Good acting often requires years of training, a ton of effort, and a little luck. Sometimes,
though, no amount of any of those things can help otherwise talented actors affect an accent that's
simply beyond their abilities. These are the on-screen accents that were absolutely horrendous.
Just because you once starred in an Austin Powers movie doesn't
mean you can actually pull off a decent British accent. Just ask Heather Graham.
Perhaps the worst part of Graham's atrocious accent in the 2001 Ripper flick From Hell
is that she just can't seem to decide which one to go with.
The United Kingdom is home to dozens of different accents and
dialects — unfortunately, it seems that Graham is unable to pull off any of them.
"Well, you'd better throw us in jail, then, 'cos we've no money for food and no money for a doss."
During this movie, Graham jumps from cockney to a kind of Irish to something
altogether unintelligible, proving that the actress may just have benefited from some
more thorough accent coaching. In fact, sometimes it seems like she's barely even
trying at all — and simply sounds more like a Hollywood actress than a Whitechapel local.
"I wish I could show you the little village where I was born. It's so lovely there."
Not even a spoonful of sugar can make Dick van Dyke's attempt at Cockney English more palatable.
In fact, he himself once called his work in the 1964 classic Mary Poppins, quote,
"the most atrocious cockney accent in the history of cinema."
"What did I tell ya? There's a whole world at your feet."
At the time, however, van Dyke didn't know how far off he really was.
As the actor later told The Guardian:
"Someone should have told me I needed to work on my Cockney accent.
Nearly everyone in the Mary Poppins cast was a Brit, but no one said anything. [...] Years later
I asked Julie [Andrews]: 'Why didn't you tell me?' She said it was because I was working so hard."
Still, van Dyke continues to keep a positive attitude about the whole thing,
despite actual Brits apparently never letting him forget it. He explained:
"People in the U.K. love to rib me about my accent.
I will never live it down. They ask what part of England I was meant to be from,
and I say it was a little shire in the north where most of the people were from Ohio."
"Now, I always say there's nothing like a good joke."
What happens when a French-American actor plays an immortal Scottish
swordsman? Well, something like this:
"This cannot be. It's the Devil's work."
Christopher Lambert's fake Scottish accent in 1986's Highlander is
undoubtedly one of the worst to ever hit the big screen.
Most of the time, Lambert barely sounds Scottish at all, and the movie isn't helped
by the fact that actual Scottish actor Sean Connery plays an Egyptian/Spaniard
who sounds neither Egyptian nor Spanish. He does, however, sound a lot like Sean Connery.
"I am Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez,
Chief metallurgist to King Charles V of Spain. And I'm at your service."
But hey, who needs accents when you have the Macleod Longsword?
Having cemented his reputation as a major blockbuster movie star, in the early '90s
Tom Cruise decided to prove that he could really act. So, not long after earning an
Oscar nomination for Born on the Fourth of July, he signed up for Far and Away.
Co-written and directed by Ron Howard and co-starring Cruise's wife Nicole Kidman,
Far and Away tells the epic story of a young Irish immigrant couple who arrive in the United States
in the late 19th century, searching for a better life. But in his efforts to play a
representative of the 1800s Irish diaspora, he missed one major element: a decent Irish accent.
"I'm not going to a distant world. I'm of Ireland, and I'll stay in Ireland 'til I die."
In 2021, Irish Central called Cruise's voice work, quote, "truly appalling" and added that:
"[It] sounds like how a Hollywood film executive imagines Irish people talk."
Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the best actors of his generation — and
in 2007 he earned his third Academy Award nomination for Blood Diamond.
An exposé of the inhumane, brutal, and deadly diamond trade in Africa,
the film takes place during the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s. DiCaprio plays Danny Archer,
a diamond smuggler turned activist who hails from Zimbabwe, but spent years in South Africa.
