Fake Nationality - TV Tropes
Fake Nationality
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This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.
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Chandler: Alright boys, I confess. I was Abie the fish peddler.
Ravelli: How did you get to be Roscoe W. Chandler?
Chandler: Say, how did you get to be an Italian?
Ravelli: Never mind. Whose confession is this?
— Animal Crackers
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. Probably.
Israeli and Arab actors tend to wind up playing each other quite frequently (though Israeli-for-Arab is more common than the other way around). Gung-ho movies made during World War II featured every kind of Asian except Japanese, since the Japanese-American actors were otherwise occupied. And very few Russian characters during the Cold War were played by native Russians. For foreign actors who are frequently employed to play foreign characters, see Plays Great Ethnics .
The most common examples have their own tropes: Fake American , Fake Australian , Fake Brit , Fake Irish , Fake Scot , Fake Russian , Yellowface , Brownface , and Fake Mixed Race . 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. An added complication is that human appearance varies even within nationalities and ethnicities as a result when playing a historical character the foreigner might have been selected because s/he greatly resembled the original.
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.
See Pass Fail when, for whatever reason, the actor isn't convincing as another nationality.
Examples:
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Jin Yan was one of the most famous actors of early Chinese cinema, appearing in Peach Blossom Weeps Tears Of Blood , Wild Rose , and many other productions over a span of 30 years, 1928-1958. He was called the "Film Emperor". He was Korean.
The 2000 Korean movie Joint Security Area :
Korean actress Yeong-ae Lee plays Swiss army Major Sophie E. Jean, who's supposed to have grown up bilingual in Switzerland. The film includes some daring stunt linguistics with Sophie opposite a more senior Swiss officer, played by Christoph Hofrichter (who is German.) For some reason, they speak mainly English - he in a reasonable approximation of a Swiss accent, she, well, rather not. You could make the excuse that she had been poorly schooled in the local language by her Korean parents, but she's supposed to be a high-flying military legal specialist, and it doesn't work well.
The same movie has a Swedish officer played by a German actor. The looks work, the accent doesn't .
Very cleverly and subtly spoofed in the Jim Carrey film The Majestic , set in the 1950's . In the movie-within-the-movie , Sand Pirates of the Sahara, the villain is "The Evil but Handsome Prince Khalid" who is played by B-movie actor "Ramon Jamon". "Ramon Jamon" is played by Cliff Curtis, a Polynesian Maori from New Zealand, who has made a career out of playing Latin Americans ( Blow , Training Day , Live Free or Die Hard ) and Middle Easterners ( Three Kings , The Insider )...
...and has also played a Spaniard (The Fountain) and a Chechen (Traffic).
a Viennese psychiatrist in What's New Pussycat? .
...the eponymous German Mad Scientist and the US President in Doctor Strangelove (as well as British Group Captain Mandrake, though that one wasn't fake),
...the American playwright Clare Quilty in Lolita , and the American gardener Chance in Being There ,
...the French Inspector Clouseau ,
...the Chinese Sidney Wang and Fu Manchu in the parodies Murder by Death and The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, respectively (acknowledging how common this trope was in the days of Asian characters like Charlie Chan ),
...the Italian thief in After The Fox .
...who impersonates an American tourist at one point...
...the Japanese Hirohito in Soft Beds, Hard Battles (one of 6 roles, also including a Frenchman, 1 German, 1 Austrian - Hitler)
In The Quiet American (1958), the Vietnamese heroine, Phuong, is played by Italian actress Giorgia Moll, and her sister by reputedly Algerian (possibly French) actress Kerima.
Averted for the Caucasian male leads, as the British Thomas Fowler, American Alden Pyle and French Vigot are played by Michael Redgrave , Audie Murphy and Claude Dauphin respectively.
Mickey Rooney as Holly's awfully stereotyped, Yellow Face Japanese neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany's .
Ben Kingsley , a Brit of Russian Jewish and Kenyan Indian ancestry, has played...
...Lenin in Lenin: The Train.
...Moses in Moses.
...Otto Frank (father of Anne ) in Anne Frank The Whole Story .
...a half-Maori in the Ender's Game film.
...a Persian in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Physician.
...the French Georges Meliès in Hugo .
...Regent of Hungary Miklós Horthy in Walking with the Enemy.
The Mandarin (A character usually associated with the region in China) in Iron Man 3 . Though it's a ruse, and the Mandarin is actually a hired British actor, making this an in-story example.
...an Egyptian Pharaoh in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb .
...and an American in half a dozen movies.
The American actor Tony Shalhoub, who is of Lebanese descent, is often hired to play Italians ( Wings , Big Night, Cars) due to his curly dark hair and swarthy Mediterranean features.
Lampshaded in a Wings episode: "Joe, please explain to the nice man with the gun that I am not a Libyan terrorist."
Shalhoub memorably created an entire language and accent for his cab-driver character in the comedy film Quick Change . (Or it would be memorable if anyone had ever seen the flick.)
Tony Shalhoub's character of Fred Kwan spoofed this practice in Galaxy Quest when he mentioned that Kwan is a stage name used to fit his character of Tech Sergeant Chen's Asian nationality. Interestingly, when the Thermians are naming the crew, he narrows his eyes when his character's name is spoken. Apparently, that's supposed to be enough to make him seem Chinese.
1999's ' The Mummy is a festival of Fake Nationality. Its Egyptian/Arabic characters include Ardeth Bey (portrayed by Israeli Oded Fehr), professor Terrance Bey (Erick Avari, British-Indian), Gad Hassan (Omid Djalili, British-Iranian), and of course its titular mummy Imhotep, played by Arnold Vosloo (Afrikaner South African) as well as his ancient girlfriend Anck Su Namun (Patricia Velasquez, Venezuelan). The Mummy Returns '' adds in The Scorpion King , played by Dwayne Johnson (Polynesian-American).
It gets better: Arab-English Evelyn Carnahan (she states her mother was Egyptian) is played by Jewish-English actress Rachel Weisz, and American Rick O'Connell, is played by Canadian Brendan Fraser. Fehr himself is something of an expert in Fake Nationality, as he also played Saudi terror mastermind Faris Al-Farik in the TV show Sleeper Cell. His character in Sleeper Cell even lampshades this by pretending to be Jewish, saying many people from the Middle East seem to look alike so he's passed as Iranian, Kurd, Jew, etc.
There's also Benny, who according to supplemental materials is supposed to be Hungarian, is played by Chicago-born Irish-American Kevin J. O'Connor.
The 2017 The Mummy again has a mummy that is African but not Egyptian, with Princess Ahmahnet played by an Algerian, Sofia Boutella.
Al Pacino (American of Italian descent) as Cuban Tony Montana in Scarface (1983) , although there were some actual Hispanic actors. Also in the credits they denounce all the criminal acts of Scarface, and state that Hispanics are hard working people.
Yet another Israeli, Mark Ivanir, a Russian-born immigrant, is a master of Fake Nationality. A partial list follows: a Pole in Schindler's List , a French mercenary in Walker Texas Ranger, a German in Monk , a Yugoslavian in The Terminal , and a Greek in Dollhouse . I'm leaving out all of his appearances as a Russian, since they're (sort of) justified.
The Mask of Zorro gives us Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones (both Welsh) as the original Don Diego and his daughter.
Spanish-born Antonio Banderas plays a Mexican... who goes undercover as a Spaniard. The antagonists of the film - evil governor Don Rafael Montero (probably Spanish as it takes place during the war of independence) - and its sequel - French Jerk Count Armand - are played by Englishmen.
Banderas playing a Mexican struck again in Desperado , in which he played El Mariachi.
In the first and third Die Hard movies, Englishmen Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons played German terrorist brothers Hans and Simon Gruber. A scene was added to the first film when the producers discovered how well Rickman could also fake an American accent.
This page is illustrated with Sean Connery , who has portrayed so many non-Scottish characters (almost all with his own distinctive Scottish accent) that there is simply no point in listing them all. Ironically enough, in the one movie he starred in that was at least partially set in Scotland ( Highlander ), he played an Egyptian. Not only was he an Egyptian, but he was an Egyptian who was pretending to be a Spaniard and had at one point been married to a Japanese princess. Who appeared to be a Scot of course...
For that matter, Connor MacLeod was played by Christopher Lambert, French accent and all. And the Kurgan is played by an American, Clancy Brown .
According to director commentary they worked with a voice coach try to give him a non-specific "European" accent for the "modern" parts of the film, to show how he must have moved from country to country over the centuries, picking up scraps of accents here and there.
There's a missed opportunity for a Bond One-Liner in the scene in The Rock where a bad guy beats Connery, calls him English and refers to his own Irish parentage — why didn't Sean say something along the lines of "I'm Shcottish, arshhole!" Though it's particularly annoying when he's playing Irish-Americans , such as in Family Business , Darby O'Gill and the Little People or The Untouchables . Or The Longest Day ("It takes an Irishman to play the pipes").
In You Only Live Twice , a portion of the plot revolved around making Connery into a Japanese guy. All they really did was dye his hair black, use eyeliner to fake epicanthic folds, and dress him in a kimono. And while James Bond is English, Ian Fleming eventually made him the son of a Scotsman specifically on the account of Connery.
