Hugh Laurie can talk the talk.
The American characters in Genius — screening earlier this summer in art-house cinemas everywhere — are played by the following actors.
Thomas Wolfe: Jude Law (English)
Maxwell Perkins: Colin Firth (English)
Aline Bernstein: Nicole Kidman (Australian)
Ernest Hemingway: Dominic West (English)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Guy Pearce (Australian)
Zelda Fitzgerald: Vanessa Kirby (English)
I didn’t see the film, but I don’t have to in order to know the American accents are spot-on. In my experience, English and Australian actors’ American accents are virtually always spot-on. This is true of well-known players, like Damien Lewis in Homeland and Billions; Idris Elba and West in The Wire; and so much work by the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis, Toni Collette, Heath Ledger, and many more.
It’s true of relative unknowns as well. I just finished watching the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle, where two of the three main male American characters are played by actors I wasn’t familiar with but whose British nationality is pretty clear from their names — Rupert Evans and Rufus Sewell. I hate to say it, but I found their accents more convincing than that of the third lead, who is American and whom I will not identify.
Playing Dr. Gregory House, Hugh Laurie is the Briton whose American accent has probably been heard by the most sets of ears, owing to House’s eight seasons on the air, and that is generally considered bloody brilliant, if not the best of all time. Laurie was pretty unknown here when the show began, in 2004, and many assumed he was a native. At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Laurie was co-presenting with fellow TV doctor Zach Braff and began speaking in his normal manner. Braff looked at him oddly and Laurie asked, “What?” Braff replied, “Oh, nothing, I just didn’t realize we were doing British accents.”
The phenomenon probably wouldn’t be so striking if the reverse process weren’t such a carve-up. Sure, the statute of limitations has passed on Dick Van Dyke’s “cockney” in Mary Poppins, and sure, Gwyneth Paltrow and Renée Zellweger produced passable if fairly vanilla English tones in Shakespeare in Love and the Bridget Jones, films, the latest of which will open in September. (You can judge Zellwegger’s accent by her voiceover in the trailer below.)
But on the whole, the history of American actors attempting to impersonate British people is an undistinguished one. (Mike Myers in the Austin Powers films and Christopher Guest in This Is Spinal Tap don’t count — both of them come from English families.) Not to single out Anne Hathaway, who is a good sport, but she recently was justly dissed by James Corden in a mock-rap on The Late Late Show:
This isn’t just for me
It’s for the whole U.K.
Mad at your awful British accent
In the movie One Day.
It should be pointed out that not all British actors are great at talking American. The British website shortlist.com said Ray Winstone’s Boston accent in The Departed “sounds Australian” and accused Gerard Butler of doing “a playground American accent” in The Bounty Hunter. “It should be accompanied by waving a gun and calling someone ‘filthy punk.’”
But over all, the disparity is arresting and puzzling. Why does it exist? Various explanations have been offered.
1. Demographics and market capitalism. On a world-wide basis, the vast majority of characters in English-language films and television shows are American. As Lucinda Syson, a British casting director working in the U.S., observed in The Hollywood Reporter, “In Britain, we grew up on Starsky & Hutch, Kojak and Hawaii Five-0; we grew up with American accents, so British actors are able to have those accents as opposed to American actors, who would only see a few British shows.”
Moreover, because of the disparity in roles, it is very much in Brits’ interests to learn to speak American, while capable American actors can do very well indeed without bothering to learn British.
2. Pedagogy and approach. Compared with American actors, Brits more often have intensive academic training, schooled in a variety of accents, not just American ones. In addition, their tradition of acting calls for working from the outside in, the “outside” including costume, hair, physical mannerisms, and accent. In the last seven or eight decades, American acting has been dominated by the inside-out Method approach, which focuses less on details and more on motivation and reclaiming emotion.
3. Physiognomy. An anonymous (and presumably British —s ee spelling of “characterized”) commenter on a Yahoo site devoted to this question credibly observes, “The American accent is characterised by its dominant ‘r’ sound. This strong ‘r’ tends to penetrate and pervade their attempts at other accents. Conversely, the British accent is more neutral sounding, so they can layer American characteristics over their natural accent without it showing through. Think of accents like canvases. The American accent has a thick, black base coat that’s difficult to paint over, the British accent has a thinner, lighter base coat.”
A final explanation of the disparity is that it doesn’t exist. To state the obvious, top American actors are well known to American audiences. As a result, the theory goes, we are hyper-aware of the flaws in any new accent they might attempt, whereas we implicitly give unknown Brits (see Hugh Laurie) the benefit of the doubt. This may be a reason why the American accent of the very familiar Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules drew criticism.
It’s intriguing but I don’t buy it. The best American actors are great at so many things, chief among them riveting our eyes to the screen. But give them a line in cockney, Mancunian, or even Received Pronunciation — well, the results won’t be pretty. Not that they asked for it, but my advice to them would be to work on their American accents. Otherwise, they’ll start losing even more roles to Commonwealth luvvies.