Scooped

So I love NPR, but they totally scooped me the other day. I was going to write a blog entry about this conversation I had with my father recently, where I was talking about all the non-U.S. actors doing excellent American accents on TV these days.  Then I heard this on Morning Edition. Although, I did know that Simon Baker was Australian and not Birtish like they said, so Ha!

Also, my research was more complete. For example, they didn't mention Aussie Poppy Montgomery, who's on Without a Trace with Anthony LaPaglia, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who they did talk about. They got Hugh Laurie, Rufus Sewell, Jason O'Mara, and Damian Lewis (who are all super hot, by the way), but they missed nearly as many: Johnny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Ed Westwick, John Nobel, Anna Friel, Yvonne Strahovski, Anna Torv,  Lena Headey (actually they seem to have missed all the women except Jean-Baptiste.  I guess that's what an Oscar nomination gets you).  

So...what's up with this?  I do buy some of the arguments in the NPR story that UK actors are trained, and that there is a place in the theatre for actors who are not "leading man handsome", unlike in the US, so actors are nurtured and allowed to develop.  But what about the Aussies?  There's not really the whole acting-tradition-going-back-to-Shakespeare thing there.

I also wonder why some of these characters can't have their native accent.  I understand in some cases, like O'Mara as an NYC cop, and the various CIA and FBI agents...they generally need to be Americans for plausibility.  But couldn't Sewell be a British scientist consulting for the FBI?  Weswick the scion of an ex-pat family living on the Upper East Side?  Laurie a British doc in a Princeton hospital (Chase works there, and he's an Aussie playing an Aussie)?  

There's...not really a point to this.  I just found it interesting.