In The Name of the Rose he plays the Englishman William of Baskerville, whom Umberto Eco created as a composit of Sherlock Holmes , William of Ockham, and Roger Bacon.
And in Back to the Future Part III , he dons an Irish accent when he plays Marty's great-great-grandfather Seamus McFly.
While neither Canadian or American is a particular ethnic distinction and the two countries share some accents (including the Transatlantic, or neutral English accent), what makes this trope more applicable is that Michael J Fox is noted for playing particularly 'All American' characters. These include: the young Republican, Alex P Keaton ; political spin doctor Mike Flaherty ; a high school student turned werewolf/basketball star and not one but two Vietnam war soldiers (Casualties of War and a tv documentary, Dear America: Letters from Vietnam).
The only time Arnold Schwarzenegger has ever been without his trademark accent is in a deleted scene from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines . In the scene, Arnold plays an American sergeant that is supposedly the future inspiration for the T-800's appearance. However, he has a very broad Southern accent. The general in charge mentions the accent. A technician says, in Arnold's own voice: "We can fix it." Seen in this hilarious clip.
Though he's a former East German in Commando , which mostly explains his accent.
The only other he's given a non-American clear nationality is Red Heat , as a Russian .
Not true that he's never been without his trademark accent. His first film, Hercules in New York had him billed as "Arnold Strong", and all his lines dubbed by another actor due to his thick accent and poor English. (then when the film was re-released to cash on his fame, they erased the Same Language Dub ) His next role was in The Long Goodbye, where he had no lines at all, playing a deaf-and-mute hitman.
He even played an American cowboy in The Villain who had an unexplained Austrian accent.
In the first Terminator film, he at least tries to shake off his accent and use a regular American one. It doesn't quite work as his usual accent always keeps slipping in but he tries, and his lines are few anyway. After this though he became a star and his accent was so well known he was told to never lose it. But compare his first "I'll be back." in Terminator to later ones.
After The Terminator , he hired an accent trainer, so he didn't lose his trademark accent and start sounding too American. This is probably after his accent became well-established in the American mind as part of his image.
Ironically, he isn't allowed to do his own dubbing for the German dubs of Terminator out of fear that his particular accent would come off as hickish and thus out of place for the character.
In the film The Peacemaker , with George Clooney, the Bosnian terrorist trying to nuke the UN building is played by Marcel Iureº, a Romanian.
Jean-Claude Van Damme is another actor that's prone to playing other nationalities than his own Belgian, especially American. Much like Arnold, he rarely bothers with anything but his own Belgian accent , even when playing American Colonel Guile in the Street Fighter movie.
Very few Belgians have the 'Belgian accents' depicted in movies. Most Belgian Francophones have an accent similar to that of Northern France (not including Paris). In Belgium, the stereotypical 'Belgian accent' tends to be either played for the laugh or bashed mercilessly; the few people who do have this accent often face prejudice.
Van Damme has used a few variations of his French accent including Cajun ( Universal Soldier , Hard Target ) or French-Canadian ( Sudden Death ). Not mentioning Legionnaire, where he is French.
Erick Avari, an Indian who grew up in the Himalayan foothills, has played members of over 24 nationalities, including ancient Egyptian in both the original Stargate movie and in Stargate SG-1 .
Similarly, Vin Diesel 's indeterminate ethnic phenotype allows him to convincingly play many different nationalities, from Italian-American to ancient Carthaginian.
Aussie western The Proposition has a primarily English cast, most of whom speak in their natural accents; justified, as during the time period it's set, Australia was still entirely made up of English convicts and the accent hadn't shifted to its modern version. However, Aussie David Wenham spoke with a put-on British accent, and English-born Aussie Guy Pearce and American Danny Huston both spoke with Irish accents. At least that makes sense as many of the convicts were Irish.
Critical Research Failure ? Australia has never been entirely made up of convicts. Convict transportation ended in 1868 (well before the 1880s setting of the film) and the population quadrupled during the gold rush of the 1850s-1870s. However it was largely made up of people who had left the UK fairly recently.
The Australian accent became much like it current form very early on in Australian history, as shown by recordings from that era . Plus the majority of the original convicts were anything but English, the major English influence on the Australian accents came from the soldiers. Most of the first fleet were Irish, Cornish or from an Eastern European country.
Peter Stormare, a Swede, has made a career out of playing just about every European nationality, from Spanish to Russian; has also been Fake American and even Fake Mexican.
Most famously, he's known for Fake German in VW commercials.
Both Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill features many characters who are nationals of fictitious countries.
For Your Eyes Only has three fake Greeks, a fake Belgian, two fake East Germans and a fake Russian, at least. That's before we get to the Liverpudlian character who's putting on an Austrian accent.
GoldenEye has lots of Fake Russians...
Not to mention Bond himself, who has only been played by an Englishman by two actors of the six (Connery was already mentioned, Lazenby is Australian, Dalton is Welsh and Brosnan is Irish). Three if you include David Niven.
Although once Sean Connery played Bond, Ian Fleming made the character born to a Scottish father and a Swiss mother.
American Don Cheadle played a fake Rwandan in the movie Hotel Rwanda . And got an Oscar nomination for it. He also played Basher Tarr in Ocean's Eleven , Oceans Twelve and Oceans Thirteen, with possibly the worst British accent in a film since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins .
The worst, or at least most egregious , before Dick Van Dyke, was probably Ingrid Bergman 's attempt to do a Cockney accent when playing Ivy Peterson in the 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is especially silly, because there were a lot of Swedish immigrants living in the poorer areas of London at the time the story is set, so there was nothing wrong with her own accent, and on top of that neither of her American co-stars, Lana Turner and Spencer Tracy, are making the slightest attempt at even a Hollywood generic British accent. The only redeeming factor, is that most of the time, Bergman seems to forget she is supposed to be doing the accent, so there's some relief. When she is doing it, it's every bit as grating as Dick Van Dyke's.
It's inexplicably common for young female leads in films set in Ireland to be played by non-Irish actresses. For instance: Kate Hudson and Frances O'Connor in About Adam , Kelly MacDonald and Shirley Henderson in Intermission , Laura Fraser in Divorcing Jack and Minnie Driver in Circle of Friends (all British except Hudson interestingly enough). It even applies to slightly older 'Irish' female characters - witness Julia Roberts in Michael Collins and Samantha Morton in In America. There might be something of a vicious circle in play: there are few prominent young Irish actresses to cast for major roles leading to the filmmakers to cast foreign actresses, leading to even fewer young Irish actresses achieving a breakthrough to prominence in the first place.
Actually, while Frances O'Connor was born in England, she grew up in Australia from age two.
In a rather amusing inversion of this, Irish actor Jason O'Mara portrays an American cop in the U.S. adaptation of English cop show Life On Mars . His real Irish accent is shown with one episode...where he's "faking" it undercover, infiltrating an Irish gang.
O'Mara also played an American secret agent in The Agency . In one episode, he went undercover as an IRA operative. Viewers criticized his "phony" accent.
So strong is this trope that Saoirse Ronan (of Atonement and The Lovely Bones ), arguably one of the most prominent young Irish actresses has yet to be cast as an Irish character in a film.
Ms. Ronan was born in the United States, but she moved to Ireland when she was three.
Maureen O'Hara flagrantly averted this subtrope in The Quiet Man, but she may be the exception.
Speaking of Fake Irish , one of the main characters in the movie Michael Collins, that of Éamon de Valera, an Irishman who authored the present Irish constitution and who took part in one of the biggest events of modern Irish history (the Easter Rising)... was played by an Englishman, Alan Rickman. Though, at least Rickman had some Irish Catholic background. Still, given that the movie had a less than flattering portrayal of de Valera, it could be intentional to cast someone who was English.
Brad Pitt played something in Snatch. . It was originally meant to be stereotypical East End cockney, but Pitt apparently sounded like the legendary Dick Van Dyke. So instead he put on something approximating Irish to portray a "pikey", i.e. Funny Foreigner stereotype of an Irish Traveller .
In 300 , a good part of the million man Persian army is made up of blacks, samurai-masked warriors, and 7 feet tall monsters, but very few of them actually look Persian (though a lot of faces were hidden). Indeed, the emperor himself was played by a Brazilian. This probably made the whole controversy surrounding the film a lot worse.
This is partly justified in that the Persian army is explicitly said to be made up of people from all over the empire, not just native Persians. That doesn't stop Gerard Butler's Scottish accent while playing a Greek general from being absolutely hilarious.
Which is also Truth in Television , to an extent. One of the few things about the movie that is...
Butler's accent is actually entirely consistent with traditional Translation Convention - in English-language adaptations of Ancient Greek plays, a Laconic (Spartan) accent is traditionally depicted as Scottish, as it carries appropriate connotations of cultural austerity, dry wit and barely controlled rage ; furthermore, a Scottish accent was often called the "Doric" back in the day...and as it happens, the Spartans were Dorians. It works, too .
Of course, it's not meant to be realistic, though it's somewhat jarring when The Queen's Greek is otherwise in effect.