Both of those countries were colonized and long occupied by European nations; namely the U.K.
and the Netherlands. But DiCaprio's accent in the movie doesn't sound much like a typical
South African accent, nor does it seem English or Dutch-based either. Instead,
DiCaprio's character sounds more like he might be from another part of the world entirely.
"You Americans, you Americans love to talk about your feelings, huh?
What does that mean, what does that mean?"
Trevor Noah, a native of South Africa,
even called out DiCaprio's voice performance on a 2019 episode of The Daily Show:
"We've gotta get back to those bloody get the diamonds,
get the bloody diamonds. What are you, a drunk Australian? What are you doing?"
Martin Scorsese's crime thriller The Departed is an epic tale with a hefty and confident state of
place — that place being Boston. Scorsese loaded the cast with actors well-known for their Beantown
roots, including Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon, but he also brought in the legendary Jack Nicholson,
who portrays Irish-American gang boss Frank Costello.
Maybe Scorsese thought that Wahlberg and Damon's natural accents were enough for this
very Bostonian movie, or that their speech patterns would simply rub off on Nicholson.
Or maybe he just thought that Nicholson would do his job as one of the most
acclaimed actors of all time and give that Massachusetts brogue a try. Alas…
“Heavy lies the crown… sorta thing.”
To be fair, sometimes Nicholson does provide a serviceable accent,
dropping an "r" here and there like a true native Boston man. But then, on occasion,
he'll give a line reading in a genuinely comical, hugely over-the-top Irish accent.
"Oh, I love the dear silver that shines in your hair."
Justin Timberlake is an entertainer at heart. His career began in childhood,
when he was a member of the always singing, dancing, and smiling Mickey Mouse Club — and
later found mega-fame as a member of the boy band *NSYNC. Timberlake brought that same kind
of intense energy to some of his early film acting roles, particularly that of arrogant
French Canadian hockey player Jacques Grandé in the Mike Myers' 2008 comedy The Love Guru.
Timberlake goes as big, broad, and wacky as he possibly could have in the film,
so naturally he opts for a truly cartoonish French accent,
reminiscent more of Pepe Le Pew than an actual French-speaker.
"Stay away from my girlfriend! Wooooo!"
The real problem here, however, is that Jacques isn't French — he's
French Canadian, which is supposed to be a distinctive dialect in of itself.
Robin Hood is a distinctively English folk hero. A rogue ex-aristocrat in the English system,
he steals from the rich and gives to the poor, operating with his band of Merry
Men out of a home base in Sherwood Forest, near the city of Nottingham.
The tale of Robin Hood has been put to film many times, including a take in 2010 that cost nearly
$200 million. Producers likely wanted to make sure they got a good return on their investment
and preferred a bankable star in the title role — someone like Russell Crowe, for example.
Perhaps it just didn't matter, then, that Crowe does not, will not, and seemingly cannot speak
with an East Midlands accent, the regional English dialect used around Nottingham.
"Every Englishman's home is his castle. What we would ask, your majesty, is liberty."
Upon Robin Hood's release, critics quickly called out Crowe's accent; the actor even
abruptly left an interview with a BBC Radio host who said he sounded more Irish than English.
Eight years later, actor Con O'Neill brought up Crowe's Robin Hood accent on Twitter.
Crowe replied that his accent was supposed to be that of:
"A child born in Barnsley, on his father’s death, taken to France at age 6, travels across Europe
to the Middle East on foot, fights in the third crusade for Richard I, alongside men
from all parts of Britain, Ireland and France & finally returns to England a man in his 40’s."
In the 1997 action movie Con Air, Nicolas Cage plays a recently paroled convict and former U.S.
Army Ranger who gets stuck on a prisoner transport plane after it's hijacked by the other prisoners.
His character, Cameron Poe, is said to be from Alabama, so Cage affects a slow, languid
drawl — and seems to be aiming for something close to Forrest Gump by way of Foghorn Leghorn.
“Nice jet. You can take Cindino and leave the rest to rot, for all I care.
