I don’t want to lose my accent, I just want it to become smaller.
I think it’s sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.
I hate it when people in India throw in an American or English accent while rapping without even a passport in possession.
I think most British people who say they can do an American accent are so bad at it. I find it excruciating. I find it excruciating the other way around, too.
Sometimes you forget where the heck you are but when you get on stage, you know by the look on the people’s faces and the accent in their voices where you might be.
Though every film teaches me at least three new things, I don’t subscribe to doing homework about a character’s backstory unless it’s a historical role or one that requires training in accent.
They seem to be charmed by my Southern accent.
I didn’t think I had a voice at all, and I still think of myself as an interpreter of songs more than a singer. I thought it was too deep; people thought I was a man. I had a very strong Jamaican accent, too; the accent really messed me up for auditions.
I’m not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent – which was careless because there’d be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.
An accent in a way can be an entry into a character.
I think anything sounds good with a Southern accent.
In fact, I was very conscious of my accent and used to hesitate in talking to people.
I was very nervous about the accent. I was very nervous about being an American.
The Australian accent is sort of like going down a step in smartness, you could say, because you guys pronounce things as they’re spelled. We add and abbreviate stuff.
I had a vocal coach. It’s a sad thing, but I had to hire someone so that I could get my Australian accent back.
You can’t do Shakespeare with a Southern accent, honey.
My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.
For whatever reason, we relate to anything godlike with an English accent. The English are very proud of that. And with anything Roman or gladiators, they have an English accent. For an audience, it is an easy trick to hook people in.
I’m obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects… So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct – Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver – I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.
My dad did every single accent under the sun, and he would read bedtime stories.
Manchester is obviously is a huge footballing city with Manchester City and Manchester United there – and I really like this accent because my agent is also from Manchester and my girlfriend’s family is from Manchester.
I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I’ve been practising it for so long over so many years I’ve almost lost my accent.
Stevie Wonder, he was in a party. They introduced me to him. I didn’t know that he had like a accent… or that is just how he talks. He was real cool. Kinda chopped it up… It was cool, good experience.
I studied voice for three months to get rid of my English accent. I changed my hair to blonde. I knew I could be sexy if I had to.
An accent like mine and a face like mine, I think a lot of the time it’s easy for casting directors to just stick me in as a bad boy, but ‘Being Human’ took a risk on me – bless ’em – and I’m not that bad boy no more.
Everyone thinks that just because you have a Scouse accent, then you must be ‘on the rob’.
I think I have got quite a posh Scottish accent. It’s funny because I grew up in Oxgangs and Fife.
Growing up, I was constantly labeled an ‘oreo’ by my black peers because of my proper speech and ‘valley girl accent.’
How come foreign accents are so sexy? If I say, ‘I’m going to the store,’ it sounds boring, benign and rudimentary. But if it’s said with an accent, it sounds fundamentally cool.
I had this awesome tennis teacher when I was 12 who was Icelandic. He looked like a Viking: long hair, and he was built like a rock and spoke with this accent.
I’ve been a fan of ‘Survivor’ for a long time. I even applied for a season. I made a really stupid audition tape. For some reason, I thought if I spoke in a German accent, whoever was casting would think it was funny and put me on the show. But that didn’t work!
I got so much negative feedback about my accent. People saying, ‘Yeah, you need to go to elocution lessons.’
To be honest, it’s easier for me to speak with an American accent.
I found that Scottishness and Englishness are actually strong, instinctive things, whatever the historical reasons. Even the accent changes – just two inches across the border.
When I first started out, being from the South and going to New York or Chicago, people kept telling me to get voice lessons and ‘lose that stupid accent you got.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, where I come from, you have the stupid accent.’
My Hindi was not very good, but I guess people liked my accent and gave me Hindi roles.
Even if I know that people can hear my French accent, my goal is to provide the best English as possible when I act.
Auditioning for a couple of years, 99 per cent of the time you are doing an American accent.
I have trouble sometimes watching actors – even when they do a great job – with an accent.
For me, there’s bands like Frightened Rabbit and The View, and they’ve all had that Scottish accent. It’s just class to hear it.
For a lot of people, and I’m one of them, where you are and who you’re spending your time with greatly impacts your accent.
For too long, people have had to neutralise or lose their accent out of fear of prejudicial treatment or to fit in. This has then led to a lack of regional accents, which has allowed this lazy stereotyping and prejudicial attitudes to prevail.
I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America.
Every time I get in an Uber in L.A., they’re like, ‘Oh, great accent. Are you from Australia?’ I constantly have to repeat myself when I’m in North America because no one understands a word I’m saying.
Christopher Reeve did such an amazing job that to give him some kind of accent or more bravado would have been wrong. Audiences wouldn’t have responded to that either.
In Cardiff, I’ve heard a number of accent mixes that weren’t previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi. This pattern is repeating itself in many urban communities across the U.K.; people are especially keen to develop a strong sense of local identity.
I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.
I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider’s perspective.
I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I’ve always been a good mimic. It really wasn’t that hard for me.
I started acting when I was really young. I came to the States and didn’t know anyone, and I spoke with a weird Irish accent.
Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone’s IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.
I’m so envious of certain actors that have that natural facility to hear a cadence and the rhythm of an accent, that it goes into their brain and just comes out. Chameleon voices.
I do one accent – my own. I can make it louder or quieter. That is the sum total of my vocal range. I thought I could do an American accent until I tried it in front of an American – the expression of horror is still burnt onto my retinas.
I played a lot of leaders, autocratic sorts; perhaps it was my Canadian accent.
People are amazed that I’m Canadian and I don’t have this crazy accent.
Well, I couldn’t speak English before I went to Belfast. So I learned English with a Northern Irish accent.
For me and accent work, I think once you’ve figured out where that energy is, where the sound is in your throat or your mouth, it’s a whole lot easier to do.
I understand English; I read and write English perfectly, but the accent won’t go away.
You don’t do classics with a Texas accent.
I’ve been a loner all my life, so it didn’t bother me that Hungarian was my first language and that I had to learn English. I had a pretty heavy accent in junior high school and would say things like ‘wolume control’ instead of ‘volume control.’
I enjoy the mental gymnastics that go along with matching voice to picture and vice versa and trying to accent the action as opposed to provide all of the action through my words. And that’s really what play-by-play is.
I was a journalist’s dream case study; a gobby girl with an accent who was good at engineering.
When I travel round the country, people can’t place my accent; if there’s someone in the audience, they’ll be like, ‘You’re from Philadelphia’, but everyone else will say, ‘Where are you from, California?’ I get England sometimes – bizarre!