The atrocious film Sniper 2 had Tom Berenger as the titular sniper battling villainous Hungarian-speaking Serbs in Cuban-style military uniforms through the streets of Budapest, Serbia (the actual capital is Belgrade, Budapest is the capital of Hungary). Three cheers for looking up basic facts on the Internet...
In Owen Wilson's film Behind Enemy Lines , all of the Serbian characters were portrayed by Croatian actors, probably because no Westerner can tell the difference and no self-respecting Serbian actor would play the stereotypical role of the bad guy terrorist.
To be honest, no Serbian or Croatian person could tell the difference, either. Not even by accent, since accents depend on where the person is from, rather than what ethnicity they are - a person born in Belgrade is going to have a different accent from a person born in Bosnia or Croatia, but people from a certain part of Croatia or Bosnia will have the same accents regardless of their ethnicity.
Films based on The Bible tend not to have Middle Eastern actors, at least for the lead roles. This is probably because most Christians and Jews are non-Middle Eastern, and people expect to see their spiritual forebears portrayed as if they were their ethnic forebears too.
Any film set in Ancient Rome will invariably cast British actors as Romans .
Gerard Butler, a Scot, as Attila the Hun, who historically would have come from as far East as modern Mongolia, in the dramatized Attila .
Not to mention The Conqueror , where John Wayne of all people played Genghis Effing Khan !
Who can forget Esteban Colberto from the Colberto Reporto Gigante ?
Subverted by Peter MacNicol's character Janosz in Ghostbusters II : He spouts a bizarre accent throughout the movie, and when someone finally asks him where he's from, he replies in confusion: "The upper vest side."
Pierce Brosnan is so well known for playing James Bond that many people are surprised to find out he is actually Irish (and not British). Brosnan himself seems to have gotten tired of this and most of his more recent films have him play Irish, or Irish-American, or simply an Irish accented American . Lampshaded in After the Sunset :
Woody Harrelson: It's okay to be happy to see me. Just because you're English doesn't mean you need to hide your emotions.
Pierce Brosnan: I'm Irish. We let people know how we feel. Now f*ck off.
The tendency of Robin Hood not to be played by an actual Brit has been lampshaded in Robin Hood: Men in Tights when Cary Elwes (British) remarks, "Unlike other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent." Ironically, he is also well-known for his Southern American accent in Twister and Kiss the Girls .
Elwes also played stereotypical blond Californian jet pilot Kent Gregory in Hot Shots! Pretty impressive, since Californians are among the most daunting Americans for foreigners to play.
It's a particular indictment of Kevin Costner's atrocious semi-attempt at a British accent in the then-recently-released Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves , which a good part of the film was a parody of.
This is particularly ironic considering the fact that the real Robin Hood didn't speak English at all, or at least not modern English. English language as we know it didn't even exist at the time, let alone a British accent. Robin Hood was more likely to speak the Norman version of French (spoken by the Norman nobility) and early Middle English (spoken by the everyone else- a Germanic language probably sounding similar to modern Dutch and Flemish). The widespread insistence on having actors speak RP ('posh' British accent) when playing characters in period dramas set in Middle Ages or Renaissance is also amusing, since such an accent did not exist at the time. An accent tinged with Anglo-French would be pretty much impossible to simulate, as Anglo-Norman French probably sounded like French, Italian, and Icelandic jammed awkwardly through a meat grinder and would be nails-across-a-blackboard to any modern French speaker.
Maybe, but the same "or at least not modern X" could be a problem with any work set more than 200 years ago or so, and yet it's still a convention that actors generally speak with an accent similar to a modern person of the nationality of their character. So it's funny that that is ignored so often for Robin Hood for some reason. Especially when other actors in the same work do match their character's modern equivalent, but not the title character.
That convention does not really makes sense in too old times as nations and their citizens changed a lot in history. The accents' choices can lead to fail history , as in Gladiator with the "Germanic" using a German accent (the actor is German). But old Germanic peoples did not live only on modern Germany but also on parts of modern France, Netherlands or Russia, so it makes as much sense to make a Germanic character speak with a German accent as for a Latin character to speak with an Italian one or for an Anglo-Norman-French character with an English one, though it is certainly more realistic .
Young Frankenstein has three Transylvanian characters (Transylvania is part of Romania). In ascending order: Inga (Teri Garr, American), Frau Blucher *WHINNY* (Cloris Leachman, American) and Inspector Kemp (Kenneth Mars, American). Plus all the folks playing the villagers.
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
Adam Sandler plays a fake Israeli, quite horribly.
Also Emmanuelle Chriqui, a Canadian of Sephardic (Jewish) Morrocan descent plays the Palestinian hair salon owner and love interest of Adam Sandler.
Don't forget the Italian-American John Turturro playing a Palestinian terrorist.
Olivia Colman plays the Ax-Crazy Polish secretary in the radio sitcom Hut 33; she does so with an accent that sounds more Russian than Polish, possibly justified by the Rule of Funny .
Jean Reno was born in Morocco to Spanish Andalusian parents and is commonly known as a French actor. Apparently, that range has driven producers to see fit to cast him as Italian (in The Professional ), German (in Mission: Impossible ) and Belgian (in Hotel Rwanda ). He also played an Italian (Enzo) in The Big Blue (which was produced in France). and an Iraqi in the Italian film, The Tiger and the Snow.
Gerard Butler (a Scot) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (an American) play Irishmen (with varying degrees of success) in the film P.S. I Love You .
Has Famke Janssen ever played a Dutch character?
Juliette Binoche played a Bosnian woman in Anthony Minghella 's Breaking And Entering , occasionally speaking her "native language" with a strong French accent. She was also the French-accented Czech (or Slovak?) Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Australian Nicole Kidman and French actors Vincent Cassel and Matthew Kassovitz played Russian gangsters in Birthday Girl .
Vincent Cassel again played a Russian gangster in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises , with other Russians being portrayed by a Danish/American (Viggo Mortensen), a British-Australian (Naomi Watts), a German (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and a Pole (Jerzy Skolimowski).
Rade Serbedzija's international career has consisted of playing all kinds of fake nationalities, usually Russians ( The Saint , Mission: Impossible II , Snatch. , Space Cowboys , 24 ), but he's also played a Czech ( Duet ), a Greek ( The Truce ), and an Italian ( Stigmata ). He's actually Croatian.
... and the Fake American homeless guy from Batman Begins !
Russian Oleg Menshikov and Lithuanian Ingeborga Dapkunaite played a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Muslim, respectively, in Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness.
In an opposite example, Serbian actors Branka Katic and Dragan Micanovic played Russians in the UK TV series Auf Wiedersehn, Pet. Katic has also played Russians on Trial and Retribution and H G Wells: War With The World. In the upcoming John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies , she plays Romanian-born Anna Sage.
Christopher Lee has played all kinds of fake nationalities, including Chinese. Being a prolific actor capable of speaking many languages helps.
His favorite role he's ever played was the Gujarati-born founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. And despite not being remotely South Asian, he pulled it off pretty well.
Russian in Romanceofa Horsethief
And another Italian American, Don Altobello, in The Godfather Part III . And many, many others.
The Welsh actor Hugh Griffith played various English characters in Shakespearean theater and English and French characters on film. He had a tour de force performance as the Arab Sheikh Ilderim in Ben Hur and was nominated for a Tony for playing American Southerner W.O. Gant in Look Homeward Angel . He did get to play Welshmen now and then.
John Rhys-Davies, the Anglo-Welsh actor, has played a Portuguese sea captain (Rodrigues in Shogun), an Egyptian (Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark ), a Frenchman (Porthos in two different productions, and a Norman knight in one production of Ivanhoe ), a Dwarf , Americans, Leonardo Da Vinci and occasionally a generic Englishman. Despite all this, he's still respectful of his heritage and has even performed in Welsh for TV. Something about that dark Brythonic complexion which says 'Mediterranean coast' to casting directors (or 'cover him in latex' to Peter Jackson)....
He especially insists he's English in several Sliders episodes. Once, when he's mistaken for Luciano Pavarotti , and again when he's asked by Rembrandt if he can fish. "I'm English. We invented fishing."
While we're in Indiana Jones : Alison Doody said she didn't expect to play Elsa in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , "since they were asking for an Austrian 30-year old, not an Irish 22-year old". Also, the only villain with its own nationality is Mola Ram: Paul Freeman and Ronald Lacey are British, Belloq is French and Toht is German ; Julian Glover is British, Donovan is American (but considering he played a Greek James Bond villain ...); and Cate Blanchett is Australian, Irina Spalko is Soviet - Ukraine , actually.
Glover's (natural?) Scottish-sounding accent slips in a scene near the end, when he is saying: "The Nazis want to write themselves into the Grail legend....take on the world." I don't think this hurts the film too much; I just took it to mean that Donovan either was an immigrant or had one or two foreign-born parents, and so grew up with that accent before he tried to change it.
Nearly every Spaghetti Western ever filmed has Spaniards playing Mexicans, since they were shot in Spain and Spanish actors were more readily available than genuine Mexicans. Also, for obvious reasons, Italians played characters from both sides of the border. And then, in a class by himself, we have New Yorker Eli Wallach as Tuco Ramirez, " The Ugly ".
