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!
One of my best friends growing up was Vietnamese, and he and his mom would teach me how to say certain things so I could impress my nail girls. Then the nail girls would teach me how to count to 100 and basic things like 'Thank you' and 'You're welcome.' It's funny, because any accent that I do now always turns into Vietnamese.
I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.
If you're in America a lot, it's easy to get into playing American. All of it, the sounds, the energies, all very different. But it's really hard to do the accent. I tend to try and stay in it all day, which is the only way I can manage it.
When my grandfather died, I started adopting some of his accents, to sort of remind myself of him. A homage. He was a war hero, and he was really great with his hands.
I love talking in an American accent. Even though it hurts my face after a few hours.
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.
My grandma said - when I was really young and I'd sing along to the radio - why do you sing in an American accent? I guess it was because a lot of the music I was listening to had American vocalists.
To be honest, accents are one of those things for me, personally, that usually come quite naturally by just listening to the people.
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.
After The Beatles came on the scene everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.
I like to hear BBC Manchester about the news and to learn English and the Manchester accent.
I'm a big fan of the Irish accent. After a couple of drinks, I start to get a bit of an Irish lilt, too.
Well, I couldn't speak English before I went to Belfast. So I learned English with a Northern Irish accent.
I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent - it feels fake.
I have spent too long training myself to speak with an American accent, it's ingrained. I spend 16 hours a day on set speaking with an American accent. Now, when I try to speak with an Aussie accent, I just sound like a caricature of myself.
As a kid I decided that a Canadian accent doesn't sound tough. I thought guys should sound like Marlon Brando. So now I have a phony accent that I can't shake, so it's not phony anymore.
I'm pretty adamant to do an American accent because you get it immediately.
When I am playing a role far away from me with an accent that is not mine I always employ a dialect coach. I am almost always playing someone that has an accent that is not mine.
The odd thing is if you asked me to do the accent now I would find it very difficult unless I was also playing that part, because I associate it so much with entering into the role and stepping into someone else's shoes.
I don't speak cockney and I don't pretend to come from that part of the world. For the longest time the English, like the Beatles and so on sounded American. "She loves you yeah yeah yeah!" All of the sudden you sound American. It doesn't work that way with Americans who try to sing English. It's not convincing. If I say "Footy" and "tele" and "Brissy" and "Sydney" and "Simmo" it's not convincing.
Because I'm Irish, I've always done an accent. Not doing an accent is off-putting because I sound like me. I love doing an accent. Doing the accent from West Virginia was great, and we had to get specific with it.
Doing an accent removes you from yourself and reminds you, every instant, that you're playing a part.
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.
In Australia, kids play in American accents.
