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I said, what about Breakfast At Tiffanys? She said I think I remember the film... it was the one with Mickey Rooney as the Japanese Guy. Eye wezh bohrne endh raizhed en thu deshurt
At some point an Italian is going to be playing Kevin Bacon.
When an actor plays a native of a nationality or area other than their own. (Not counting those actors who play an extraterrestrial, who are never from the same place as their character. One would hope.)
Israeli and Arab actors tend to wind up playing each other quite frequently. Gung-ho movies made during World War II featured every kind of Asian except Japanese, since the Japanese-American actors were all in concentration camps were otherwise occupied. And very few Russian characters during the Cold War were played by native Russians. Depending on the extremity of the stereotyping, this can be extremely offensive (such as in black face or yellow face examples), though sometimes outrage is somewhat exaggerated when the actor is playing a nationality they already resemble.
The most common examples have their own tropes: Fake American, Fake Brit and Lzherusskie (also known as Fake Russian). See also: Fauxreigner where the character is pretending to be a nationality they aren't (or acting more stereotypical than they actually usually do).
If you are actually from the area in question, you may remember one or more of these examples as "That foreigner with a strange accent. Where are they supposed to be from?". On the other hand, some actors are really good at it.
Often the result of the WTH Casting Agency or the desire for a director to have someone who speaks his or her language in the cast.
Examples:
Film
Television
- On Lost, Naveen Andrews, a Brit of Indian descent, plays an Iraqi; the Australians in flashbacks are overwhelmingly played by non-Australians faking the accent. Additionally, Frenchwoman Danielle Rousseau is played by Croatian actress Mira Furlan, while Russian Mikhail Bakunin is played by Venezuelan-born Andrew Divoff. Nigerian Eko is played by British actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, but this is justified since his parents are Nigerian. Similarly, Korean-born American Daniel Dae Kim plays a Korean.
- Betty's family in Ugly Betty is Mexican-American, but while all members of her immediate family are played by Hispanic actors, none of them are of Mexican descent. There's America Ferrera (Honduran-American), Tony Plana (Cuban), Ana Ortiz (American of Puerto Rican and Irish descent) and Mark Indelicato (American of Puerto Rican and Italian descent). This wouldn't be that notable except that it still holds true when you include her extended family from the episode "A Tree Grows in Guadalajara", which was composed of Justina Machado (Puerto-Rican-American), Rita Moreno (Puerto Rican) and Lillian Hurst (Puerto Rican). The episode also had Lilyan Chauvin (French!) playing a Mexican native.
- The animal hunter in Eureka has an horrific supposed Australian accent. To an actual Australian, it sounds like a strangled mix of South African, Irish, New Zealand accents using occasional Australian words
- British Hugh Laurie as American Gregory House on House. In a season one episode House calls a doctor in the middle of the night and fakes a British accent, claiming he's from London and forgot what time it would be in America. For that scene, Laurie did not speak with his real accent, but with the accent he used when he played Bertie Wooster. It was meant to sound "over the top" and be a wink to people who know Laurie's work in Jeeves And Wooster.
- The George Lopez Show: Carmen's actress is actually Albanian-American.
- SciFiDebris humorously lampshades this tropes in his review of Star Trek The Next Generation with the quote and video above.
- Kato in various adaptations of The Green Hornet. While the first radio actor to voice the role was apparently Japanese (Raymond Hayashi), American Roland Parker voiced him for most of the series run (where Kato's nationality shifted from Japanese to "generic Oriental" to "Filipino"), while American Mickey Tolan played the role towards the end. In the film serials, Kato's nationality was specified as Korean, but the role was played by Chinese actor Keye Luke. And in the TV series Kato was (presumptively) Japanese but played by Chinese actor Bruce Lee.
- Mixed with the Fake American concept on the short-lived series "New Amsterdam". Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a Dane, plays John Amsterdam, a NYC cop who is actually an immortal Dutchman doomed to walk the earth until he found his soul mate and went through an interesting string of relationships and Americanized aliases. His American accent was good enough to fool most viewers.
- David Carradine, who is an American of Cherokee, English, Irish, Italian, Scottish, German, Spanish, Ukrainian and Welsh descent, played the half-Chinese Shaolin Master Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu. Carradine's half-brother Keith portrayed a teenage Caine, while an equally non-Asian Radames Perá played young Caine.
- In the 1987 British made-for-television film Scoop, Norwegian actor Sverre Anker Ousdal plays insane Swede Erik Olafsen. Funny thing is, Olafsen is a rather Norwegian spelling, the most common Swedish equivalent would be Olofsson. Not to mention that there is nothing in the plot that requires the character to be a Swede - making him Norwegian would at least be more accurate.