Alfred Molina is a London-born actor whose father and mother are from Spain and Italy, respectively. He has played:
Russian in Anna Karenina and Letter to Brezhnev.
Russian Jew in Fiddler on the Roof (On stage.)
The 1998 adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask featured an eclectic array of fake Frenchmen. Most notable were Englishman Jeremy Irons as Aramis, Irishman Gabriel Byrne as D'Artagnan, American John Malkovich as Athos, American Peter Sarsgaard as his son, and American Leonardo DiCaprio as King Louis XIV, none of whom particularly bothered to disguise their country of origin. This was made particularly noticeable by having an actual Frenchman, Gï¿½rard Depardieu , round out the cast. Hilariously, the only accents that did match were John Malkovich and Peter Sarsgaard, playing father and son, and only because both men happen to hail from St. Louis .
In Time Regained , John Malkovich plays Baron de Charlus, entirely in French, going the trope one better. Some reviewers noted that the halting style of a non-native speaker worked in his favor for a scene late in the film, in its present, where Charlus has gone senile.
Conversely, Jeremy Irons ' turn in the title role in Swann in Love almost two decades earlier was dubbed into French, along with that of the Italian who played Odette, because neither of them spoke the language well enough.
John Malkovich also played le Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons but then topped his two French characters by playing the King of France Charles VII in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc .
He also played Uruguayan Carlitos at the beginning of Alive .
Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård has played characters who are German (conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler in Taking Sides), Saxon (Cerdic in King Arthur ), ambiguously French (Lambeau in Good Will Hunting ), presumably British (Bootstrap Bill Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean ), and Spanish (Francisco Goya in Goya's Ghosts). He also has several Fake Russians on his resume.
Yet Skarsgård is the sole Swede in the main cast of the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (four others, including Joel Kinnaman , have smaller roles), which features lots of Brits and Americans speaking with Swedish accents.
An odd aversion occurred in the film Shattered Glass . The real Kambiz Foroohar is Iranian-American. Upon watching himself portrayed in the movie, he posted an entry on a popular Iranian-American blog lamenting that although he was the first Iranian character depicted on film after 9/11, he had been portrayed as "generic ethnic guy", by an actor he had been told by the film's producers was Indian-Canadian. The "Indian-Canadian" actor in question then wrote into the same blog and clarified that actually, he was Iranian as well. Awkward...
Tony Randall played the titular Chinese wizard in 7 Faces of Dr. Lao . Although as the title also implies, the character can appear in pretty much whatever form he wants.
X-Men Film Series :
Halle Berry attempted a strange Kenyan accent for Storm (an actual African) in the first X-Men film, although she dropped it after this film.note It seemed to be a (poor) imitation of the rather odd British-African accent American Iona Morris used for the 1992 cartoon series . Canadian Wolverine is played by an Australian ; Magneto (Polish) is played by an Englishman ; German Nightcrawler is Scottish .
X-Men: First Class features German-Irish Michael Fassbender as Magneto (who according to the comics is either German or Polish, but definitely not Irish).
Played straight in The Wolverine with Korean Will Yun Lee playing Japanese Kenuichio Harada. Averted with all the other plot-important Japanese characters who are portrayed by actual Japanese actors.
X-Men: Days of Future Past has Mexican Adan Canto as Sunspot (Brazillian) and Canadian Brendan Pedder as Apocalypse (Egyptian).
X-Men: Apocalypse : The eponymous villain is now played by the Guatemalan-American Oscar Isaac , an Australian as Nightcrawler, and another American as a young Storm.
Despite the multiple British actors playing American characters throughout the X-Men movies, ironically the one British X-Man, Psylocke , has only been played by American actresses: Meiling Meloncon in X-Men: The Last Stand and Olivia Munn in Apocalpse. (though the latter's Asian heritage fits how Psylocke is effectively in a Japanese woman's body )
The Australian who played Wolverine, Hugh Jackman , has been a Fake Brit ( Kate and Leopold , The Prestige , a voice role in Flushed Away ), Fake American (most of his roles, such as Swordfish ), Dutch (if Van Helsing is like Van Helsing ) and French ( Les Misï¿½rables (2012) ). Probably his only post-Wolverine roles featuring his true nationality are, appropriatedly, Australia and as the Australian Easter Bunny in Rise of the Guardians .
Mostly averted somewhat in Pocahontas , in which Disney used Native American actors as the voice talent for the main Native American characters (Irene Bedard, Michelle St. John and Russell Means). But of course they cast Mel Gibson as the Englishman John Smith. The main (British) villain is also played by an American, David Ogden Stiers.
Fisher Stevens played Ben, dubbed " Racist Indian Guy " in Short Circuit and its sequel. Stevens is very, very white.
It could also be read as an early attempt at subverting Indian stereotypes. Sure, he mangles the language for laughs but on the other hand he's technically the smartest character in the movie and ended up becoming the focus of the sequel, in part because the character was so popular.
The English Patient has Juliette Binoche (French) as Hana (French-Canadian); Willem Dafoe (US American) as Caravaggio (Canadian); and Naveen Andrews (British Indian) as Kip (an Indian Sikh). Ralph Fiennes , who plays the title character, actually is English.
Actually, Fiennes qualifies here as well because, despite the title, his character is actually Hungarian.
While we're on Naveen Andrews, in Mighty Joe Young he plays an African. Add an Arab , that's three ethnicities by the same guy.
Elsewhere, Willem Dafoe has played a Mexican in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Jesus in The Last Temptationof Christ .
The early '80s film Night Crossing , about a family that escaped East Germany by balloon, featured British actors in the main adult roles, Americans as the kids, and Germans in practically every other role.
Slumdog Millionaire 's titular Mumbai "slumdog" is played by (ethnically Indian) Briton Dev Patel.
The pan-Scandinavian movie I Am Dina , set in nineteenth century rural Norway, featured illustrious actors from all three countries and then some - like Gérard Depardieu, playing one of the male leads. For the sake of realism (one assumes), it was decided to do this in English. The result was hotly debated, but the biggest irony was probably that the only English actor, Christopher Eccleston, was cast as a Russian.
This caused a mild uproar in the US (and a huge uproar in Asia) when Chinese actresses Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li and Chinese-Malaysian Michelle Yeoh were cast as Japanese characters in Memoirs of a Geisha . The film was Banned in China and Ziyi stated that it was like an American faking a French accent while speaking Russian (they performed in English with fake Japanese accents).
Off-hand references in other examples notwithstanding, there deserves to be a primary mention of Dick Van Dyke 's legendary performance as the cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins . This and Mickey Rooney's performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's are probably the ultimate examples of this trope in filmdom. Incidentally, in Mr. Van Dyke's Biography episode, he stated that the hatred of his accent in the film is responsible for more pain during his acting career than anything else he's ever done; he believed that his performance should be memorable — not his horrible accent. (Which he didn't think was that horrible anyway.)
Conversely, hardly anyone gives Mr. Van Dyke's credit for his other English accent in the film , Mr. Dawes Sr., which no one ever complains about - perhaps because it's not until the very end of the movie that it's revealed who's playing him!
Bram Stoker's Dracula has significant examples. Canadian Keanu Reeves and American Winona Ryder stand out with the worst fake British accents since Dick van Dyke, and Englishman Gary Oldman plays the title character — the Romanian Dracula .
Also, Welshman Anthony Hopkins is the Dutch vampire killer Van Helsing.
The cast of the 2006 film adaptation of Perfume : Story of a Murderer has British actors/actresses, and German actresses playing Frenchmen/women. Only Dustin Hoffman, an American, was playing an Italian living in France.
Kelly McDonald traded her very pronounced Scottish brogue for a West Texas twang in No Country for Old Men . Made even stranger by the fact that, with the exception of Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, McDonald was the only non-Texan who had a major role in the film. (Bardem, who is from Spain, probably also qualifies for his portrayal of Chigurh, in spite of Chigurh's mysterious origins, although he supposedly has a "Dallas" accent. Eyeroll ...)
The Boys from Brazil features Gregory Peck (American) as the German Josef Mengele and Laurence Olivier (British) as Austrian Jew Ezra Lieberman.
In Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven , Kurdish Saladin is played by Syrian Arab Ghassan Massoud. Closer than many portrayals. The same region at least...
Also, the French characters were played by Orlando Bloom (English), Liam Neeson (Irish), Brendan Gleeson (Irish), Marton Czokas (New Zealander), Jeremy Irons (English), David Thewlis (English), Kevin McKidd (Scottish) and Michael Sheen (Welsh) to name a few. The only actual French person was Eva Green.
The Dark Knight Saga is another such festival of Fake Nationality, mostly of British actors pretending to be American , such as Christian Bale , Gary Oldman , and Tom Wilkinson. Others Fake Americans include Irishmen Cillian Murphy and Liam Neeson (note: it was never stated Ducard was American, but Neeson uses an American accent), Dutch Rutger Hauer, and Australians Heath Ledger and Ben Mendelssohn. In fact, the only actual principal American actors on set were Morgan Freeman , Katie Holmes, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart. Singaporean Chinese actor Chin Han played the Chinese Lau, and French actress Beatric Rosen pulled a Fake Russian as Natascha, prima ballerina of the Moscow Ballet.
