Mallory Jansen Quotes

I've pretty much played every regional accent you can play in the U.K. I've played German, French, Arabic; I've been Jordanian, Lebanese. I've covered a lot of ground.

Every time I create a character, I don't assume they speak like I do, even if they're Australian.

Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!

I have a funny accent in every language.

I love playing characters with different accents. It's a lot of fun.

Whenever I'm in the U.K., people say I have an American accent. Which is, obviously, funny.

I have always like doing accents; I find it much easier to get into character for me.

As an English actress constantly playing Americans, you already had to step way out of your box in that way.

In 'Shirin Farhad' I play the character of a Parsi woman. Though I was born a Parsi, in a Parsi family, I don't have the right accent.

I love accents - I wish I could find an accent for every one of my characters. It makes it so much easier when I don't have to hear my own voice.

I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.

The thing with being able to do accents is that it's still completely separate from being an actor.

I've not been called on to do a lot of accent work.

I don't aspire to just play things that are like me. Whether the accent is Taiwanese or British or Canadian - that is the very craft in which I was trained. It is my absolute privilege and honor to do that.

I know that Philadelphians hate New York actors passing off New York accents as Philadelphian when they are quite different.

I never noticed my voice. I did become aware as a little kid at camp that I liked doing accents. We'd do plays and skits, and I realized I loved speaking in voices that weren't my own.

I've played American characters before, so I've naturally become more at ease. Still, there are some American words that I cannot get my tongue around, but if you keep it flowing, you are never too far away from the truth.

For years, I'd go to the movies and see guys doing Boston accents and think, 'Oh please, God, I hope I never have to do that.'

I think the hardest accent for me to do is what I end up trying a lot of times, and it's like some sort of a general American sound. So not Southern and not east-coast or west-coast, but just a general American sound that no one really speaks, actually.

When I'm playing an American, I don't play Lennie with an American accent. They're American characters who look like me, but they have different voices.

It's quite telling that the really big comedians - like John Bishop from Liverpool, Kevin Bridges from Glasgow, Peter Kay from Bolton - stand out with their strong regional accents.

I can do so many accents that I'll never be able to use. There aren't casting calls for a black guy to play a Scottish highlander. I can hope. I've got my brogue ready. I just need the opportunity!

When I went to London, they told me I spoke with a funny accent - English with a Chinese accent.

Today, actors aren't forced to ditch their regional accents like they used to. The best example's Tom Baker, a Scouser who went to great lengths to change his accent and ended up with something alien - and fantastic. It's sad that when the likes of him go, there won't be those sorts of accents any more.

I'd never gotten to do an accent for anything that I've done, so that was really appealing because I love doing accents. Ever since I was a kid, I made it my business to try to mimic foreign accents, so it was really fun to be able to do that. I was really working on the accent to try to make it really good.