15 Handsome, Talented Actors Who Shouldn’t List ‘Accents’ As One of Their Talents
Accents are hard, but brains are amazing. What this means is that we can basically all, inside our head, do accents perfectly, but somehow between the brain and the mouth, most of the time, it all falls apart and they come out sounding like shit.
What tends to happen, trying to do an accent, is that we focus on one or two things, and do those, and do nothing else. An American trying an Australian accent drops their Rs and inserts a twang and that’s it, and they sound terrible. A British person doing an American accent puts the Rs in and rounds their vowels, and nothing else, and they sound so bad.
Any normal person who thinks they can do an accent realizes after about two syllables, “Oh Christ, I can’t do this,” and opts to shut the hell up. If someone looks like a movie star, though, a combination of confidence and ambition — being surrounded by people fawning over them and saying yes to everything — can lead them to think, “Hell yeah, I can spend two hours on a big screen convincing people I’m from somewhere I’ve never been. Sure, I’m from Texas in real life, but I’ll play the shit out of a guy from Switzerland! My flawless body and glistening features will allow the audience to believe I’m absolutely from Budapest, a place I couldn’t find on a map. Action!”
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Leonardo DiCaprio: That Afrikaans Accent is Leonardo DiCrappio
Has one face ever adorned as many teenage girls’ bedroom walls as Leonardo DiCaprio’s? However, playing an Afrikaans-speaking Zimbabwean in Blood Diamond, he somehow seems in even more over his head than, you know, when he drowned in that boat movie.
Don Cheadle: Don’t, Cheadle
Don Cheadle claims to have spent time in London perfecting his Cockney accent for the Oceans trilogy — strange, as his accent is absolutely dreadful. People gave Dick Van Dyke shit for his in Mary Poppins, but this is far worse.
Justin Theroux: Justin Credibly Bad
Justin Theroux is handsome, talented and incredibly successful. He’s doing well in life. His Northern Irish accent in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, however, is dogshit. He pronounces “scream” like it has three syllables and a question mark.
Christopher Lambert: There Can Be Only One Accent
Christopher Lambert, god bless him, had a lot to contend with on Highlander. He is extremely shortsighted, which made swordplay difficult, and learned his lines phonetically — he is Swiss, and his first language is French. His Scottish accent? Fucking dreadful.
Keanu Reeves: Nobody Be-reeves You’re Anyone Other Than You
Nobody has a bad word to say about Keanu Reeves — he’s humble and charming despite his enormous success. What a man. Not a British man, notably: He’s played one several times and done a fully ass job of the voice.
Kevin Costner: As English as the Statue of Liberty
Kevin Costner sure plays a great cowboy. He’s less suited, perhaps, to playing a 12th-century English nobleman — in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves he very much sounds like a guy who owns a minivan.
Cary Elwes: What a Sawful American Accent
A lot of the first Saw movie features the British-accented Cary Elwes and the New Zealand-accented Leigh Whannell arguing in American accents quite, quite poorly. Perhaps it’s knowing Cary Elwes has such a great real accent that makes it worse.
Brad Pitt: Bad Shit, Accent-Wise
There is one line delivered by Brad Pitt in an Irish accent in The Devil’s Own — “I need that money, Tom!” — that is so, so bad, Jesus Christ it’s bad, so shit, absolutely dreadful. Also bad? Every fucking other one.
Russell Crowe: Skin-crowelingly Bad
Russell Crowe is frequently great at accents — this perhaps led to a bit of overconfidence making Robin Hood, in which Crowe’s character seems to come from every town in the British Isles at the same time.
Arnold Schwarzenegger: I’ll Be Back, in Austria, Vocally, At All Times
Arnold Schwarzenegger is such an icon that he doesn’t need to try. He can play a suburban American named Harry and not do a damn thing with his accent and it simply doesn’t matter that he is so, so Austrian.
Jean-Claude Van Damme: Damme, That’s Bad
Jean-Claude Van Damme speaks five languages and can do the splits: that’s awesome. In Street Fighter, he plays Colonel William T. Guile, an all-American Air Force hero. What part of America is Guile from? Belgium.
Sean Connery: Acshents Weren’t Hish Shtrong Shuit
Whoever Sean Connery was playing on screen, that character was Scottish. James Bond only became half Scottish after Sean Connery played him. In Highlander, for instance, he plays an Egyptian who has lived in Japan and Spain, so he sounds, of course… Scottish.
Sir Michael Caine: Caine’t Really Do Accents
Michael Caine only occasionally deviated from his real Cockney accent — admittedly, winning an Oscar as Maine’s most Cockney-sounding doctor in The Cider House Rules. In On Deadly Ground he’s apparently Texan. Ha! No he fucking isn’t!
Nicolas Cage: Tries a Coppola Different Accents
Nicolas Cage is an incredibly talented, occasionally misunderstood performer. Whatever he’s doing on-screen is exactly what he’s trying to do. Just, sometimes he’s trying to talk in an accent from a country that only exists in his (awesome) imagination.
Tom Hardy: Hardy Comprehensible
Tom Hardy loves doing accents, to the extent that many of his roles involve doing four or five, layered on top of one another. They might be good? Hard to tell — you usually can’t understand a fucking word he’s saying.
