MovieChat Forums > Man on a Ledge (2012) Discussion > I am so sick of Brits with terrible Amer...

I am so sick of Brits with terrible American accents!


I started to watch this but was too put off by Worthington's terrible accent. It's bad American. Just stop it, Hollywood! I know these actors are well trained and easy to work with. But their accents ruin movies! Just stop it!

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Worthington was born in England but his family moved to Australia when he was 6 months old. Consideres himself Australian.

Actually I like his accent quite a bit.









If the idea is to stay alive, I'm driving.

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Yeah, it was a little to much.

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He's Australian. And yes his accent was atrocious. Funny, it was fine in Avatar. But then he had James Cameron to contend with had his accent not been up to scratch.

"It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man"

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I guess this is what happens when the movie star is bigger than the director?

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Worthington is notorious for inconsistency in his accent in his movies.

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Victims, aren't we all?

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Not every brit or aussie actor can do American accents well. I admit, his wasn't that great and Im still wondering how he became so popular in Hollywood.

But for every bad american accent by a brit, there are 100 even worse brit accents by american actors. It's just a fact that Hollywood being in the US is the gold standard for all actors around the world to strive for financial success so foreign actors/esses often practice american accents usually from watching american tv or movies. Not so of american actors who rarely practice accents at all except for fun or when assigned a role that requires it. Add to that, most other countries with high literacy rates are encouraged and mandated to learn basic to intermediate english in primary and secondary school while foreign language is just an option or elective here in the states. So there's no necessity for us to sound literate in other languages.

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Why is there always some idiot (who can't even tell a Brit from an Aussie) complaining about accents on IMDb. Relax enjoy the film who knows the background of the character in question, where he was educated, what ethnicity his parents were etc

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Amen!

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No kidding! Who cares what his accent sounds like!?

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Exactly, who cares? I watched it in German.

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Agreed. I didn't even really notice there was a case of specific accentuation going on, bad or not. Did they state anywhere that Worthington's character was supposed to have one? And even then, the viewer could very well just imagine he's a guy of British-Aussie origin who moved to NY five years prior to the film's happenings, or whatever really.
People seem to have no issues with Chinese, Indian, Russian characters speaking English with a (mostly badly) faked Chinese, Indian, Russian accent even when they're speaking to each other. How odd it that in comparison..

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I'm not affected by it. Mel Gibson had an Aussie accent in all his 3 Lethal Weapon films.

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The movie is too good to worry about the accents.

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I enjoyed this movie, I didn't care if his accent was off or not.

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A Lot of Aussies do better American Accents than the other way around. Have yet to hear an American do a good Aussie accent - please share if there is someone out there that does.

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A Lot of Aussies do better American Accents than the other way around. Have yet to hear an American do a good Aussie accent - please share if there is someone out there that does.

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Watch Liev Schreiber in the Aussie movie 'Mental'. He has a great Aussie accent.

Bear Village?... How the hell do i know?

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Watch Eric Bana in Blackhawk Down. His Southern accent was do good, I did not know he was an Aussie until years later.

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Thank GOD someone else has raised this....but for me it's not just Brits doing bad American accents, it really irritates me when casting directors insist on using actors who don't have the natural accent of the role they are playing just because they are big names or 'flavours of the month'. Why can't they use actors who come from the part of the world they are supposed to be playing?? Wouldn't some South African actor have killed for the role Matt Damon played in Invictus? Wouldn't an American actor have killed to play Lincoln? The list goes on and on.

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Can anyone give an example of how there was a problem with his accent? I just watched the movie, thoroughly enjoyed it and never once noticed anything wrong with Worthington's speaking voice.

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It's an AUSTRALIAN accent.

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I agree. It wasn't an issue with me.

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I guess I wasn't paying attention. When did they say he was born and raised in the US?

What we have here is failure to communicate!

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I've just watched it again too right now. I thought it was an American accent. Not sure of the dialect (Brooklyn or whatever) but still, it wasn't Aussie. Now, being an Aussie myself, I can tell you that it is NOT easy playing an American. It is the one form of English that I can't imitate. I thought he did a good job with it.

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The one that stands out for me was watching Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner. Now that was bad casting. Kevin was hot in Hollywood at the time and that was why he got the part, but he had NO idea how to play Robin Hood with an English accent, and what shocked me was that he was allowed to get away with it. If he'd been just out of drama school and it was his first movie role, I wonder if the producer and director would have been so forgiving.

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Why? Current English accents are far removed from the accents in Robin Hoods time, an American accent is closer to that accent because it is rhotic.

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Since he has done an American accent much better, that he didn't do much to hide his own accent was clearly a choice.


If you can't walk and talk/text at the same time, do the rest of us a favor and get out of the way.

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So what happened to Mel Gibson's aussie accent?

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probably the same thing that happened to Anthony La Paglia's

Live in any new place and eventually the local accent (or the one you are deliberately using for work) will take some sort of hold.

Interestingly it'll never be complete (or rarely so) it's interesting to hear (for example) a friend's father who has lived in Aus about 35 years, but born and raised somewhere in the southern US. His accent (to us) still sounds more American, but to his relatives who came to visit, it sounded more Australian. Perhaps most interesting of all, he still used a lot of the phrases and expressions from his country of origin, but pronounced in his current blend of accents.

I think with actors and accents, one of the better ideas I heard of was on the directors commentary of 'the jackal' where he discussed Richard Gere and an irish accent. Where possible, there are a range of accents that fall within the spectrum of an irish accent (even to an aussie, it's easy to pick someone from Dublin, vs someone from, say, Belfast) - anyway what he did was to find the 'particular' irish accent that Gere was more in sync with an able to do better.

Obviously for some films, an actor needs a specific regional accent, I dunno, Boston, New York, whatever, and its just what they need to work toward, but in other cases, perhaps finding the accent they can do more plausibly would be better than a poorly performed American accent from a different part of the US.

I don't know of many actors that can do an Australian accent well who aren't born here (or perhaps some New Zealanders - and on that tangent - not everyone outside of the South Pacific would instantly pick those two accents from one another, but to the locals they are about as different as can be. Perhaps with the popularity of stuff like flight of the conchords this would no longer be the case). One of the actors who was given some credit was an actor who had a semi regular spot on 'JAG' playing an Australian but who was actually born and raised in the UK. I can only comment that whilst it was (esp for tv entertainment purposes) certainly not that bad, it was obvious to most people I know (of those who ever actually watched the show) that the accent was off. Not everyone twigged that it was a British actor, some thought it might just have been a result of living overseas for long enough for some of his accent to change.

Worst accent in recent years? Ray Winstone in 'the departed' - if only they had introduced his character as something like 'irish underworld, raised in london's east end' or something like that, and let him use his own accent (not that that would be perfectly accurate to the backstory, but good enough, and certainly better than the accent he used in the film)


[I never seem to be able to get a post to be displayed in teh right place in a thread, apologies in advance if this has happened]

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Well why do all Nazi have English accents in most movies? Those Germans must not like that too much. LOL No seriously Mel Gibson goes in and out of his accent all of the time. Just bad acting.

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Worthington's Aussie accent came out a lot, especially when he was yelling.

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