Heath Ledger played American characters quite a bit.
Not to mention a Fake Brit in A Knight's Tale .
And, although the majority of the cast was British, Casanova was Italian.
Also, we can't know that the Joker is American; nothing is solid about his past. A wanted poster seen very briefly in the 1989 film reveals that he was born in Brooklyn, New York, but that depiction is no longer canon (and, by many fans, has never been considered canon).
The third film retcons Ducard as vaguely Middle Eastern, though he doesn't look the part. It's also possible he was simply an American in the employ of the warlord. And his daughter is played by a Frenchwoman who passes as Fake American . And from the same place comes Bane (half-British and half-Latin American in the comics), played by a Brit.
Andrew Garfield is a very interesting case. He was born in Los Angeles to a British mother and American father, but then moved to Britain when he was three. His three most famous roles include an American ( The Amazing Spider-Man ), a Brazilian ( The Social Network ), and a Brit ( Never Let Me Go , bonus points for being a clone in the movie).
The aforementioned Irishman Liam Neeson also played a Scot in Rob Roy , a German in Schindler's List a Frenchman in Les Misï¿½rables (1998) , and a (presumably) Spanish Jesuit in The Mission .
Liam Neeson and Arnold Vosloo both played (presumably) American biochemist Dr. Peyton Westlake aka Darkman .
This whole long list and not one person has cited Meryl Streep 's multiple portrayals of nationalities other than her American one:
Italian in The Bridges of Madison County.
Australian in A Cry in the Dark.
British in The French Lieutenant's Woman (though only her Show Within a Show character), Plenty, and as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady .
Irish in Dancing at Lughnasa.
Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet , both English, play Germans in The Reader with accents.
Fiennes played an Austrian in Schindler's List .
Fiennes played a Hungarian at least twice, both from the same era: in The English Patient , as noted above, and also in the less-well known Sunshine, which was about a Hungarian Jewish family during World War II.
And he plays another Central European (this time of unknown nationality) in Grand Budapest Hotel .
In 2006's All the King's Men, Brits Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins and Kate Winslet try to play southern Americans. Only Law comes out sounding respectable as far as accents go.
Mel Gibson , an American raised in Australia plays the Scottish William Wallace in Braveheart with an accent.
Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce in L.A. Confidential
Guy Pearce does a creditable American as Lenny in Memento .
Pete Postlethwaite plays Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects . Not much can be said about the character for certain due to an Unreliable Narrator , but the name sounds Japanese and the actor is very white. It could be a code name of course.
Most of Peter Lorre 's (an Austrian-Hungarian Jew) career is built on this trope. A small list of the nationalities he was casted as:
Japanese (the Mr. Moto series) - although he reportedly refused heavy makeup and relying on stereotypes
Chinese (They Met in Bombay) - where he did wear heavy makeup and rely on stereotypes
French ( Mad Love , Passage to Marseilles)
Russian (Background to Danger) - bizarrely, frequent costar Sidney Greenstreet (an Englishman) plays a German agent
Mexican (Secret Agent) - although another character states he's "not really a Mexican..."
German - innumerable movies made in WWII, with the then all-too-common irony of a Nazi character being played by a Jewish actor who fled Germany when Hitler came to power
Lee Meredith, an American actress from New Jersey, played the Swedish Ulla in Mel Brooks' The Producers . In an interview, she said that her use of stilted, formal Swedish, and her fake vaguely Scandanavian accent, made Norwegians assume she was rural/small town Swedish; while the Swedes thought she was Norwegian.
In the 2005 musical remake, the film version of Ulla was played by Uma Thurman; who, although American-born, is at least half-Swedish.
The first stage version of Ulla was played by Cady Huffman, another American.
Most of Lou Diamond Phillips' early roles were Mexican-American characters (La Bamba, Stand and Deliver, Young Guns), but his ancestry is quite mixed note  Phillips' father is a Scots-Irish American with one-quarter Cherokee blood, and his mother is a Filipina with Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese ancestry. More recently, he has played both King Arthur and the King of Siam on stage.
Vincent Schiavelli, an Italian-American, stole his brief scene in Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies as the German Dr. Kaufman.
The 1943 film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway 's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls , (which is about the Spanish Civil War ) had all kinds of foreign actors playing Spanish characters: Swedish ( Ingrid Bergman ), Greek, Russian, Mexican, Maltese, German, Hungarian. There was one Spanish actor too.
Machete brings us American Steven Seagal as a Mexican drug lord. And no, he doesn't try at an accent .
Angels & Demons has quite a bit of this, notably Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer as the Italian Vittoria Vetra. The character of the camerlengo had his nationality changed from Italian to Irish in the film, where he is played by the Scottish Ewan McGregor .
The 2004 film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber 's The Phantom of the Opera has this all over the place. It is set in France, and it is assumed that most characters are French. While the Phantom's nationality and family background is never explicitly stated, it can be assumed that he probably wasn't Scottish like his actor Gerard Butler. The British Miranda Richardson plays the French Madame Giry, her daughter Meg is played also by a British actress ( Page Three Stunna Jennifer Ellison), Christine Daae, of Swedish descent, is played by the American Emmy Rossum and the Italian diva Carlotta is played by the British Minnie Driver.
The little-known lowish-budget Christian film Hansie, about South African cricketer Hansie Cronjé, was shot almost entirely in South Africa, with some scenes intended to be in India; all the characters in the movie are either South African or Indian, and most if not all the actors, writers, etc., are South African. Inexplicably, Hansie Cronjé's wife, Bertha, is played by American actress Sarah Thompson. Her Afrikaans accent is, quite frankly, terrible to the point of causing the audience's ears to bleed (it's like something between Dutch and German and maybe a little Australian). To be fair, the Afrikaans accent can be described as something between Dutch, German and Australian, ... but not in the way she portrayed it. At all. But ja, at least she tried, hey.
If it wasn't painfully obvious how hard she was trying, her accent would have fallen under As Long as It Sounds Foreign .
Most of the Tibetians in 2012 were not played by actual Tibetians: Tenzin is played by Singaporean Chinese actor Chin Han, and his brother Nima by Canadian Chinese actor Osric Chau. Also, the Croat-Danish actor Zlatko Buric portrays the Russian Yuri, and his also-Russian girlfriend Tamara is played by French actress Beatrice Rosen, who also pulled a Fake Russian in The Dark Knight .
A most absurd one in the Thai superhero film Mercury Man. The Big Bad is an Afghan terrorist named Osama bin Ali, but he is played by a Thai actor. No effort is made to change his appearance or voice to remotely sound Middle-Eastern.
British actor Orlando Bloom has played:
American (Oregon) Drew Baylor in Elizabethtown .
American (North Carolina) Harris Parker in Main Street.
Scottish Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean .
Irish Australian Joe Byrne in Ned Kelly .
American Todd Blackburn in Black Hawk Down .
Cayman Island native Shy in Haven (but with his British accent).
Frenchman Balian in Kingdom of Heaven (again, with his British accent).
Played for laughs in the DVD extras of Knocked Up , where he participated in a skit in which Judd Apatow hired him for the male lead role (played in the movie by Seth Rogen) thinking he would use an American accent, which he refuses to do, leading Apatow to assume that he just can't. Bloom tries to play it off by saying that a British man can get a woman pregnant just as easily as an American man can.
Zoe Saldana , who was born in New Jersey and spent her teen years in the Dominican Republic has played:
African Nyota Uhura in the 2009 Star Trek reboot.
Cayman Island native Andrea in Haven.
Caribbean Anamaria in Pirates of the Caribbean .
Colombian Cataleya in Colombiana .
Let's be sure to mention India-born British Vivien Leigh , whose most memorable roles were as a Southern Belle in both Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire . The role of Scarlett O'Hara has also been played by England-born Joanne Whalley .
Troy (2004) featured Greek and other Mediterranean characters, but not a single Greek actor. A sampling:
American Brad Pitt as Achilles (with an atrocious British accent).
British Orlando Bloom as Paris.
German Diane Krueger as Helen of Troy.
Australian Eric Bana as Hector.
Irish Brendan Gleeson as Menelaus.
Irish Peter O'Toole as Priam.
Scottish Brian Cox as Agamemnon.
Australian Rose Byrne as Briseis.
Welsh Owain Yeoman as Lysander.
British Saffron Burrows as Andromache.
And so on...
The Brothers Grimm had Jonathan Pryce playing the French baddie, complete with an hilarious French accent.
Gnl. Delatombe: Zis is what I call Victorhy!
Pretty much everyone in the film is this trope: Matt Damon (American) and Heath Ledger (Australian) as the titular German brothers, Peter Stormare (Swedish) as the Italian Mercurio Cavaldi, Lena Headey (English) as Angelika (German), and Monica Bellucci (Italian) as the Mirror Queen (presumably German).
Pat Morita's heavy Japanese accent in The Karate Kid franchise is notable due to his natural American accent.
Supposedly, he didn't have this accent during his first audition and was rejected as a result. He then went to his uncle, who coached him in the "proper" Japanese accent and came back for a second try.
Johnny Depp is this trope. Aside from his legendary portrayal of English pirate Captain Jack Sparrow , he's broken out the British accent for several roles; better still, in Don Juan de Marco, he played—ready for this?—an Italian-American who reinvented himself as a Mexican lothario—who speaks with a Castillian accent.
