On Accents

You might be watching a show at times and then start to wonder when you watch the special features or see the actors and actresses from it on talk shows why they sound different. This happens a lot. I am specifically referring to accents. A lot of the time, an actor or actress is forced to do an American accent even when they are not American and don’t normally sound like that.

Ironically, the first show that might have made someone use an American accent when they don’t have that voice normally was the British show Doctor Who. One of the characters on that show was Peri. She was an American on the show, although played by a British actress. Not only did she have to use an American accent on the show throughout her whole filming of it, but even in interviews, they wanted her to keep up appearances so people wouldn’t know this long term.

At first, this was an outlier. But it started to become more common decades later. You see, the people who did the show House wanted an American to be the lead of the show. Hugh Lorie, a British man, learned about the role and auditioned using an American accent. He was hired for the lead. I don’t know at what point they learned that he wasn’t American. It might have been too late for them to change the casting decision, but they did learn at some point. Still, he might have been the best person for that role in the end, even if it wasn’t that nice a person. 

The concept of someone having to change their accent is still quite common today. I didn’t even know for sure what Rowan Atkinson actually sounded like for quite a while as he had at least two different voices in roles that I heard him do. Some may even have different accents for the same character on the same show that they play. It would all depend on what’s going on.

But is this a problem? Should people be forced to do different accents than the one that they naturally have? Why can’t a character simply be British? The show Dollhouse was weird with this since they had one British actress always using her real accent and a different actress that was not American using one unless she was being her true self and not her programmed self. You’d think that it would be simple just to say that a character isn’t American and that would be okay. But this is something that just keeps happening and I am not sure if it is an issue, but that’s what just keeps going on.