Sometimes I’m asked to read a commercial in an accent and it’s really not my forte. I can get away with short character lines but an entire commercial in, say, British? Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t.
So when I discovered that some of our favourite TV performers are disguising their accents to sound “American” we were delighted and flabbergasted! We were aware that the star of The Mentalist, Simon Baker, is Australian but you could have knocked us over with feathers when we heard his co-star Owain Yeoman (Wayne Rigsby) speaking normally and realized he’s British. Brilliant!
In Fringe, Anna Torv is another Aussie who’s doing a smashing job of supressing her native tongue. But it was feather-knocking time again when I watched this latest brief behind-the-scenes video posted on the show’s Facebook page. John Noble (Walter Bishop) is definitely not an American! This makes the superb acting of all of these talented people even more respect-worthy. Have you ever watched someone on TV and thought, I can do that! Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that I can’t do that.