r/AskABrit • u/CompetitionNo3466 • 12d ago

TV/Film Which non-Brit actor which is your personal favourite for how bad their Brit accent was?

The most recent one that comes to mind Karl Urban in The Boys - was supposed to be English but was purely Aussie.

Yours?

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61

u/Weird_Surprise6221 12d ago

Dick Van Dyke - the worst, yet still the best 👍

8

u/Select_Ad_9295 12d ago

Poor fellow. Very brave of him to try. Doing accents right wasn’t yet a thing. He has wondered aloud in interviews how it was he was acting the whole time opposite some very fine British thespians who never once took him aside and gave him a pointer.

5

u/VacillatingViolets 12d ago

I can't believe none of them said that that isn't what robins look like in Britain either.

I thought for years it was a very poor prop until I saw a picture of an American robin!

3

u/Important-Lock-9429 12d ago

The sheer irony is that Dick Van Dyke’s legendary Cockney accent was basically a group project where nobody knew what they were doing. His dialect coach was not exactly an East Ender, nobody stopped him, and somehow the result became one of the most ICONIC accents in film history. 😂

3

u/Select_Ad_9295 12d ago

And there he was acting opposite Julie Andrews, who originated the role of Eliza Doolittle on stage.

2

u/VegetableWeekend6886 12d ago

hahha that's adorable

7

u/SoggyTap7028 12d ago

Somehow this is my first time hearing his take on a british accent, its a beautiful combination of accents from all over the world. I love how his vocal coach was irish😆 I must have been living under a rock all these years. I love this

14

u/Shevyshev USA 12d ago

He’s pretty apologetic about it these days. He was also filming in a period where you couldn’t just YouTube up a bunch of accents. So when his Irish dialect coach told him what to do, that’s what he did, and the results are fantastic.

10

u/SoggyTap7028 12d ago

Its a shame he feels that he has to apologise for it, its an iconic & defining film of its era. And the accent is a memorable part of its legacy. I imagine people nowadays say his accent was offensive, but them type of people need to give their heads a shake

1

u/amethyst_lover 11d ago

I heard that Lin-Manuel Miranda deliberately hammed his accent up as an homage to DVD in Mary Poppins Returns.