Oscar Time:Most Ridiculous Fake Accent in a Movie

*shudder*

But this is what makes it great. He sounds a lot like Ren Hoek.

Gotta be some environmental violation to that one but what an amazing thought! C'mon! I thought I was the only one out there totally unamused by the profoundly irritating Ms Roberts. There's got a be a support group out there that can help me deal with the pain of sharing the same planet as her.

honorable mention: Harvey Keitel as Brooklynite Judas in Last Temptation o' Christ

Is that the one about the sadists?

thats the english version then, is it? :D

Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman pretending to be competent singers in Moulin Rouge.

Brad Pitt in The Devils Own.

Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet.

Hmmm. I detect a theme here.

Very OTM.

Also, after that Italian film thread I was reminded:
Rod Steiger's Mexican accent in Duck, You Sucker. That's a hoot.

ray winstone in the departed. just appalling, so embarrassing seeing him do such a hamfisted crappy take on an american accent. the plot should have been rewritten to make his character british rather than allow that crap to make it to film. some of the other characters were pretty bad too, but it stuck out most with winstone, perhaps because his acting was so wooden as well. (and wasn't the editing sloppy in parts?!)

and an honourable mention for orson in the lady from shanghai. in that instance he completely ruined what may have otherwise been a fairly enjoyable film.

kevin costner to thread

The worst/most half-assed accent I can recall is Keanu Reeves' southern drawl in The Devil's Advocate. I can understand American actors fucking up foreign brogues, but how hard is it to deliver a passable southern accent? Keanu fumbles it badly at the beginning of the film and by the second act, the "accent" has all but disappeared.

one thing i've noticed actors often get especially wrong is southern accents. they always try to do that genteel Gone With The Wind "Ah doo declaaayaaa" accent, even if its a hillbilly character or something.

I love Ewan McGregor and I love Big Fish, but his Alabama accent is horrific.

alex otm. i was watching the old series 'american gothic' recently. it's set in a town near newberry, s.c., but most of the characters have the charleston accent rather than something that'd be more indigenous to middle or upper s.c. (also, it was shot in coastal n.c. and looks a little too plantation-y to be in the newberry area).

Bizarrely Gabriel Byrne does a really bad Irish accent in a number of his films (alongside a number of other bad things).
-- Lara (Lara), Monday, 24 February 2003 00:58 (5 years ago) Link

okay lol me calling someone out 5 years later but how can you do a bad accent from your own country? this isn't even an issue of regional dialect. i got to see Miller's Crossing in a theater a few weeks ago and same thing, the woman sitting directly behind me said "Oh my god his accent is so bad! oh that's terrible!" probably 10 times, like hollywood knows the rest of the world better than itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INERGITKOcE

They're always after Tommy Lee Jones' lucky charms.

and an honourable mention for orson in the lady from shanghai. in that instance he completely ruined what may have otherwise been a fairly enjoyable film.

didn't quite ruin it but it was extremely distracting, didn't he do some theater work in dublin early on, should've been at least passable.

John Malkovich in Rounders (an excellent, overlooked film)--defies description.

http://filmjournal.net/danielstephens/files/2007/10/rounders3jpg.jpg

Lady from Shanghai is great, screw authentic accents

Also, in RED HEAT, Arnold Schwartzenegger doesn't even try to sound like the Russian cop he is portraying. What? Are we supposed to think ann Austrian accent is interchangeable with a Russian one? Come on!

― Alfred Bigcock, Monday, 24 February 2003 00:48 (7 years ago)

sure that's a fine carry on you got there xp

Crowe's Scouse/Yorkshire/West Country/Aussie/Ancient Roman accent in Robin Hood surely deserves a place at this table.

Gregory Peck's Nazi in The Boys from Brazil (totally great trash) is pretty infamous.

Bizarrely Gabriel Byrne does a really bad Irish accent in a number of his films (alongside a number of other bad things).
-- Lara (Lara), Monday, 24 February 2003 00:58 (5 years ago) Link

okay lol me calling someone out 5 years later but how can you do a bad accent from your own country?

― Cosmo Vitelli, Monday, March 24, 2008 6:41 AM

dunno if como's saying byrne's accents shouldn'y be awful or that they aren't awful. they are awful.

pierce brosnan is another one, but his normal accent is ear-rating too

jon voight nailed kerry, kevin spacey mistook inner city dublin for belfast, which is kinda lazy.

tom cruise in far and away is the worst though.

colin farrell's quite good with accents, but once or twice a movie he lapses into dub, which is always hilarious to me.

jon voight is awes in the general

yeah, best irish accent (and a regional one at that) i can think of off the top of my head. was bryan cox irish in the escapist?

http://www.teddykgb.org/soundboard/

Rounders and Lady From Shanghai are great examples of "bad" accents enhancing a movie greatly. Orson's oirish accent was totally intentional.

Ewan McGregor, Clive Owen and Liam Neeson have never pulled off an American accent as far as I can remember, though Liam's a step above the other two. I think it's a little too easy to use accents (and appearance) as uhh a scapegoat - probably not the word I'm looking for - so people don't have to think about whether a performance is good or bad. It's just kind of an easy superficial thing to pick up on, like a goofy hairstyle or something. I just thought of that Bob Mitchum anecdote where David Lean asked him to do an Irish accent for Ryan's Daughter and he responded "but David, what county?" Never saw the movie so I dunno if he pulled it off, but he was probably great either way.