You fire that weapon, 20 pissed off prisoners are gonna hear it."
This is an especially strange choice for Cage, a notoriously quirky man who speaks
with a twinge of the South in real life — even though he was born in Burbank, California.
Sam Worthington starred in the highest-grossing film ever released,
and yet he probably could still walk down the street unaccosted — because the scenes
in Avatar in which his face was actually on screen were kept to a bare minimum.
The Australian actor's time as Jake Sully in the movie is mostly spent as a combination of CGI
and voice acting, as his character inhabits a lab-grown avatar meant
to look like the inhabitant of an alien planet.
Unfortunately, this means that the audience is basically forced to focus on Jake's voice.
Naturally, then, many have noticed that Worthington's attempt at sounding like
a tough American Marine veteran actually sounds like anything but.
"I needed their help,
and they needed mine. But to ever face them again, I was gonna have to take it to a whole new level."
His prominent Australian accent leaks through often during the movie,
despite undergoing extensive work with a dialect coach before filming began. But maybe there's
only so much you can work with — after all, as director James Cameron told Total Film:
"His accent was thicker than Crocodile Dundee."
In a crowded cast of terrific actors at the top of their game,
Don Cheadle somehow managed to pull off one of the most memorable performances in the 2001
remake of Ocean's Eleven. He played Basher Tarr, the member of Danny Ocean's heist crew who is an
expert in explosives — and who is supposed to come from a British, working-class background.
Cheadle was born in the American Midwest, however, so he worked hard with an on-set speech coach in
order to perfect his character's Cockney accent. Although, "perfect" might not be the right word.
"Alright chaps — hang onto your knickers."
Once the movie was released, however, it appears that Cheadle's accent provoked a
few strong reactions. The actor later said that, on a visit to London:
"Someone would come up and say 'love that character, mate,
it's great.' And the next street someone would come up and say,
'don't ever do that again!' Someone did a u-turn to come drive by me and cuss me out for the part."
Cheadle is so over the criticism of his accent,
in fact, that he has even taken to supporting a fan theory that explains why it sounds so off:
that Basher is really an American pretending to be a Cockney Brit.
"Oh, leave it out."
Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers is an eye-popping, style-hopping extravaganza.
The movie follows spree killers Mickey and Mallory Knox, whose criminal fame
is spurred on by Wayne Gale, the host of a trashy TV show called American Maniacs.
Robert Downey Jr. is both loathsome and bombastic as the exploitative and ratings-hungry Gale,
whom Stone later explained is based on a combination of Geraldo Rivera
and Australian tabloid journalist Steve Dunleavy. It's actually the latter's Australian
accent that Downey is trying to imitate here, but he doesn't quite get it right.
"Do you think those nitwits out there in zombieland remember anything?"
Instead, Downey's accent is some bizarre combination of South African, a couple of
different British dialects, some New Zealand vocal features, and perhaps just a hint of Australian.
In 2005, Oscar-winning filmmaker Cameron Crowe received the worst reviews of his career
with his rom-com flick Elizabethtown. Starring English actor Orlando Bloom,
it appears that Elizabethtown doesn't really know what kind of movie it wants to be;
it's a romantic comedy, but it's also about a guy mourning his father's death,
as well as a professional redemption story, and a movie about a man returning to his hometown.
Similarly, Bloom is all over the place with his accent,
despite some extensive accent training. At the time, the actor said:
"It wasn't easy to master an American accent. I
had a lot of help from a dialect coach. But I did all right. No?"
"A billion dollars! That's a lot of million."
Bloom's character is supposed to be a Kentucky native, but the actor is never able to really
commit to a specific Southern accent. The way he delivers the script's dialogue in a wishy-washy,
non-specific American way is a little reminiscent of that of his co-star,
Alec Baldwin… but, for some reason, it also sounds kinda Scottish, too.
"How's that going?"
"Sort of a wait and see."
"Oh yeah?"
"But then I waited and I saw."
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