Screen acting is a multifaceted discipline. It’s not enough for an actor to look the part. They’ve got to sound the part as well. And when they don’t, things can go really wrong really fast.
“Sounding the part” has proven very tricky for a lot of screen actors through the decades, including some of the very best performers (with the very best dialect coaches) in film history.
Below, I have selected 20 of the most infamous, the most intrusive accents in film history, and provided clips so you can hear them in all their awkward, clumsy glory. And yes, you’ll definitely see a couple Oscar winners on the list…
Born in Buckinghamshire, England, Aaron Taylor-Johnson sounded about as comfortable playing a gruff American soldier in Godzilla as I would sound playing a rich and handsome actor from Buckinghamshire, England. Instead of going with a nondescript American voice, Taylor-Johnson decided to go the route of a more inflected Noo Yawk kind of thing, and it wound up about as realistic as the sight of a gigantic lizard shooting atomic lasers out of its mouth.
There’s a strong “How do you do, fellow kids?” vibe to Ben Kinglsey’s voice in the great ’90s comic thriller Sneakers. Like, Sir Ben, I know you won an Oscar. I know you are a great actor. But this accent … it is not fooling anybody.
Brad Pitt, Troy
READ MORE: The Most Convincing Movie Accents We’ve Ever Heard
Brad Pitt gave a very memorable turn with a very memorable accent playing a bare-knuckle boxer in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. But his other accents are much more hit or miss. I’m not sure what he was going for as Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy. Greek? English nobleman? Vaguely important sounding? Whatever it was, it didn’t work. While Pitt looked every inch a legendary warrior, he sounded like a nervous kid in a school play.
No accent has given American actors more consistent fits than Irish. I’m not sure why, but it regularly backfires in spectacularly distracting fashion. Cameron Diaz, a wonderful actress in almost all her screen roles, was not up to the challenge of the Irish accent in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Her struggles were even more glaring in a film co-starring Daniel Day-Lewis — maybe the best accent actor in history. Cameron Diaz would, uh, not merit consideration for that title based on this performance.
Charlie Hunnam has boatloads of charisma — in his native English accent. He’s gotten a little better at playing American guys through the years (all those seasons as a biker on Sons of Anarchy definitely helped), but he really struggled playing Americans at different points in his career. In Pacific Rim, he was very lucky the film involved as much kaiju action as it did. Hunnam himself has admitted that he’s gotten so lost blending together different voices that when the time came to play the title role in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword he actually had to hire a dialect coach to help him relearn his natural accent.
Dick Van Dyke is one of the most beloved performers in Hollywood history. So even while everyone agrees that his accent is deranged in Mary Poppins, we all sort of shrug and accept it? And kind of love it? What would “Chim Chim Cher-ee” be without it?!?
This one is so bad I want to believe it’s terrible on purpose; like a sly meta-commentary on bad accents in ensemble thrillers featuring many actors all trying to stand out in a crowd of movie stars any way they can (i.e. by talking with an unforgettably off-base Cockney accent). Unfortunately, Don Cheadle has gone on record saying he was going for good, not bad with this voice. (“You know something? I really worked on that accent. Went to London, spoke to people, got to know it … my agent said it was fine, so I’m stuck with this thing. Even though everyone laughs at me.”)
Ewan McGregor is another actor who can do almost anything in his native accent but often sounds a little … off when he tries to play American. You could name a bunch of different McGregor accents as his worst, including The Men Who Stare at Goats and Nightwatch, but The Island has always stood out as particularly rough and synthetic — which is actually kind of ironic, given this Michael Bay film’s subject matter.
Harrison Ford has not done a lot of accents in his long and quite successful career. If you’ve seen him fumble a Russian voice in Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: The Widowmaker, you know why. (“Why do they have to be Russian? What is that about?” Ford himself joked in a famous appearance on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.)
It’s a’me! Jared Leto in a da House’a Da Gucci! I’m’a Italian!
John Malkovich’s accent in Rounders makes The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Boris and Natasha look like the subjects of a nature documentary about a moose and squirrel.
Jude Law, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Jude Law is another actor who, in an act of wise self-preservation, has largely avoided roles that demand too much of him in the accent department. In the early days of his career, though, he didn’t have the luxury of being quite so selective in his roles. And what you got at that point, was Jude Law doing stuff like playing a Southern-fried murder victim in Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The results speak for themselves. (Literally.)
Justin Theroux, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
Another good actor doing another bad Irish accent; in this case, Justin Theroux as an Irish mobster in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Listen for yourself; there’s just no defending it. (Although if you want to give Theroux a pass in this movie simply because he’s so absurdly shredded and hot, be my guest.)
Katharine Hepburn, The Iron Petticoat
Katharine Hepburn had one of the most distinctive voices in movie history; decades after her death people still imitate her unique speech patterns. The drawback of such a unique speech pattern is that it doesn’t always prove quite so adaptable to other accents. When Hepburn tried to play a Russian pilot opposite Bob Hope, the film was a disaster, with Hope and Hepburn clashing over the tone of the film and the size of Hope’s role. And then when Hepburn spoke, it sounded like … this.
Look, this is not about knocking Keanu Reeves. Keanu Reeves is a good actor, and he has made many great movies, from My Own Private Idaho to Speed to The Matrix to a ton of other things. When critics used to bash him and call him a bad actor, it was silly and mostly wrong. BUT … his English voice in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is bad. “I’ve seen many strange things already!” he says, quite unconvincingly in one scene. If you’ve watched Keanu in Coppola’s Dracula you’ve heard many strange things too.
Kevin Costner, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Long regarded as one of the worst accents in Hollywood history, Kevin Costner’s nobleman from his grounded retelling of the Robin Hood legend is not only unconvincing, it’s also inconsistent. Costner’s accent seems to appear and disappear not only from scene to scene, but sometimes from line to line. It is brutal.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond
Leonardo DiCaprio is generally a very good accent actor, but he gets tripped up once in a while too. His accent work as a Rhodesian mercenary in the thriller Blood Diamond leaps immediately to mind for this sort of list. I’ve never forgotten his delivery of the line “You know in America it’s bling bling, but out here it’s bling bang, eh?” which was featured in all of the Blood Diamond’s trailers.
Admittedly, Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown had a lot of problems, not just star Orlando Bloom’s shaky American accent. (The film was the inspiration for film critic Nathan Rabin coining the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” to describe Kirsten Dunst’s character.) Still, the way Bloom stumbles his way through every single line of dialogue definitely did not help.
Tom Cruise does his own stunts and his own accents. Unfortunately, as evidenced by Ron Howard’s Far and Away — another film with a great American star doing a not-great Irish accent — Cruise is only really good at one of those things.
Austin Butler’s Elvis voice in Elvis? Genuinely impressive! Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker voice in the same movie? Genuinely horrifying! He’s supposed to be Dutch, I think? He sounds more like an over-the-top Bond villain from a Saturday Night Live sketch making fun of bad accent work in movies.
The Worst Movie and TV Catchphrases
If we never hear these catchphrases from movie and TV shows again, that would be just fine.
