History Main / WhatTheHellIsThatAccent

** James Earl Jones joked about how the actor in the Darth Vader suit was British, so of course they hired a Black man from the American South to voice him.

* Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'' adopts a weird sort of mid-Atlantic accent that sounds sort of like it wants to be British but can't quite make it -- which stands out, given that practically everybody in the movie speaks with one [[UsefulNotes/BritishAccents British Regional Accent]] or another. And occasionally he says random lines in a hammy Irish accent. Mortensen himself was primarily raised in Denmark and Argentina. (See the Real Life section below.)

* Edna Mode from ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles'' has a... German/Japanese accent, which forced Creator/BradBird to play the role himself, as no one else could do the accent properly. He apparently went to Creator/LilyTomlin and asked her to do it, but after he gave an imitation of what he wanted, she replied that he could do a better job than she ever could.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Madagascar}}'':

* ''WesternAnimation/DespicableMe'':

** In "The Final Cut", Batman comes to the aid of Society of Assassins member Mutro Botha, played by Creator/TimCurry, who speaks with an unmistakably... ''foreign'' accent, which, judging by his name, was probably meant to be South African.

** During their ''VideoGame/DarkSeedII'' Wrongpurae, they had a field day trying to place Mrs. Ramirez's meandering accent, which seemed to be anything ''but'' Hispanic.[[note]]While Mrs. Ramirez might not actually be Hispanic herself, as the surname belonged to her late husband, this doesn't excuse her strange accent.[[/note]] They eventually narrowed it down to a vague mix of Irish and Swedish.

** During their ''VideoGame/DarkSeedII'' Wrongpurae, they had a field day trying to place Mrs. Ramirez's meandering accent, which seemed to be anything ''but'' Hispanic.[[note]]While Mrs. Ramirez might not actually be Hispanic herself, as the surname belonged to her late husband, this doesn't excuse the accent.[[/note]] They eventually narrowed it down to a vague mix of Irish and Swedish.

* InUniverse in ''Anime/GreatPretender,'' Makoto speaks English with a strange accent that gets described as "a weird mishmash of dialects." [[spoiler: It's a hint that his father, whom he learned English from, spent a lot of time traveling the world.]] According to an interview, this apparently took his voice actor, Alan Lee, many attempts to get right, as he kept slipping into a more standard Japanese accent.

** While not as extreme, and much easier to understand, Wesker's accent is also quite confusing. As TheMole in STARS in the first game he puts on a generic American accent. The rest of the time, however, it blends RP, Boston Brahmin, Creator/DavidBowie, and occasional traces of Canadian (one voice actor, Richard Waugh, was Canadian, and the other main voice actor, Creator/DCDouglas, who is from California, tried to imitate his voice to some extent) into something that is almost, but not quite, Transatlantic. Possibly Justified as he is a former secret agent (for Umbrella), and [[spoiler: was raised by the Wesker Project, so his place of birth is unknown and he might well have been taken somewhere else at a young age.]] It's made even more... unique... by the fact he uses TrrrillingRrrs when saying "Uroboros", presumably for emphasis as he doesn't do this the rest of the time; goes from a smooth, posh and occasionally slightly nasal tone to GutturalGrowler when angry; and often talks in a slight monotone with a lot of dramatic pauses. [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools Tropes Are Not Bad]], though: the strange accent suits the character quite well.

** Also from ''Inquisition'', this becomes a subtle foreshadowing with party member Blackwall. His accent can be best described as "French person trying to sound British." Then you find out [[spoiler: He's an Orlesian mercenary who went on the run after a job went horribly wrong, and is trying to pass himself off as Ferelden]].

* Profily in WebAnimation/BattleForDreamIsland has a peculiar accent. It doesn't sound like the other American accented cast, nor is it entirely British (although their voice actor is British). According to the show's wiki, he is listed in with the other characters who have non-American accents such as Tree (Australian), Purple Face and Two (both British) and Winner (New Zeeland), but it's not named.

* Kataya from ''VideoGame/KrazyIvan'' who's your MissionControl. The voice actress' (Creator/SaraStockbridge) attempt at emulating a heavy Russian accent sounds overly-exaggerated and would likely result in laughter from Russian gamers. There's also some Polish and Ukrainian thrown in as well and it just sounds... [[https://youtu.be/byHQ8KivQqA?t=50 odd]].

* Kataya from ''VideoGame/KrazyIvan'' who's your MissionControl. The voice actress' (Creator/SaraStockbridge) attempt at emulating a heavy Russian accent sounds overly-exaggerated and would likely result in laughter from Russian gamers. There's also some Polish and Ukrainian thrown in as well and it just sounds... [[https://youtu.be/byHQ8KivQqA?t=50 odd].

* Butcher Bill Cutting in ''Film/GangsOfNewYork'', as played by Creator/DanielDayLewis, speaks with a bizarre, archaic accent that's halfway between New Yawk and Australia. Day-Lewis [[DoingItForTheArt being Day-Lewis]] based it on a [[ShownTheirWork real historical New York accent]] that no longer ''exists'', which he spent an inordinate amount of time getting right, as is to be expected.

Not to be confused with NotEvenBotheringWithTheAccent where a character is supposed to be from Country Y but sounds just like the rest of the cast. May overlap with JustAStupidAccent, AsLongAsItSoundsForeign or UnexplainedAccent (if there's no in or out-of-universe reason the character should talk like this). If the accent ''starts'' recognizable but then inexplicably jumps on a cross-country road trip, then it's OohMeAccentsSlipping. If the character denies they have an accent, it's VotOcksent. If the character's accent makes them incomprehensible, see UnintelligibleAccent.