Robert Downey, Jr. is an American who in Tropic Thunder played an Australian who was playing a black American and while that briefly pretended to be a Asian farmer.
He also played a very convincing Australian reporter in Natural Born Killers . It wasn't intended at first but his performance was inspired by an Australian journalist and he and Oliver Stone decided to work with it.
Not to mention Sherlock Holmes and his first Oscar nom as Charlie Chaplin .
Pick an old Western with Indians in it. Any of them. Mostly portrayed by Jews and Italians in brownface, for the characteristic plains Indian big nose (this also leads to unusual blue-eyed Indian
◊
, such as the one from The Searchers ). More recently, Asian actors have had such roles, as evidenced by Brotherhood of the Wolf . At the same time, white actors have claimed indigenous ancestry to make it seem "less racist" that they're playing nonwhite characters. Examples include Johnny Depp (Tonto) and Noah Ringer ( The Last Airbender ).
Mike Todd's 1956 film of Around the World in 80 Days (1956) had Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess.
In Taking Lives , most of the main French-Canadian characters are played by French actors using their own French accents. The difference between Quebec French and France French is as big as the one between British English and American English. Even more bizarre, the movie itself was shot in Quebec City and there are some bona fide French-Canadian as secondary characters.
Angelina Jolie has played several non-American characters:
French, as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart .
Russian in Salt (but it fits as Salt is supposed to be a Deep Cover Agent ... and she is one among many Fake Russians there)
Michael Mann 's adaptation The Last of the Mohicans cast the English Daniel Day-Lewis as American Hawkeye and the American Madeleine Stowe as English Cora (although Cora's sister Alice was played by genuinely English actress Jodhi May).
My Big Fat Greek Wedding is full of this.
Nia Vardalos is a Greek-Canadian playing a Greek-American.
Lainie Kazan is Russian Jewish on her father's side and Turkish Jewish on her mother's side.
Michael Constantine was born in the United States to Greek immigrant parents.
Andrea Martin is an Armenian-American; the scene where Rodney & Harriet try to recall the ethnicity of Rodney's secretary, which turns out to be Armenian, may be a reference to this.
Joey Fatone is Italian-American.
Yoshiko Otaka
(aka Shirley Yamaguchi) made a career under the false identity Li Xianglan, playing the role of a Chinese woman in propaganda films
in colonial Manchuria. In fact, most people at the time believed she was Chinese because her grasp of the language was that good.
Colombiana has a pair of these. The first being the already mentioned Zoe Saldana as a Colombian. The second being Maori actor Cliff Curtis playing a Colombian-American gangster.
Ron Perlman is an American who played French strongman One in the French film The City of Lost Children , since he is the only American who memorized all his lines and didn't speak French .
Most of the cast in the American remake of The Debt (the main Israeli characters are played at various points in the film by England's Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson, Ireland's Ciarán Hinds, Australia's Sam Worthington, New Zealand's Marton Csokas and the USA's Jessica Chastain).
The "Somali" pirates in The Expendables are very obviously not Somali, but played by Americans of West African descent. Peoples from those two regions look nothing alike.
South African actress Charlize Theron has yet to play a South African character; even in Mad Max: Fury Road (which was filmed in Africa) she plays an Australian - albeit with an American accent.
Most non-French film adaptations of The Three Musketeers qualify; The Three Musketeers (1993) had exactly one French person in the cast (Julie Delpy), which is still one more than The Three Musketeers (2011) (and neither of them were even filmed in France!).
In War, Inc. Hilary Duff plays a Central Asian pop star, and unlike some people with Fake Nationality she doesn't drop the accent when singing.
The Manchurian Candidate original, in addition to Khigh Dhiegh, had Henry Silva (Sicilian-American) as a Korean, and Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey as Americans, Not Even Bothering with the Accent . The 2004 remake didn't follow this trope, and cast Americans as Americans, Englishmen as Englishmen, and this one guy of European extraction played by a Swiss actor.
Mortal Kombat has an interesting, if complicated example with the character of Kano. In the video game his character was supposed to be of Japanese/American decent, but for the film his character was played by the white, Australian accented Trevor Goddard. Unfortunately Goddard was a Brit who only pretended to be an Australian in the belief that it would further his acting career, and his fake Australian accent makes Kano sound more like some sort of iffy Cockney. Thus not only did the character have a fake nationality but the man portraying him did as well. If that wasn't enough, the game developers liked Goddard's performance so much that they eventually decided to Retcon the character to be wholly Australian, but since the actor's nationality was fake it meant that the character's still was too.
Egyptian-Lebanese Omar Sharif had a hard-time finding suitable roles in Hollywood. Among others, he played:
A Spaniard in Behold a Pale Horse
Genghis Khan in Genghis Khan
The King of Armenia in Fall of the Roman Empire
A Russian in Doctor Zhivago
A Serbian in The Yellow Rolls-Royce
An Arab in Lawrence of Arabia
A Russian in Doctor Zhivago (Omar Sharif's brother, at that)
An Indian in A Passage to India
Genghis Khan is rarely played by an actual Mongol in movies. He has been played by an Egyptian (Omar Shariff), an American (John Wayne), and a Japanese (Tananobu Asano), among others.
Super Troopers has Brian Cox (Scottish) play Captain John O'Hagan of the Vermont Highway Patrol , an American of Irish descent, based on his last name and his catch phrase being "I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet" in a fake Irish accent. The catch phrase and the accent are later mocked by Farva near the end of the film.
One of the Running Gags in the film is the fact that no one can quite figure out Ramathorn's ethnicity, if only by the process of elimination, due to him being Ambiguously Brown (he's not black, Mexican, or Arab). The actor Jay Chandrasekhar is actually American of Tamil descent.
British actor Mark Strong, who is of Austrian and Italian descent, is often cast in Middle Eastern roles, playing an Iranian in Syriana, a Jordanian in Body of Lies, and an Arab in Black Gold.
Omar Sharif and Keenan Wynn as Mexicans, and Julie Newmar and Ted Cassidy as Apaches in Mackenna's Gold .
Almost everyone in Ever After , Hugo and In Secret is British playing a French character. The exceptions are Americans and other non-Brits playing French characters with English accents like Drew Barrymore in the first, Chloe Grace Moretz in the second, and Elizabeth Olsen , Jessica Lange and Oscar Isaac (born in Guatemala to Guatemalan and Cuban parents) in the third - the fake nationality triple play.
Hugo lead actor Asa Butterfield is English and has played a German , a Frenchman and an American before his fifteenth birthday* Based on filming dates, with Ender's getting 18 months' post-production. Kid's gunning for Christian Bale's record.
In 21 and Over, the Korean-American Justin Chon plays the Chinese-American Jeff Chang. Furthermore, the version released in China changes him from an American-born Chinese to a Chinese-born exchange student.
Japanese-American actor Sessue Hayakawa
was early Hollywood's go-to guy for any ethnic minority. He was offered roles as Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation have quite a few (given they went from "real American heroes" to multinational, not surprising):
Both Jonathan Pryce (Welsh) and Sienna Miller (English, born in NYC) are Fake American (the President of the US and Anna Lewis/ The Baroness ).
Snake-Eyes is American but is played by the Scottish Ray Park.
Lee Byung-Hun is a Korean actor playing the Japanese Storm Shadow. As a boy, he's played by a Chinese-American, Brandon Soo Hoo (who also played a Vietnamese drug lord in Tropic Thunder ).
The possibly European Zartan is played by the already mentioned South African actor Arnold Vosloo.
French actress Elodie Yung plays the Japanese Jinx.
The Irish Ray Stevenson plays a Southern-American, Firefly.
In Pacific Rim , Max Martini (American) and Robert Kazinsky (British) portray Hercules and Chuck Hanson, the Australian pilots of Striker Eureka. American Raleigh Becket is portrayed by the British Charlie Hunnam.
The Chinese Wei triplets are played by the Vietnamese Luu triplets.
Robert Maillet and Heather Doersken (both Canadian) play the Russian pilots Aleksis and Sasha Kaidanovsky.
Newt and Hermann (both German) are played by an American (Charlie Day) and a Brit (Burn Gorman but born in the states)
In The Heat Kaitlin Olson cameos as Tatiana, a Bulgarian prostitute.
In the 1982 film version of Annie , Trinidadian actor/choreographer Geoffrey Holder played Warbucks' Indian bodyguard Punjab.
The Clint Eastwood - Charlie Sheen vehicle The Rookie cast Puerto Rican Raul Julia and Brazilian Sonia Braga as Germans. To repeat, the Clint Eastwood-Charlie Sheen vehicle The Rookie cast Puerto Rican Raul Julia and Brazilian Sonia Braga as Germans .
The Damned provides one of the more extreme examples. While a few of the main cast (Helmut Griem, Albrecht Schoenthals, Rene Koldehoff) are German, most are a bizarrely eclectic mix of nationalities. Most speaking English in their native accents, at that!
Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling (English);
Helmut Berger (Austrian);
Umberto Orsini and Nora Ricci (Italian);
Renaud Varley (French);
Florinda Balkan (Brazilian);
John Frederick (American)
Dolph Lundgren is Swedish, but has played mostly Americans as well as a couple of Russians (in Rocky IV and Red Scorpion ) and a German (in The Expendables ).
Cinema Paradiso has three French actors playing Italian characters - including star Philippe Noiret as Alfredo, as well and Jacques Perrin and Brigitte Fossey as the adult Salvatore and Elena.
A lot of the cast of Into the Storm (2009) . Brendan Gleeson is an Irishman portraying the Englishman Churchill, the actor who portrays FDR is actually Canadian, the King of England is portrayed by Iain Glein, a Scot, India-born Englishman Ismay is portrayed by a Welshman, and Clement Attlee is played by another Scot.
Averted in Godzilla (2014) . Alongside Serizawa, the power plant workers, Ford Brody's teacher, the teenage Yanki boy, his parents, and the boy (who Ford Brody bonds with in the train scenes) and his parents are all actually Japanese. Played straight with Aaron Taylor-Johnson himself, who is from England.
West Side Story : Maria is a Puerto Rican character. The folks in charge of casting looked at the Ukrainian Natalie Wood and said, "Eh, close enough." Maria's brother, Bernardo, is played by George Chakiris, a Greek-American.
In the live-action adaptation of the life of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas , the titular character is played by the Spaniard actor Oscar Jaenada. Keep in mind Cantinflas in Real Life spoke with a very thick lower-class accent, and even Mexicans themselves struggles on imitate that kind of accent, but Jaenada himself manage to pull a really good accent anyways. For a better analogy for English-speaking audiences, it's like a classical British actor trying to imitate the stereotypical American ebonics accent.
Milla Jovovich , Ukraine-born but raised in the USA, identifies as Ukrainian and American. She's played mostly Americans, the very occasional Russian, and people who are French (The Messenger: The Story Of Joan Of Arc, The Three Musketeers and an episode of Married... with Children ).
Nastassja Kinski (German) has played people who are Italian (Stay As You Are, Unfaithfully Yours), English (Tess, To The Devil... A Daughter), Polish (The Claim), French (Les Liaisons dangereuses), American (many examples) and Russian-pretending-to-be-American (Terminal Velocity). Confusingly, she once played an American in a German movie (Passion Flower Hotel)!
The Princess Bride :
Mandy Patinkin , who plays Inigo Montoya, is American, not Spanish.
Although it's never stated in the movie, in the book Fezzik is Turkish. Andrï¿½ the Giant , who plays him, is actually French.
Wallace Shawn (Vizzini) is not actually Sicilian.
In the 1989 movie Hellgate, set in California but shot in South Africa, Ron Palillo is the only actual American in the cast.
In Paddington , the Peruvian bears are voiced by the English Ben Whishaw , Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon. The English villain is played by Australian Nicole Kidman . The German Mr Gruber is played by English Jim Broadbent. Scottish Peter Capaldi and English Julie Walters have essentially swapped nationalities.
Under the Skin features the American Scarlett Johansson as an alien disguised as an English woman.
The Love Guru has Canadian Mike Myers as an American, while actual American Jessica Alba plays a Canadian (as do several other cast members).
Avengers: Age of Ultron :
British Andy Serkis is playing South African Ulysses Klaue.
Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are Eastern Europeans, respectively played by American ( Elizabeth Olsen ) and British-Jewish ( Aaron Johnson ) actors.
Noah has Hebrews played by New Zealanders ( Russell Crowe and Marton Csokas), Englanders ( Emma Watson , Ray Winstone and Douglas Booth), a Welshman ( Anthony Hopkins ), Americans ( Jennifer Connelly , Logan Lerman , Madison Davenportnote the ill-fated Na'el and Finn Witrocknote the young version of Winstone) and at least one Canadian (Dakota Goyonote the young Crowe). Several of them, notably the American actors, go for a fake nationality triple by donning English accents.
In Jupiter Ascending , the very Irish Maria Doyle Kennedy plays Jupiter's mom, a Russian immigrant.
A great deal of the major or supporting characters in Mortdecai are played by someone not from the same country as them.
Spinoza, apparently a Frenchman, is played by Welsh actor Pal Whitehouse.
Emil Strago is definitely not an Australian, but his actor, Jonny Pasvolsky, is.
Hong Kong gangster Fang Fat is played by Phillipine actor Junix Inocian.
Notably averted in Inglorious Basterds , in which every character with a speaking role is played by an actor of the correct nationality.
In 1979's Arabian Edventure , is even more lacking in actual Arabs in main (or any) roles than Persia The Sands Of Time '', with the likes of Milo O'Shea, Christopher Lee , Pter Chushing (!) Oliver Tobias, Emma Samms, Mickey Rooney (!!), Shane "Scott Tracy" Rimmer, freaking John Ratzenberger in the cast.
Jamie Bamber , a Londoner of American and Irish ancestry, plays an Australian as the titular John Doe: Vigilante.
Dennis Haysbert, an African-American actor known for his roles in 24 and The Unit , played the Cuban character Pedro Cerrano in the Major League movies.
In Deadly Sisters, based on a pair sisters found guilty of killing their mother , casts American Abigail Breslin and English ( not always that well hidden ) Georgie Henley as Canadians.
Holocaust 2000 : The Israeli Sara Golan is played by Italian actress Agostina Belli.
In Star Trek Into Darkness , Khan is played by the white British Benedict Cumberbatch .
Chicago-born Walter Koenig, son of two Russian Jews, as Russian Pavel Chekov.
To be fair, Koenig is of Russian descent. The v/w switch was inspired by his father who had difficulty pronouncing these. But the realistic Russian accent he first used was deemed "not strong enough" by Roddenberry, who instructed Koenig to deliberately ham up his accent as much as possible.
Star Trek: The Original Series has, in addition to the aforementioned Chekov, a Canadian (William Shatner) playing an American (James T. Kirk), another Canadian (James Doohan) playing a Scotsman (Scotty), an American (Nichelle Nichols) playing an African (Uhura), and a Japanese-American (George Takei) playing a non-Japanese Asian-American (Sulu). The only regular character portrayed by an actor of the same nationality was McCoy, a U.S. Southerner played by a Georgia-born actor with a slight-but-legit Southern accent (DeForest Kelley).
Star Trek: The Next Generation has an Englishman (Patrick Stewart) playing a Frenchman (Picard), an American (LeVar Burton) playing an African (Geordi La Forge ), and another American (Denise Crosby) playing someone of Ukrainian descent (Yar). Admittedly, Yar was not Earth-born; she was born and raised on a human colony on a completely different planet. LaForge's actual origins are deliberately vague—he's a Military Brat whose parents moved wherever Starfleet sent them. All we know for sure is that his mother was in Africa when he was born.
The post-Nemesis Expanded Universe puts Zefram Cochrane High School (as LaForge mentioned in First Contact) in Mogadishu, Somalia. Yes, that Mogadishu. It must be better in the 24th century...
Enterprise has a Korean-American (Linda Park) playing a Japanese woman (Hoshi). But in general, the later series were more accurate, with human characters either played by actors of appropriate nationality, or being from worlds other than Earth.
Spoofed in All That with one of Kenan Thompson's characters who is a black man in a blonde wig with a Scottish accent who claims to be Japanese. When asked why he has a Scottish accent, he answers "I don't know. It's been freakin' me out for years!"
Lost has Briton (of Indian descent) Naveen Andrews as Iraqi Sayid Jarrah, New Zealander Alan Dale as the British Charles Widmore, and 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, but at least he's half-Russian and speaks the language. Nigerian Eko is played by British actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje , but this is justified since his parents are Nigerian and he does the accent right for once. Similarly, Korean-born American Daniel Dae Kim plays a Korean...who can't speak English at first (ironically, he had to be taught Korean by his on-screen wife Yunjin Kin, similar to how in-character Sun teaches English to Jin).
The third episode of Sherlock has British actress Haydn Gwynne playing a Czech women. Gwynne is fluent in French and Italian, so she often plays different nationalities.
Carlo Rota, a British-born actor of Italian ancestry, plays the Lebanese Yasir Hamoudi in Little Mosque on the Prairie (note that on 24 Rota plays Morris O'Brian, whose ethnicity has not been specified but is likely Irish, and on an episode of This is Wonderland he played an Italian hotdog vendor).
The Israeli Ziva David is played by Cote de Pablo, whose parentage is Chilean.
For that matter, Ari the Big Bad is played by Rudolf Martin, a German.
And American (of Irish and Italian ancestry) Armand Assante as Frenchman Rene Benoit, a.k.a. La Grenouille. ( But then, France is between Ireland and Italy, so... )
Hispanic Michael Trevino plays the white Tyler Lockwood who is descended from Native Americans on The Vampire Diaries
Also neither Paul Wesley or Ian Somerhalder who play the Italian-American Salvatores have any Italian in them and none of the actors who play the Originals have any Scandinavian ancestry, except for Riley Voelkel
Betty's father in Ugly Betty is Mexican , but the actor who played him, Tony Plana, is Cuban. Her extended family from the episode "A Tree Grows in Guadalajara" 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 a horrific supposed Australian accent. To an actual Australian, it sounds like a strangled mix of South African, Irish and New Zealand accents using occasional Australian words.