- In Heroes, we have the Indian-American actor Sendhil Ramamurthy playing the Indian character Mohinder Suresh; at the beginning of the show he attempted to do some kind of Indian accent (possibly Tamil?), but after a few episodes he settled on a (relatively good) straight British accent. We also have the Korean-American actor James Kyson Lee playing the Japanese (and Japanese-speaking) character Ando Masahashi, presumably under the tutelage of his authentically Japanese colleague Masi Oka.
- Averted by British actor Christopher Eccleston, who played the British Ensemble Darkhorse (and possible One Scene Wonder) Claude Rains. This troper noticed a couple of lines in the first episode that didn't sound like normal British speech patterns, so maybe Claude wasn't originally intended to be British, but just sort of ended up that way once they cast his actor.
- Buffy and Angel used this, most obviously with Americans David Boreanaz, James Marsters, Juliet Landau and Alexis Denisof playing the Irish Angel and British Spike, Drusilla and Wesley Windham-Price respectively.
- In Boreanaz's case his character's nationality wasn't revealed until two seasons in two seasons in, while he had been speaking with a basic American accent and his Irish accent in flashbacks was rather poor so he continued to speak with his regular accent. Fanon says he hated Ireland so much he never wanted to talk as though he belonged there.
- Even though he gave his son an explicitly Irish name?
- See http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0219206/board/thread/67815602?d=90619232&p=1#90619232
 for some of the natter about how Alexis Denisof's American accent sounds fake and put-on...
- On MASH, Asians of every nationality and descent were used to play the native Koreans.
- The Play of the Week adaptation of Rashomon (not to be confused with the Akira Kurosawa film) had actors of several nationalities playing Japanese characters. None of the actors were Asian, let alone Japanese. Among them: Ricardo Montalban (Mexican), Carol Lawrence (Italian-American), James Mitchell (Anglo-Portuguese), and Oscar Homolka (Austrian).
- Seinfeld featured a Finish character... using a Russian accent.
- Hogans Heroes is actually a surpsingly complete aversion. Of the main cast, which included French, British, American and German characters, only Sgt Shultz was represnting a different country, he was Austiran.
Theatre Examples
- The title character in Othello has been played by a Caucasian (with or without blackface) more often than would make one comfortable.◊ Do they figure no one will notice?
- Indeed, this was how it was done in Shakespeare's day. The first black actor to play Othello was in 1825, but don't think just because they went black they never went back - Constantin Stanislavski played him in 1896, Sir Lawrence Olivier in 1964, Paul Scofield in 1980, Anthony Hopkins in 1981.
- All these examples are not necessarily "blackface" - Othello is described as a "moor," which some assume to mean black and some assume to mean Arab. The Anthony Hopkins and Orson Welles portrayals made use of this ambiguity. Laurence Olivier's, though? Definitely black, and a little weird.
- Yes, just because he uses the adjective 'black' on himself doesn't mean he was actually imagined as being any darker than leather. This is Shakespeare. It also helps that neither the writer nor the audience had had any extensive nuanced experience with international race.
- In an interesting twist on the play's theme, Patrick Stewart (I think, it may have been someone else) once played Othello in an otherwise all-black cast.
- Controversy surrounded Miss Saigon when it was being transported to Broadway after a successful run in London. The Actor's Equity Association would not allow Jonathan Pryce, who had created the role of The Engineer in London (and won a Tony Award for it), to play the role on Broadway. According to them, allowing Pryce, a Caucasian, made up to look like an Asian in the show, would be an affront to Asian actors. A counterargument was that the Engineer is of mixed descent (French-Vietnamese), and Pryce was being discriminated against for being Caucasian. After pressure from Cameron Mackintosh, the producer, the general public, and its own members, the AEA relented and Jonathan Pryce was allowed to recreate his role on Broadway. A controversy also sprung up related to Lea Salonga, the female lead, but it was not racially related.
- Parodied on a Little Britain sketch in which a pushy stage mother desperately tries to get her son a part in Shakespeare's Henry V. When she suggests him for the role of Henry V, the director tells her that Jonathan Pryce has already been cast in the lead, to which she replies "But he's Chinese!"
- And of course, Lea Salonga, who is Filipina, has been cast as Vietnamese (Miss Saigon), French (Les Miserables), Chinese (Mulan, Flower Drum Song), and Arab (Aladdin).
- The character of Christmas Eve in Avenue Q is an immigrant who sings about how her life sucks, in part, because she worked in a Korean deli (or, in some versions, a Chinese restaurant) upon coming to America, despite being Japanese. In the Australia/New Zealand tour, she is played by Filipina Christina O'Neill.
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