* In the ''WebOriginal/FurryBasketballAssociation'', Jorge Gonzalez is noted to have a very weird accent--as it turns out, he's fluent in both Argentinian Spanish and Patagonian Welsh, but spent time in Spain. He hated living in Spain so much he's gone through speech therapy to get rid of the Spanish part of his accent.

* Colonel Tom Parker, the manager of Music/ElvisPresley. He was born Andreas van Kuijk in the Netherlands, then moved to the US as an undocumented immigrant at age 19, inventing the identity of Thomas Andrew Parker from West Virginia. He was in his [=40s=] when he started managing Elvis, and by that point his accent (as heard [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZ2ld_CAS4 here]]) had become Americanized enough that he had little trouble passing as American. The only things that may have given him away were some odd locutions, like saying "yust" instead of "just", or rhyming "book" with "fluke", but likely people would've written them off as some sort of rural dialect. Still, he retained fluency in Dutch throughout his life; in his [=80s=] he spoke the language perfectly when he was interviewed by Dutch television.

* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'': Invoked this trope for comedy, as all of the characters' "accents" are how a typical American in TheSixties might have perceived it. The Spy's accent, in particular, is the hardest to pin down; [[Characters/TeamFortress2Support his character page]] on This Very Wiki used to say that it "seems to take a drunken tour of most of southern Europe". His mixed use of French, Italian, and Spanish pronunciation and vocabulary in his dialogue was so confusing that before "Meet The Spy" ([[CharacterizationMarchesOn and every subsequent update thereafter]]) made it definitively clear that he was French, there were massive Edit Wars on both the Official [=TF2=] Wiki and The Other Wiki over the Spy's nationality, labeling him as Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Basque and Corsican, among other ethnicities.

* ''Literature/RichardTheThirdInTheTwentyFirstCentury'''s accent is described as somewhere between Appalachian and Scottish, though this is perfectly justified seeing as he's from 1485 and that's simply what an English accent sounded like at the time.

* Colonel Tom Parker, the manager of Music/ElvisPresley. He was born Andreas van Kuijk in the Netherlands, then moved to the US as an undocumented immigrant at age 19, inventing the identity of Thomas Andrew Parker from West Virginia. He was in his [=40s=] when he started managing Elvis, and by that point his accent (as heard [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZ2ld_CAS4 here]]) had become Americanized enough that he had little trouble passing as American. The only things that may have given him away were some odd locutions, like saying "yust" instead of "just", or rhyming "book" with "fluke", but likely people would've written them off as some sort of rural dialect. Still, he retained fluency in Dutch throughout his life; in his [=80s=] he spoke the language perfectly when he was interviewed by Dutch television. By contrast, Creator/TomHanks went with a strange, much-criticized vague Mittel European accent when he played Parker in ''Film/Elvis2022''.

* Fans were asking the trope question when Music/{{Eminem}} released ''Relapse'' in 2009, a {{Horrorcore}} concept album in which Em debuts a new incarnation of Slim Shady, a MedicalHorror-themed SerialKiller. While Em had always loved doing accents and impressions on his albums, he does most of ''Relapse'' in a ShiftingVoiceOfMadness with a variety of accents, many of which are unidentifiable. In interviews, Eminem claimed his motivation was that he was bored with the English language and was [[AccentDepundent warping his pronunciation to make rhymes that wouldn't work in his natural accent]] (opening track "3AM" has him pronounce "cornea" the same as "corner ya", and make perfect rhymes with "Klonopin"/"ottoman" and "mannequin"/"man again"), though some have observed that the accent seemed to have stuck from 2004's "Ass Like That", a diss track directed at Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the [[NeverLiveItDown comical hand puppet he was beefing with at the time]]. While the album has had a generally more positive reception a decade down the line (with Music/TylerTheCreator citing it as his favourite album ever), Eminem admits in later albums that on ''Relapse'' he 'ran those accents into the ground' and [[CreatorBacklash cringes when he listens to it]].

* ''Film/BladeRunner2049'': Creator/JaredLeto plays Niander Wallace with a really weird mix of flat tones and [[AcCENTUponTheWrongSylLABle weird, musical pitch shifts]]. It has the effect of making Wallace seem more [[UncannyValley inhuman and robotic]] than any of the actual [[ArtificialHuman Replicants]].

* The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll08ktN6Y24 G-man]] from ''VideoGame/HalfLife''. He sounds vaguely North American, with a light vaguely-British accent, with the whole mess wrapped up in the UncannyValley like he'd read about proper inflection in Earthling conversation but never quite got it. The overall effect comes off as an attempt at "generic human".

* ''[[VideoGame/SoulSeries SoulCalibur]]'': seriously where in Britain is Ivy meant to be from?

* Music/DavidByrne is Scottish by birth but has lived in the U.S. since childhood and spent most of his adult life in New York City, all of which has given him a strangely indistinct accent in his speaking voice. This fits his {{Cloudcuckoolander}} public persona.

* Creator/ViggoMortensen was born in New York to an American mother and a Danish father. In his early years he lived in Venezuela, Denmark, Argentina, the U.K., and Spain. He claims fluency in English, Spanish, Danish, and French, and is conversational in Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish. (Whew.) When speaking English he usually sounds ambiguously American, but elements from other accents do creep in as well. In ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'', for instance, he occasionally slips out of the vaguely English-inflected accent adopted by most of the characters and into something all his own.

* Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'' adopts a weird sort of mid-Atlantic accent that sounds sort of like it wants to be British but can't quite make it -- which stands out, given that practically everybody in the movie speaks with one [[UsefulNotes/BritishAccents British Regional Accent]] or another. And occasionally he says random lines in a hammy Irish accent. Mortensen himself was primarily raised in Denmark and Argentina.