Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.
I love rapping. I do. My styling's similar to Missy Elliott - I think she's so dope. In a weird way, that's how I first learned the American accent: doing American rap songs.
Acting in another language is great, and I've done that. But you can't do it as well as you can do it in your own language.
If you're in America a lot, it's easy to get into playing American. All of it, the sounds, the energies, all very different. But it's really hard to do the accent. I tend to try and stay in it all day, which is the only way I can manage it.
There's always a certain kind of homework you have to do when there's an accent involved.
I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I've always been a good mimic. It really wasn't that hard for me.
Voices are always a challenge. I always have to work at each accent I do.
It's hard to learn an American accent. Some of the Rs at the ends of words are incredibly hard.
Everyone learns how to talk by doing an impression of their parents. I'm one of many people who has a highly developed ability to do that.
To be honest, accents are one of those things for me, personally, that usually come quite naturally by just listening to the people.
I spent a lot of time in London when I was growing up and I've always picked up accents without even really meaning to. It used to get me into trouble as a child.
I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.
I think that's what's great about being an actress is you get to learn so many different things like that, like learning a little bit of Tibetan here, learning a Southern accent there.
I love Russian, because it's delicious to speak like that. If you have to speak French, you can also do that, because it's not difficult. Accents are a cool thing to do. And I love doing them.
It's not a deliberate thing. It's not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It's just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you're going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that's what happened.
I'm not conscious of having changed my accent.
I have enough trouble just speaking normal Australian. On 'Vikings,' we had a great vocal coach who helped make all of us sound the same. But I'm very bad at accents, to be honest.
For creating the Texan accent, I would listen to Sissy Spacek and watch her in 'Badlands.' I downloaded the audio of that whole film and listened to that.
You can learn any accent you want. It's a fascinating thing.
I grew up being fascinated by accents and dialects. One of the things that interested me were actors that were doing different characters, or sort of more caricatures.
When I'm doing an accent, you shouldn't notice it for a while, if I'm doing it right.
In my work I try to get things right, to do it well, and if there are specific skills involved - like in a case conducting or playing the piano, or in this film I have coming up where I play a character who is German - I'm very meticulous about learning accents and dialects and those kinds of things. That's probably the closest I come to being a perfectionist.
I listened to a lot of tapes of British theatre actresses and tried to learn from them. As Americans, we don't have such a gift with language.
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 Israeli accent wasn't one that I was overly familiar with so had to learn from scratch but I was very fortunate I had the right amount of time.