Played by Canadian American Matt Frewer, best known as Max Headroom .
Briton 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 in Jeeves and Wooster .
The "Wooster" accent is also the accent he used for the extremely dim Prince of Wales in Blackadder III. In fact, the BBC impersonation show Dead Ringers played with the idea of Hugh Laurie doing House - in his Prince Regent accent from Blackadder. A second sketch had him playing the Prince Regent - but in Gregory House's American accent.
It's possible to find the occasional Brit complaining about Hugh Laurie's "horribly fake" American accent on House, though it sounds perfectly fine to people who are actually from the US (this is probably due to the fact they know he's not American, so his accent must be fake, right?). Word of God says that one of the producers was unfamiliar with Laurie and had been complaining about all the foreign actors being suggested for the part; when he heard Laurie's audition tape, he said something along the lines of "There, that's what I want, an American actor!"
SF Debris humorously lampshades this tropes in his review of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the quote and video above where Brit Patrick Stewart plays Frenchman Jean-Luc Picard, with his own British accent .
The British accent is at least a decent second choice. A Frenchman who speaks English completely fluently will tend to sound British, as that's the accent taught in French schools. For that matter, there's no real reason to suppose that a French accent of 200 years in the future would sound anything like a French accent of today.
Stewart spoke French in just one episode of the entire series, which was passable but of course English-accented.
Kato in various adaptations of The Green Hornet has always been Filipino but has never been played by one. The first radio actor to voice the role was apparently Japanese (Raymond Hayashi), American Roland Parker voiced him for most of the series run, 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 played by Chinese-American 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.
German actor Horst Buchholz played a Polish man very convincingly in Tiger Bay - his accent only slipped in a single scene.
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 Scoopl , 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.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel used this, most obviously with Americans David Boreanaz , James Marsters , Juliet Landau and Alexis Denisof playing the Irish Angel and English Spike, Drusilla, and Wesley respectively.
The California-born Marsters took this to an extreme in the Buffy episode "Doomed" (4x11). Playing the British vampire Spike, he replicates a Brit's very poor imitation of an American accent when Spike tries to change his speech to avoid detection by the vampire-capturing Initiative. This rather remarkable feat can be considered the linguistic equivalent of "chicken-fried chicken": chicken pretending to be cube steak pretending to be chicken.
In Boreanaz's case his character's nationality wasn't revealed until two seasons in, and he has some Irish ancestry. His Irish accent in flashbacks was rather poor, so he didn't bother using the accent when Angel was temporarily reverted to his teenage personality in one episode.
for some of the natter about how the American-born Denisof's American accent sounds fake and put-on.
On Mash , Asians of every nationality and descent were used to play the native Koreans.
In the later part of that series, Korea itself was cast to play Vietnam .
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 Oskar Homolka (Austrian with a Czech surname).
Seinfeld featured a Finnish character... using a Russian accentnote Despite the geographical proximity and shared history, Finnish sounds nothing like Russian: even something like Spanish or Japanese or Turkish would actually be closer (though if you want the best wrong Finnish accent try Hungarian which sounds surprisingly similar (Finnish and Hungarian are related, yes, but only as much as English and Russian are related: the similarities are mostly coincidental)).
Hogan's Heroes is actually a surprisingly complete aversion. Of the main cast, which included French, British, American and German characters, only Sgt. Shultz was representing a different country-he was Austrian.
In the time the series is set, Austria wasn't exactly "a different country"-it had been annexed by Germany.
In Fawlty Towers , Manuel, who's from Barcelona, is played by a German-born British actor.
Who is also Jewish, and in fact escaped Germany right after Kristallnacht.
The "American" in the Waldorf Salad was a Canadian actor that made a career of being the token North American on British shows.
Swedish actress Helena Mattsson was cast as a Russian gold-digger on Desperate Housewives .
Daniel Davis of Arkansas has made a career playing proper Brits, most notably on The Nanny . According to his IMDb profile, during the run of that series viewers would write in saying that his castmate Charles Shaughnessy (who actually is British) should take lessons from Davis on how to do a proper British accent!
24 has produced several examples:
The above-mentioned Vosloo as Habib Marwan, a terrorist Big Bad of Turkish origin.
British-Sudanese actor Alexander Siddig played Hamri al-Assad, a presumably Lebanese terrorist mastermind turned Atoner .
Sean Majumder played an Arab terrorist on the show, despite being half East Indian and half Newfie.
In a particularly jarring example, American Dennis Hopper played Big Bad Victor Drazen, a Serbian warlord.
Don't forget Indian-American actor Kal Penn playing an Arab of indeterminate origin.
Aki Avni, an Israeli, plays an Arab terrorist. For about twelve seconds.
And Jack Bauer is played by a Canadian actor of British ancestry. Damn it!!!
Anil Kapoor, a Bollywood (Indian) superstar, is playing a character of presumably Iranian origin, though not a terrorist, but a foreign President.
Australian John Noble played a minor antagonist on the series who was Russian.
Australian actor Nick Jameson also played a Russian character: Yuri Suvarov, the president of the country.
Peter Wingfield played David Emerson, a bad guy from the African nation of "Sangala," without his native-born Welsh accent. (He has also used, with varying degrees of success, an Irish accent on "NCIS:LA" and Russian on an episode of "Endgame".)
American Richard Basehart portrayed a British stage actor on an episode of Columbo. To balance it out, British Nicol Williamson portrayed an American doctor on a later episode.
New Yorker Bernie Kopell was over-the-top German villain Siegfried on Get Smart .
The Man in the High Castle features Americans Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Trade Minister Tagomi), Joel de la Fuente (Inspector Kido), and Louis Ozawa Changchien (Kasoura) as Japanese characters. Danish Carsten Norgaard plays the German Rudolph Wegener.
Khigh Dhiegh made a career out of playing "yellow peril" Asian villains, like Yen Lo in The Manchurian Candidate and Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-O . In real life, he founded the Taoist Institute in Hollywood. But he was born Kenneth Dickerson in New Jersey, of mixed Anglo and North African/Arab heritage, with no trace of East Asian-ness.
The True Jackson movie has an actor sloppily juggling an American and Scottish accent...while playing a Frenchman.
NUMB3RS features Amita Ramanujan - a Tamil character played by a Rajput actress. More egregious than it sounds, since the two groups look significantly different.
Plus Navi Rawat (the actress) is half-German...and the actors who play her parents look nothing alike.
Power Rangers RPM has a New Zealander playing the extremely Scottish Flynn McAlisteir. He made a game effort on the accent, at least. Not to mention the full cast of Fake Americans in every season since 2003.
Now that Saban has the series back, Americans are playing the Rangers again, though filming's still taking place in New Zealand and there will probably still be some Fake Americans involved.
Power Rangers Samurai has the sort-of Mexican Antonio played by an American actor.
Subverted in an episode of the Ellery Queen TV series, in which an Indian man is obviously played by a white guy with makeup. It turns out that, in-universe, he is a white guy in makeup playing an Indian.
In Season 1 of The Closer , Marina Sirtis
, of Deanna Troi fame, plays an Iranian woman. Though Greek, she plays a sleuth of Middle Eastern and Levant characters.
Margaret Cho 's All-American Girl did this in spades: Margaret Cho was the only Korean-American in the main cast of the show. The actress playing the grandmother (Amy Hill) was Japanese-American, as was father Clyde Kusatsu; mother Jodi Long and brother B.D. Wong were Chinese-American.
In Rescue Me , African-American Daniel Sunjata plays the Puerto Rican Franco Rivera.
The cast of 'Allo 'Allo! is made up of dozens of Englishmen playing Frenchmen, Germans, Austrians, Italians and Swedes. Only three characters in the show are British. Despite that, everyone talks English, but they pretend they can't understand each other and speak with different accents.
In a very early episode of The Saint , Simon Templar has to rescue a kidnapped American girl in Rome. Said girl, played by English actress Sally Bazely, is the definition of Not Even Bothering with the Accent .
On Community Abed and his dad are Arab-Americans: Danny Pudi (Abed) is half-Indian and half-Polish (and grew up speaking Polish), while Iqbal Theba (Abed's dad) is Pakistani. The Arabic they speak, however, is real.
Señor Chang, a.k.a. El Tigre Chino ("The Chinese Tiger"), is played by Korean-American actor Ken Jeong.
In Mission: Impossible , Leonard Nimoy, as the Master of Disguise , went undercover as a Japanese person and did kabuki
.
And as The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier pointed out, when he disguised himself as the villain (played by Wo Fat himself, Khigh Dheigh) he somehow became several inches shorter...
On Ringer Henry's American wife Gemma is - well, was - played by British actress Tara Summers. Averted on the same show by Ioan Gruffudd and Jaime Murray, however, who do indeed play Brits.
Adelai Niska on Firefly , a crime boss of indeterminate Eastern European ethnicity ( though he tells his henchman to cut off Mal's ear in Czech
), is played by New Yorker Michael Fairman.
In 30 Rock , Fred Armisen guest-stars as Liz's Middle Eastern neighbor whom she immediately suspects is a terrorist. He just wants to participate in The Amazing Race .