Think you know everything about your favorite TV show? You may be surprised to find out
some of your favorite characters' accents are totally fake. Acting can be amazing,
can't it? Here are some actors whose offscreen voices you might not recognize.
The Big Bang Theory catapulted actor Melissa Rauch into stardom. After appearing
as Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on the series for a decade, she's still recognized
as her character when she's out and about. Yet, there's just something different about
speaking to this star when the cameras are not rolling. As Rauch related on The Rubin Report:
"Sometimes I'll get recognized, and then they'll hear my voice and be like, 'Oh, that's not you.'"
Turns out, her own voice sounds nothing like her iconic character's.
According to Backstage, when Rauch originally auditioned for the part,
she did so with a Canadian accent. When that didn't spark the casting director's interest,
she finally gave Bernadette the high-pitched timbre we now all know and love. There was someone
very special to her that she got the inspiration from, too. As she told The Rubin Report:
"Bernadette's voice is very similar to my mother's — except without the Jersey accent."
“You live with your mother?”
“No! That’s the sad part!”
How to Get Away with Murder? More like how to get away with a convincing accent.
It turns out that the actor who played Wes Gibbons on the hit primetime thriller is actually British.
How to Get Away with Murder actor Alfred Enoch may have had us all fooled,
but perfecting his American accent wasn't so easy for him at first. Enoch admitted to Heart:
"I'm not one of these people who's good [at] accents."
However, he was determined to get it right for the show, saying:
"When I got the part I was just mindful that this
is gonna be on American TV. And I can't get it wrong."
As difficult as it may have been, there was a key to his success. For seven months straight,
Enoch only spoke with an American accent — even when he returned to London to visit his family.
Constantly speaking like someone from the States helped keep him in character,
and it made it easier to focus only on remembering his lines. He further explained on The View:
"The other thing is — I like the idea of fitting in.
I like that people should think I'm American." And this actor certainly made us all think he was.
“And this Australian lady who was sitting a couple of seats away just leant over and said
‘I think we’re the only foreigners in here’, at which point I went ‘yeah!’”
“I know, she’s probably lying, again.”
While Archie Andrews may be an American, the actor who plays him is not.
KJ Apa started off on a New Zealand soap opera
before moving to the United States to pursue a career in the spotlight.
He perfected his American accent long before that, though, telling The View:
"I think it's because we're constantly bombarded with American content over there."
However he learned his accent, he sounds pretty believable — so much so, that many fans of the
television series had no idea he didn't grow up in a small town in the States like Archie.
Apa is easily able to switch his American accent on and off,
and it has done him well while working on Riverdale. As he explained to Glamour UK:
"I'm lucky in that respect I think because it means I don't have to focus
on it while I'm working."
That said, there are still a few American words that trip
him up when he's acting. He revealed to The View:
"The hardest ones for me have always been 'burger' and 'girlfriend'."
“But Riverdale is a lot stronger than you, and we’re not afraid.”
Seeing as his character has had to spend an awful lot of time taking
Ronnie to Pop's in Riverdale, those are two tough words to get hung up on.
Whenever anyone recognizes the actor who plays Lorna Morello in Orange is the New
Black out and about, many of them have to do a double take — and it's not just
because we're used to seeing her behind bars. As actress Yael Stone told HitFix:
"I generally speak in my Australian accent. And then that will confuse them enough."
Yes, Yael Stone may be Australian, but she's spent a bit of her life living in Brooklyn,
New York. Between the big city and Boston, she listened to people's
voices all around her before coming up with the unique accent that makes up Morello's.
“Yeah, I can see that my card has been charged, but I never received them.”
It's quite a concoction, too. When HitFix asked if
she knew anyone who had that exact dialect, she answered:
"It kind of came out. I can't stop it."
