The Norse way of speaking, no one really knew what the Vikings sounded liked, they were Norsemen. The accent is really a combination of a Scandinavian accent, maybe with a Swedish accent and an old way of speaking.
I keep forgetting I'm speaking in an American accent sometimes. The dangerous thing is that you end up forgetting what your real accent is after a while! It's really strange; I've never done a job in an American accent before.
I discovered that it's not really about the language. It's about how the words are pronounced and the delivery. We have plenty of good English-speaking comedians. It's O.K. if I have my accent, my gestures, my way of speaking.
It's really an organic sort of process. You start off with the character on the page. You fall in love with that character and you have to represent that character well and I think it's just an evolution there. Using the accent and speaking the lines with the accent in fact opens the door to who the character really is.
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.
When I have to switch back and forth, it's not hard to go from the American accent to speaking Spanish, but then speaking Spanish and going back into the American accent is hard. I practice it so much. I talk to myself in the mirror all the time. It's like speaking multiple languages.
If you are playing a Hispanic character who has to speak in dialect or in an accent, nail that dialect or accent. When I hear a character that's supposed to be Cuban speaking with a Mexican accent or vice versa, it grates on me and immediately pulls me out of the story.
I have spent too long training myself to speak with an American accent, it's ingrained. I spend 16 hours a day on set speaking with an American accent. Now, when I try to speak with an Aussie accent, I just sound like a caricature of myself.
The Australian accent just a very lovely accent and it doesn't have the pretention maybe of an English accent, but yet seems a little bit more exotic than an American.
I speak with a Northern Irish accent with a tinge of New York. My wife has a bit of a Boston accent; my oldest daughter talks with a Denver accent, and my youngest has a true blue Aussie accent. It's complicated.
I guess when I first started speaking with an American accent, there's a tendency to create a caricature of the accent because you just exaggerate the pieces that stand out to you.
I went to a dialect coach and she told me that I had five problems; two were my Israeli accent and three were my New Jersey accent. I don't even want to know what I sounded like back then!
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 know Asian actors out there won't even audition for a role that have an accent. But for me, I was the kid with an accent. I still have an accent to some degree.
Because I'm Irish, I've always done an accent. Not doing an accent is off-putting because I sound like me. I love doing an accent. Doing the accent from West Virginia was great, and we had to get specific with it.
They were looking for boys who could speak with an English accent for the movie 'Lord of the Flies.' I had been abroad enough so I knew that accent.
What I try to do with the accent of any character I play is not necessarily to do something that's generic - an Indian accent and that's how it sounds, for example. I think the accent needs to sound authentic on this person.