American TV’s ongoing love affair with British actors

Dame Helen Mirren has been whingeing about Hollywood’s tendency to cast British actors as villains. 

One imagines other British actors texting her along the lines of “STFU, Your Majesty”. Does she resent her fellow British thespians picking up some serious wedge out in LaLa Land? I’d love to know how many mortgages in Clapham and Chiswick have been paid off courtesy of the Alan Rickman school of plummy, furniture-chewing villainy. 

Why do the Americans hear the English as natural villains?

It’s the accent, primarily. Whether doing upper-class English or cod-German, the accent makes them sound precise (i.e. intelligent), cold (i.e. ruthless and snotty) and alien (i.e. alien). Add to that the ingrained hamminess of classically trained theatre actors (so ingrained, in fact, that when deliberately underplaying, they might as well be carrying a flashing neon sign reading, “Look at just how over-the-top my underplaying is! Have you ever seen playing more excessively under?”) 

American audiences like to identify with their movie heroes. Immense physical strength is acceptable, and street smarts are to be admired, but extreme intelligence is to be distrusted: and English accents just makes the character sound too damned bright, like he’d, you know, put something over on you, given half a chance. (And, in case it sounds like I’m casting aspersions on Americans’ mental acuity, it’s instructive to see how intelligently acted and scripted many American TV series are compared to their dumb British equivalents .) 

Americans are extremely warm, open people, and a cut-glass English accent must, one presumes, sound somewhat cold and heartless to their ears in these demotic times. It’s not that they don’t admire the accent, you understand: anyone vaguely middle class who has ventured further west than New York can attest to the average American’s enthusiasm for the English Sound. “Where are you from? London? London, England? You have a beautiful/great/lovely accent.” (In most of the rest of the world, including this country, talking proper is more likely to get you sneered at.) It’s just that, sounding ever-so-slightly effete and supercilious, we have to work harder to prove we’re just plain folks. 

Sharing large swathes of our language does not mean we don’t sound alien. Not in New York or Los Angeles – but stop almost anywhere in between, and, no matter how American we look (give me a baseball cap and I reckon I could easily pass for a trucker) once we open our mouths, we sound exotic. And “alien” still means potentially threatening in the hinterland, where real Americans live.

But it’s American TV that’s allowing English actors to not only pay off the mortgage on their terraced property in Battersea, but to buy estates in Gloucestershire as well. You would have thought Ms Mirren – who has metamorphosed from vaguely embarrassing, if rather hot, aging hippie chick into an internationally eminent actress more regal than Queen Elizabeth II herself – would have realized that American TV has been invaded by non-American actors in recent years (these days, she probably wafts grandly past TV sets with her gaze averted, one elegant finger subtly shielding her nose from the stench). 

The difference between the status of non-American actors in movies and in TV series is the accent. On TV, they usually have to don an American accent in order to land a starring role – stick with an English accent, and you tend to wind up as a lab assistant or a villain on Bones or CSI. Master an American accent, and you’re suddenly a potential player. The list is endless: Damian Lewis in  Life, Hugh Laurie in House, Sarah Hedley in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Aussie Simon Baker and Welshman Owain Yeoman in The Mentalist, Aussies Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson in Fringe, Tim Roth in Lie To Me, Australian Anthony LaPaglia and Brit Marianne Jean-Baptiste inWithout A Trace, Dominic West and Idris Elba in The Wire – and there are literally dozens of other examples.

Why? Well, apparently, Brits and Aussies are fresh faces, they’re cheap, and they’re very good at acting. Most crucial of all though is probably the fact that they have genuinely cracked the accent. Time was when British actors playing Yanks appeared to have used the same accent coach as Dick Van Dyke – and you can still hear real clunkers on British TV (Philip Glenister in ITV’s atrocious Demons springs to mind). But now most of them sound pitch perfect. 

If any group of actors has anything to complain about, it’s Americans – there must be thousands of them wondering what the hell they have to do to land a juicy role in one of their owndomestic TV shows. Pretend not to be American? 

Maybe this mass exodus of actors from this country partly accounts for the absolute direness of British TV drama at the moment.

Whatever the reason, Dame Helen should put a sock in it and, on behalf of her fellow professionals, thank God for American TV executives’ communal love affair with non-American actors.