Orange may be the new black,
but unique accents are the newest way to tell a story. As Stone told WBUR:
"The sounds we make tell the story of our lives sometimes, so for Lorna the sounds that
she makes tell the story of her life — so a life that's kind of moved up and down the East Coast.
That she's very adaptable. She's done pretty well in prison because she has been flexible."
When you're auditioning to star in Nashville,
chances are you're going to need a Southern accent.
Luckily, Sam Palladio — who plays Gunnar Scott in the series — was able to make that happen.
“Step 2 involves a bedroom. I’ll tell you about that later on.”
However, it just so happens that the actor was born and raised in
England and speaks with an English accent. He told PopSugar about how he coped:
"Being in Nashville surrounded by the Southerners, you pick it up."
What's more, you've probably seen Palladio speaking with numerous
accents over the course of his career. As he told the outlet:
"I don't seem to do the same accent in, you know, any roles. It's a really exciting challenge."
When he began starring in other series using his authentic accent, he got quite a response
from fans. As he joked to BUILD Series, one of his favorite tweets of all time has to be
one where someone called his English accent "terrible." Even so, it's not enough to get
this Brit down. He just takes the confusion as a "compliment" of his serious acting skills.
Everybody seems to recognize actor Andrew Lincoln from The Walking Dead. However, they never see him
as himself. They see him as the southern zombie slayer Rick Grimes, instead — accent and all.
This British bloke had so many people thinking he was an American, that even his castmates
get confused when they hear him speak in his real voice. The actor told The Independent:
"They are a bit freaked out. I get a bit coy around them so I may slip into my dialect."
Lincoln credits his successful American accent to two things:
showing up early to set each day and his "amazing" dialect coach. Perfecting Grimes'
voice was an important project that required regular work, as he said at Comic-Con 2017:
“I would say it’s a work in progress but it’s a work in progress, apparently.” “Ohhhhhhhhh!”
Sure, we were all too busy watching the zombies,
but we'd still have to agree that he's perfected his American accent.
“You want them in a cell next to you? They’ll just be waiting for a chance to grab our weapons.”
However, there is a downside to being so successful at it. After playing his
horror character for over a decade, it has impacted his original voice. Aside from all
of the screaming that he does, Lincoln said his English accent is a strange sound to him now.
"This isn't normal anymore. I'm American now."
Fortunately, this has only helped him book numerous other roles in the States.
No small detail ever gets past Patrick Jane in The Mentalist.
On the flip side, some viewers may feel deceived once they discover that
the actor who played him doesn't actually have an American accent.
“I just had two weeks off. I was in Australia. I did a lot of surfing.”
Yes, Simon Baker grew up in Australia, but adjusted his accent once he began acting in
American productions. In the 2000s, he booked a role in The Mentalist,
where he had to speak with an American accent on set for seven years.
“Well now wait wait a second! He’s our suspect!”
He admitted on The Ellen DeGeneres Show:
"Sometimes I do find myself saying certain words
in my real life as an American, which sort of upsets me a bit."
However, it is not always easy for him to stay in character on set.
As he told Metro, when he worked with, quote, "a particular Australian director" who happens
to have "a very broad accent," Baker would involuntarily pick up this manner of speech
once the cameras were rolling. Luckily for him, it wasn't live television!
The popular series The Americans is a fictional thriller about two KGB
officers pretending to be Americans in a United States suburb.
“You smell like cigarettes all the time. Your whole way of being seems off.”
As it turns out, series star Matthew Rhys is neither American nor Russian. Rather,
he is Welsh. When Rhys won an Emmy for his role in 2018, his acceptance speech
had fans freaking out when they realized he didn't really have an American accent.
“Oh, the accent! So you’re not from here!” “Sadly not!” “Where are you from?” “No, I’m from Wales!”
Before landing the role as Phillip Jennings on The Americans, Rhys had to nail his American
accent in a series called Brothers & Sisters. Though he had years of experience getting it
right, he once told Ellen that he still occasionally caught the accent slipping.
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