I will say that you almost never seem to hear a great southern accent in a Hwood movie unless it belongs to a Southern actor.

reflections in a golden eye has some great bad southern accents. in that case, it just seems hammy and ott, which i generally like, whereas welles just seems lame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6Y9Z_iaxXY&feature=related

obv what you find terrible boils down to sensitive identity issues in a lot of cases. if welles was doing some intentional brechtian move, i'd say trying that in a movie financed by harry cohn was bound to bring him grief, which it did.

Saw this thread title and immediately thought Rounders too.

pay that myan hees mahny

I wonder how much of our perception of people's accents in movies has to do with that whathisname effect of expecting to hear what you're seeing? The McGurk effect, that's the one. When Hugh Laurie started doing House, a lot of British people had trouble with his accent, feeling that it wasn't genuinely American enough, while a lot of Americans who had never heard of him had no idea he was English and weren't troubled by the accent at all, because they weren't expecting anything else.

It must be hard for people who work with their voices and live one place for a long time before moving somewhere else. Either they keep their original accent and everyone comments on it all the time, or they completely embrace the new accent and are accused of somehow being traitors to their origins, or they end up with some hybrid accent that's often a bit grating. Or their accent changes depending on where they are and people think they're wankers who are trying to ingratiate themselves with the locals.

or they just act while in front of the camera? Dunno would it be that tough, rly

Olivier's Rabbi in "The Jazz Singer" - one more crime against the Jews

tom cruise in far and away is the worst though.

Will still rep for Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away.

rep for it being fucking hilarious, that is

... also way to go Sir "Best Actor of His Generation" Larry getting out-acted by, uh, Neil Diamond (xxp)

Did Olivier do much good on screen? Dude was from a different era tbf

Didn't stop Gielgud and Ralphie Richardson doing good work. Olivier was just shite, that's all.

Nazi dentist was good I think. Sleuth is a bit shit anyway and can't remember owt about his performance. Wuthering Heights?? He's at least icon-y in that.

Gielgud and Richardson took better to film, yeah.

Shit, Rebecca, Spartacus. lol amnesia. Nah he was fuckin great.

or they just act while in front of the camera? Dunno would it be that tough, rly

Hey, you're the one who was complaining about Pierce Brosnan's real-life accent.

Often find myself consciously avoiding movies with actors trying to do Scottish accents. Dick Van Dyke's Cockney and Jagger's Oirish take some beating, it must be said. Also Don Cheadle in Ocean's Whatever.

brosnan doesn't ever stop acting, tbf. i mean does that sound like a naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavin accent to you?

Steve Guttenberg's fake New Zealand accent in Don't Tell Her It's Me is evidently supposed to be convincing in-film

^^^ Not quite as good as the accents in "The World's Swiftest Indian".

oh jeez is that that tedious fucking motorbike movie?

Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Not a movie, but Daphne's brother in Frasier is about the worst ever. Daphne's bad enough.

Doesn't Jane Leeves claim that she does a terrible accent on purpose?

I suppose she had to ham it up a bit so Merkins wouldn't just think she was a Cockney

Ironically John Mahoney is Lancastrian.

Lady from Shanghai is great, screw authentic accents

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 27 November 2010 02:56 (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Morbs u sonofabitch you done me wrong with thissun

wow Soto had no idea u started this thread

Nic Cage's accent in Vampire's Kiss is nuts, especially considering that Cage wasn't even intending him to be from any specific country, just "a sophisticated person". I'd like to know who he met that sounded like that

xpost Oh myyyyy etc

Forgot!

byrne-stan taking issue with michael in shanghai is it

it's a bright guilty world

im here for one thing and im not here to defend everything

pills! poison pills!

Turn me into a caaarps

kinda need to watch it right now tbh

such a weird cut-about lovely film

I thought Tom Hanks' Boston accent in Catch Me If You Can was terrible.

this is basically the Forest Whitaker appreciation thread

not a movie but i've been re-watching angel and david boreanaz's irish accent is too half-assed to even be terrible

eXistenZ and Gosford Park good (only?) examples of bad accents on purpose.

https://i.imgur.com/Lw3Onyp.jpg

"to be a real prize fathead like mike o'hara you've got to swallow whole all the lies you can think of to tell yrself"

screw authentic accents

I agree with the good Doctor Morbius on this question. To insist on scrupulously accurate accents is to make a fetish out of realism. In comedies fidelity to an accent is wholly superfluous. In drama it is only necessary that the accent be unobtrusive enough that it doesn't draw attention to itself, as opposed to the the dialogue being delivered.

I'd say actors who can only summon a cartoon-level accent in a dramatic role should preferably deliver their lines in their normal way of speaking, no matter where the character is supposed to come from. If they are convincingly human, the audience won't give a shit about he lack of appropriate accent.

"In drama it is only necessary that the accent be unobtrusive enough that it doesn't draw attention to itself, as opposed to the the dialogue being delivered"

Failed this test tho

i think it's cool when someone can do an authentic accent, but would rather not have them do it if they suck at it.

it's not as difficult as some of the lazier Hollywood actors make it seem - there are actual books/cds that most stage actors use to perfect it.

but I agree it's fetishized in all forms of acting whereas one can be good at stage/film accents and have zero other skills in their toolbelt, relegating it to a mere parlor trick.

I remember playing Sam Byck in Assassins and at first listening to the only known audio of Byck and trying to ape his voice and then trying to do a Philly accent and then saying "jfc few if any theatergoers know what Byck sounded like" and just using my own voice.

pierce brosnans kerryman in mobland is an absolute shocking disgrace