Accent Authenticity Quotes

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.

If I'm playing an Indian in a Hollywood film, I won't do it in any funny Indian accent.

It's part of my job. You can't play Veronica Guerin sounding like this. It just wouldn't wash. But what I find fascinating about doing an accent - unless it's a farce - is that it's not slapped on.

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.

I would get a lot of roles for the ethnic friend and then I would go in for that and not be ethnic enough. They wanted an Indian accent. They wanted something more very visually, clearly specific.

Sometimes I'll go into a shop and speak in a different accent to see if I can pull it off. But then somebody will be like, 'Where did you say you were from again...?' And then I panic, and my accent dissolves, and I pretend like I wasn't doing it in the first place.

All I'm saying is we got plenty of Texans, and people from Montana, and New Jersey, and Wyoming, or Kansas City. We got plenty of actors. So we don't need some cat from Cardiff-upon-Rosemary-upon-Thyme, or whatever the hell it is, playing people from Montana. And in the reverse, they got plenty of people from Cardiff-upon-Rosemary-upon-Thyme that they don't need our asses coming over there trying to do British accents.

It's so funny how it's impossible for an American actor to play an English part or an Australian part. But by all means, come and bastardize our accent as much as you want.

Why is it when a white actor or even a black actor does a British accent, it's considered art?

In my work I try to get things right, to do it well, and if there are specific skills involved - like in a case conducting or playing the piano, or in this film I have coming up where I play a character who is German - I'm very meticulous about learning accents and dialects and those kinds of things. That's probably the closest I come to being a perfectionist.

Nobody's going to tell me to rap in an American accent.

I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent - it feels fake.

My whole deal when I do accents or dialects is I gotta fool the locals. If I fool the locals then I've done my job.

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.

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.

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.

I get a lot of disbelief that my accent could actually be real, which seems strange.

I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why people speak that way - you have to understand the culture.

I find it terribly distracting in movies when people do accents, I must say, unless it's terribly serious and the story is rooted in South Africa and you're doing a South African accent. But in period movies I think nothing can be more distracting than people doing accents.

I had this very strict rule when I began auditioning that I wasn't gonna do a thicker accent, because it was like, 'I can't tell if it's supposed to be funny because he talks funny.' And now I feel like there are certain characters that I could play that could involve doing a thicker accent, as long as it's specific to that character.

[J.F] Kennedy's own accent was inconsistent. So people are inconsistent. And it always kind of irks me when people talk about inconsistent accents, because people are imperfect by nature. So in the end, what you do is, you do an inhabitation and not an imitation.

I have trouble sometimes watching actors - even when they do a great job - with an accent. It kind of removes me, somehow. And maybe at some point, yeah, it could be a really cool experience. It's not something that I consciously think, "Oh yeah, I want to do a movie with an accent." Not to say that it couldn't happen.

A really irritating thing when you're watching a film is if somebody's accent isn't bang-on - it distracts you from getting into the story because you're thinking: 'Where are they from?'

A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.

What I try to do with the accent of any character I play is not necessarily to do something that's generic - an Indian accent and that's how it sounds, for example. I think the accent needs to sound authentic on this person.