We Need To Talk About The Terrible Australian Accents In TV & Movies
The Australian accent is a tricky beast.
That’s especially obvious if you’ve ever heard your friend from overseas do their best “G’day mate”, or if you’ve seen any film where a Hollywood star plays an Aussie.
For every master of disguise who nails our accent, there are two more who butcher it or, at the very least, slip into a Kiwi accent. So because it’s good to confront the things that make you uncomfortable, we’re diving into the worst Australian accents in TV and movies.
Hope you’re ready.
#1 The Australian episode of The Simpsons
[media_embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81FGVh1dj0A[/media_embed]‘Bart vs Australia’ is one of the funniest episodes of The Simpsons, but it butchered Aussie culture including, but not limited to, our accent.
From the high-pitched drawl of Tobias Dundridge to the bartender who mistakes coffee for bee-yah and, like, everything about “chazzwazzers”, the Australian episode of The Simpsons sounds like it’s responsible for a lot of the shitty accents we’ve heard since.
Ahh well, we could never stay mad at something that gave us dollarydoos.
#2 The fake Sydneysiders in The Good Place
Has anyone involved in this show ever heard an Australian speak? The first episodes of season 3 were set in a fake university in Sydney and wow, the accents are wild.
As fabulous as British actress Kirby Howell-Baptiste is as Simone, her Australian accent is so bad that I’m convinced she just watched clips from “Bart vs Australia” five minutes before filming started.
The accents are so bad that viewers were convinced they actually held clues for one of the show’s sneaky twists. Sadly, there was no twist, just bad accents.
me @ the bad Australian accents on s3 of The Good Place https://t.co/8pN3QiG55o
— Sarah Dollard (@snazdoll) September 29, 2018
#3 Zac Efron in Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates
Honestly, I’m a fan of this one because 1) it’s better than the others I’ve heard today and 2) I don’t care what Zac Efron sounds like as long as he’s serving me tequila in a bar.
[media_embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc4okRx52t8[/media_embed]#4 Kate McKinnon in Rough Night
Kate McKinnon’s character in this dark comedy speaks like a demented Venn diagram of Kiwi, cockney and Dutch (I think??) accents.
To add insult to injury, she nails about one word in every second sentence. At one point she says “I don’t know” and has a different accent for every word.
McKinnon told Jimmy Fallon that she taught herself our accent by listening to Australian podcasts. She didn’t say which podcasts, but I assume it was actually just old audio clips from Crocodile Dundee.
[media_embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRrjEHEAgwE[/media_embed]#5 Kate McKinnon again in SNL
Five years before Kate McKinnon singlehandedly created her own Australian accent, she played a legendary Aussie actress in this SNL skit that dragged our culture, cinema and accents to hell.
We also need to talk about how sometimes, when Hollywood does Australia, the best moments are in the background jokes. Things like SNL creating a news segment called “Boomerang Disasters”, the muffin cart in The Good Place being called “We Crumb From A Land Down Under” and the giant Forsters can in The Simpsons are classic take downs of weird Australian culture.
[media_embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5llm2WnLIaA[/media_embed]#6 Josh Lawson in Anchorman 2
If there’s one thing funnier than hearing an American doing an Australian accent, it’s hearing an Australian doing an impression of how Americans think we speak.
Josh Lawson’s first scene is 26 seconds of nonsense that not even we can understand. To be fair, we have been known to yell indiscriminately when someone asks how we are, so Steve Carell nailed his part.
[media_embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Ixz3Uv5Bo[/media_embed]
#7 The hot brothers in Pacific Rim
It’s absurd that this movie has hot Australian brothers and they didn’t cast any two of the Hemsworths.
[media_embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg8NpUL39Yo[/media_embed]#8 Lana Condor and Noah Centineo
To celebrate the release of To All The Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, the folks at Netflix ANZ had Lana Condor and Noah Centineo perform a classic scene from the OG movie in Australian accents.
While their accents are truly terrible, the video is hilarious. One of the highest forms of comedy in this country is roasting people trying and failing to do our accent, so in this way, the American actors nailed it.
Watching Lana Condor say “BBQ” with an Aussie drawl to pull herself out of a Wild West prospector’s accent is iconic and I won’t hear otherwise.
(Lead image: The Good Place / NBC)
