Oftentimes, it makes sense for an actor to put on an accent for a role, like when they’re playing a real person in a biopic (like Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in Elvis) or when being from a certain city is a big part of the character’s personal identity (like Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey). Sometimes, however, actors are pressured to either lose or play up their natural accents in order to get roles.
Here are 18 actors who were pressured to change their accent to get roles:
1.
In a 2024 TikTok video promoting her movie We Live in Time, Florence Pugh said, “It’s my second movie of doing my own voice. But it has been a long time. In fact, many people think that when I speak in my accent in interviews, that I’m lying and I’m putting on a fake one, and that isn’t true.”
2.
In the same TikTok, Florence’s costar Andrew Garfield said, “I think it’s the first time I’m using my [real voice]. Yeah, that’s true. I think it’s true.”
3.
On a 2024 episode of her podcast Mind Your Own, Lupita Nyong’o said, “[At the Yale School of Drama] I made this pact with myself that I would learn how to sound American in a way that would guarantee me a career in acting. Because obviously, I didn’t know very many people in movies and television with Kenyan accents. There was just no market for that.”
4.
Sofía Vergara once tried to get rid of her accent by going to voice coaches.
5.
In 2020, Kumail Nanjiani told Variety’s #REPRESENT: Success Stories, “I have a Pakistani accent, but [during my early auditions] they would be like, ‘Could you make it funnier? Lean in a little bit.’ And at some point, I decided I just wasn’t going to do that.”
6.
In 2024, Olivia Cooke told The Times that she feels “really sad about” losing her Northern English accent. She said, “I do put on a voice when I’m speaking to someone with a different upbringing to me. I’m proud of where I come from, but it was a source of embarrassment because I didn’t feel as intelligent as others. I speak about that to my therapist all the time and try not to do it, but I do have a chip on my shoulder about being working class.”
7.
In 2022, Diego Luna told IndieWire, “When I was very young, like 20 years ago, there was a whole conversation about losing your accent. They used to call it ‘neutralizing,’ as if it was something you could just get rid of. It was a fear of understanding.”
8.
In 2017, Awkwafina told Vice, “I’ve walked out of auditions where the casting director all of a sudden changed her mind and asked for accents. I refuse to do accents.”
9.
In 2023, Stephanie Hsu told the New York Times, “At the time when I was finishing school and living in New York, those roles were not available in the mainstream. And I had no interest in selling myself or just shrinking myself to an inappropriate cameo just so that I could say I added one more thing to my résumé. I remember in 2012, I went into a commercial audition, and they were like, ‘OK, could you do it again, but with a more Asian accent?’ And I said, ‘I’m so sorry, but this role is not for me. I don’t do that, and I’m not interested in this part.'”
10.
At EW Fest in 2015, Aziz Ansari said, “Should I do an accent? Should I not do the accent? That’s a thing that a lot of minority actors grapple with. I once was asked to audition for Transformers with Michael Bay. And it was a role for a call center guy who does an accent. And I was like, ‘No, I’m not doing it.'”
11.
In 2022, Billy Boyd told the My Time Capsule podcast, “I hate people saying they can’t understand what I’m saying…As a Scottish actor, every script I get that’s got a Scottish character in it, there’s always the gag that somebody can’t understand them. Always. Anything I do now if that gag’s in it, I say I won’t do it. The gag is overdone and not realistic. It’s just like, stop being stereotypical, you know? Just because someone has a different accent.”
12.
John Cho originally declined the role of Dusty Wong in Big Fat Liar because he was asked to use an accent, and he didn’t want kids who watched the movie to think laughing at people’s accents was okay.
13.
In 2020, Matthew Rhys told The Times, “My agent said, ‘Look, just go in as an American, because if you go in as a Welsh person, all they will do when you audition is listen for when you slip up.’ But it felt so fake, and I just thought I was gonna be found out.”
14.
When Ava Gardner moved from North Carolina to California, MGM assigned her a voice coach to get rid of her Southern American accent.
15.
In 2021, Steven Yeun told Variety’s Awards Chatter Podcast, “The first audition I had in Chicago was called Awesome ’80s Prom, which was an immersive improvised show, where you have this John Hughes spectrum of characters like Ferris Bueller. Then you have your ‘Long Duk Dongs,’ and I auditioned with Ferris Bueller’s opening monologue. And they said, ‘That was good. Can you do that all again in an Asian accent?’ And I’ll be honest with you. I knew that I didn’t want to do that. The system had no clue that’s not what I wanted. We were just in a different time. And so I remember I did a shitty accent and phoned it, and they still wanted me anyway because that’s how far and few between Asian actors were. So they call, and they said, ‘We’d like to hire you.’ And I said, ‘No.'”
16.
In 2024, Jack Lowden told Casting Networks, “I very rarely get to use my accent. I think Dunkirk was one of the few where I was allowed to use my accent, and even then I had to convince Mr. [Christopher] Nolan that it would be okay to let me be Scottish and fly in the air. I very rarely get to use my own. That’s more of a sort of UK-based thing that there’s a natural pull towards certain accents and a push away from other accents on the British Isles.”
17.
In a 2016 editorial for NBC News, Justin Chon said that, after he drove two hours for an audition, another actor who’d just gone “immediately told [him] disgustedly, ‘They want an Asian accent.'” So, he “decided not to enter the audition and drove the two-hour commute back home.”
18.
And finally, in 2023, Arnold Schwarzenegger told The Graham Norton Show, “I had an English coach and an acting coach and a speech coach and an accent-removal coach, who has passed away since then, but I mean, I should have otherwise gotten my money back. The bottom line is, I worked on it. I remember, he says, ‘You know you always say three [incorrectly]. It’s three, with a T-H.’ So he had me say, ‘3,333 and 1/3 with the T-H and not with the S.'”
