A Quote by John Oliver
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.
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My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.
I think people are really picky about English accents. When a Brit comes over here and kind of does an OK American accent, everyone's like, 'You were great! Fantastic!' But in England, even if you were doing a pretty good accent, they're like, 'But where are you from?' 'London.' 'What part of London?' Accents are really precious over there.
Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.
We just need more complex, important roles that tell our experiences as an immigrant; as someone with an accent, but also American; but also someone who's second or third-generation American, born and raised here who actually don't speak any language other than English.
I've been banging on about doing stuff in Birmingham for years and years, and everyone says 'We can't, it's the accent thing.' For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie.
I didn't want to be on screen not nailing an American accent. It's an insult to an American! There are plenty of great American actors who can already do an American accent, so me, coming in and stealing their roles, the one thing I have to perfect is the accent. So for years I practiced. And we're lucky because the whole world is raised on a library of American movies. I would pretend to be Jim Carrey, and, I say Robin Williams now because he's in my mind, but those actors really inspired us to be crazy and be theatrical.
I'm not good enough to flip in and out of my Brit accent to my American accent.
When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.
I was born in New York and moved to London with my family when I was five. I did have an American accent for a couple of months, and then it went a way.
My ultimate goal? To move my momma out of Birmingham. To move my whole family out of Birmingham, my friends, my family, me. It don't even need to be out of Birmingham, just to a better community, a gated community or something.
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.
All we ever got in those [early] days was "Where are you from? Liverpool? You'll have to be in London before you can do it. Nobody's ever done it from Liverpool.
I was every Londoner's stereotypical idea of a brash, vulgar American. When I got here, it turned out that London was the Wild West, and New York was like London at the height of the Victorian era, in which everyone was far more obsessed with table manners and status-climbing than they are in London. In London, everyone was just crawling over this blizzard of cocaine. Here, if you have more than a glass of wine with your meal, people refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous.
I was raised in an Italian-American family in the suburbs of Westchester County, just a little north of New York City.
I patterned the accent after this guy I was in a play with, but that was three years ago. Now I'm listening to Tony Head (Giles in Buffy), who sounds kind of like Spike in real life. It's much more tough-guy talk in real life. His accent (as Giles) is just as fake as mine. His is nice and gritty, but it's not North London. I'm always afraid that I'm morphing over into Tony Head, wherever he's from.
I wanted to become an actor. I went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which is one of the main drama schools in London where you go when you are older. But I was doing the junior one when I was a kid. And some friends there had agents. I was fourteen and I was like, "I want an agent! It sounds awesome!" I had no idea what that was. I thought those guys looked like men in black. They were hanging around in suits all the time. So I luckily got a very good agent in London and started auditioning. And then when I was 16, I got my first film and I've been working ever since.
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