Nobody's going to tell me to rap in an American accent.
I can rap in a London accent, make weird faces, wear spandex, wigs, and black lipstick. I can be more creative than the average male rapper.
When I sing along with Britney Spears I will sing in an American accent. But eventually I found my own voice. My songs are so brutally honest, it would be alien to sing in any accent other than my own. Don't get me wrong - I can imitate singers. I can do bar mitzvahs and weddings.
Everyone's really sweet, really nice. The 'Buffy' fans always ask me to do Kendra's lines in Kendra's accent.
Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.
Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.
They made me use an accent, which I wasn't thrilled about because a lot of us, obviously, don't have them.
In my normal life, I do not speak with an accent. It's harder for people to realize my hearing loss in everyday life.
My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American accent.
I used to have an Australian accent for school and an Irish accent for home.
I grew up three and a half hours outside of Chicago, but people would call me a 'hick' or 'country boy.' Maybe it's because I talked with more of a country accent.
My mother had an incredibly strong accent - although I couldn't hear it - and she was the main person there, so I'll have learnt to speak English from her.
I'm not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent - which was careless because there'd be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.
I'm trying hard to keep my Australian accent. My mom would disown me if I didn't.
'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.
I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back.
I thought I was clever by greeting casting agents in my Australian accent and then switching to an American one during the performance. But the Australian accent seemed to put them off. Now it's the opposite; they love Australians. And with my thick Californian accent I now have a problem convincing them I'm Australian.
Americans aren't good at accents, but the English are because their accents change. You go five or six blocks and the accent is different, so they are used to hearing different pitches. In America, you gotta travel maybe 10 states before you can really hear a difference.
It's super trippy coming to America because we know everything about it - from music and film. I know what a Southern accent sounds like; I know what a New York accent sounds like.
I can have an accent and not have an accent, so it's really cool. I can play with it. I can be very Sofia Vergara, too, so it's really cool.
My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.
I love Jonathan Adler but more importantly I love throws. To clarify, a throw is not to be confused with a blanket. A blanket is to be slept under, a throw is to accent a chair or sofa and give the illusion that in some scenario someone might rest underneath it. In reality, this scenario does not exist and I never want it to.
I love the Scottish accent; it is very sexy.
I didn't act in Israel, but I wrote plays at home and acted in plays at school. I tried to get an agent when I was 12, but they told me that I had too much of an accent.
You can be as good an actor as you want but, if your accent is too strong, it's going to limit you.
My accent was horrible. In Mexico, nobody says, 'You speak English with a good accent.' You either speak English, or you don't: As long as you can communicate, no one cares.
I never worked with a dialogue coach before, but I'd hate it if an American did a British accent and didn't do it well. It would be insulting.
I'm more of a mimic. My accent tends to drift to where ever I am.
It's funny because when I'm outside Australia, I never get to do my Australian accent in anything. It's always a Danish accent or an English accent or an American accent.
The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.
I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.
For me and accent work, I think once you've figured out where that energy is, where the sound is in your throat or your mouth, it's a whole lot easier to do.
Up until the time I was cast in 'Star Trek,' the roles were pretty shallow - thin, stereotyped, one-dimensional roles. I knew this character was a breakthrough role, certainly for me as an individual actor but also for the image of an Asian character: no accent, a member of the elite leadership team.
Whenever I'm in the U.K., people say I have an American accent. Which is, obviously, funny.
My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.
It's rare that there's a role that requires an Australian accent.
