an accent, you shouldn’t notice it for a while, if I’m doing it right.
I am trying to make my accent so it won’t bother anyone, but I am not going to drive myself crazy trying to pretend I am an American girl when I am from Colombia.
Doing an accent removes you from yourself and reminds you, every instant, that you’re playing a part.
Why am I a liberal? Because I don’t forget that I’m an immigrant and that I’m a Hispanic and that I have a Latin accent when I speak English, and I want to defend those who get racially profiled by people who would discriminate against us?
I’ve been a fan of accents my whole life. I love trying to parrot or mimic voices that I hear every day, whether it’s a geographical accent or just somebody with a funny voice who sells you your newspaper and your cigarettes.
You can’t be Eazy-E and not move a certain way, basically. So, I studied the culture of it, and also, one of my uncles is from L.A., and he’s great. He was like my performance coach. He helped me get the lingo down pat. He helped me get a lot of things down pat because I would talk in that accent for 10 hours a day.
I’m a parrot. I can pick up an accent and just do it.
I want to do a gritty, independent film, maybe in Scotland or something. I’ll have an outrageous accent, and flowing red hair.
If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.
I like everything European. Even my GPS has a British accent – it’s way less annoying than the American one.
My accent is very confused.
Americans like the British kind of quirkiness and the strange accent. They find it kind of cute or something, with a certain charm.
My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.
If all you have to criticise me on is my age or my accent, then you really can’t defeat me on the issues.
Don’t let the American accent fool you. I am British.
I love New York. I’m a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.
It was such a culture shock for me, being plucked from this diverse neighborhood in London into Jamaica Queens. I’m in this new environment, and I had an English accent.
I spoke English when I moved to the U.S.A. but I had an accent. To get rid of it, I watched a lot of TV-shows and tried to repeat after the tv-hosts. I liked shows about hip-hop.
I had a weird accent. Dutch people speak American English, and my parents were Jamaican, with their own broken English.
In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because – cause ‘you talk white.’ We didn’t talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn’t have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn’t really talking white; it was talking different.
I’ve been online doing all kinds of research and that seems to be the constant criticism, that Aibileen’s accent was just too thick. And for me, I don’t want anything to distract from the character.
I feel respect is in your hands as an actor when portraying a character, particularly when it’s from the Indian subcontinent. I do make a conscious effort to do so and often talk to the directors especially about the heavy accent when it’s not needed.
My accent gets more pronounced when I’ve been talking to people from Derry.
I’m still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent – you get contaminated after so long.
Every impression that I do is just a terrible variation on an awful Bill Cosby impression. You’re doing an Australian accent, but it’s just Australian Bill Cosby; or that’s just British Bill Cosby; that’s Pirate Bill Cosby.
I enjoy the reaction I get in the U.S.A. when people discover I have an English accent. They don’t expect that, and it’s kind of a kick.
The accent of one’s birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one’s speech.
It’s funny because if you ever ask anyone in England to try and do a Beatles accent, no one knows what they really sound like. If you ask anyone in America, they would try and give it a go. English people just know their songs.
A lot of people think I hang around Cambridge as this Hogwarts-obsessed Anglophile looking for anyone with a British accent.
If you talk with a Southern accent, it’s perceived as though you are slow. That’s not the case. I’ve met just as many dumb people who talk without an accent as with.
James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly.
My upbringing is so fundamentally different to my parents’. It must be strange to look at your child who not only speaks with a different accent but has a totally different view of the world.
I started out in New York, and New York has a way of countering a Southern accent, naturally; when I moved to Los Angeles for a job, and I just stayed, the dialect out here doesn’t really counter, and my Southern started coming back.
I took acting and elocution lessons, to get rid of my Sicilian accent.
I am a young woman, with a regional accent, from a working class family, who has had a pretty standard education. So far, so ordinary. But in the places I’ve worked, one or more of these things would put me in the minority.
As soon as you start speaking in a different language or with a different accent, it changes you as a person.
When I bagged the role of Swadheenta Ramakrishnan, I was expected to learn Tamil. I think getting the accent was the toughest thing.
When you speak in another accent, it affects you. You can’t help but be changed by it.
With only 30% of players in Premier League squads qualified to play for England, the accent on developing home-grown talent is heavier than ever.
People often ask me why I sing with a strong Irish accent. I suppose when I was five years old, I spoke with a strong Irish accent, so I sang with one, too.
I’ve done some version of that Minnesota accent – that Midwestern accent – in sketch comedy for years. It’s the quickest way to symbolize you’re a mom.
At a certain point, I had to be like, ‘I will not do any more auditions with a Middle Eastern accent.’
I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.
I’m trying hard to keep my Australian accent. My mom would disown me if I didn’t.
I can’t speak much Italian. I do go down well over there, but it’s frustrating because I can’t really speak it. Even if I do talk, they can’t understand my accent, but I should try to learn it.
I’m more of a mimic. My accent tends to drift to where ever I am.
One of the challenges obviously with doing an accent from a time period early in history is that there aren’t recordings. You would never really get the opportunity to hear exactly what you were shooting for.
Most of us don’t think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting ‘comedic’ accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.
On the other hand, there are only so many people who really knew how she was exactly, like what did her accent sound like, and the fact that she developed profound deafness when she was first running the Harriet Lane.
I speak Hindi with a Punjabi accent, not a Haryanvi accent.
I went to a very posh school, I had a very privileged upbringing with parents who were incredibly loving and brilliant. I’ve never tried to hide that; I’m not going to change my accent or talk in a different way.
