Australian actors have been putting on different accents for so long, and so undetectably, that one often stumbles upon surprise Aussies in films and shows. Sarah Snook was not the only Australian in Succession, for example; Nate Sofrelli, the political strategist and Shiv’s erstwhile lover, was played by compatriot Ashley Zukerman. Then there’s Geraldine Viswanathan (Thunderbolts*, Drive-Away Dolls), Dichen Lachman (Severance), Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things), Yvonne Strahovski (The Handmaid’s Tale) – the list goes on.

But the reverse – foreign actors convincingly portraying Australians – has been rare; quite often attempts have ended up a jarring melange of cockney, South African and New Zealand English.

But a spate of excellent on-screen Aussie accents suggests the tide may be turning: this year alone we’ve had American Kaitlyn Dever as Australian con artist Belle Gibson in Apple Cider Vinegar, and Cosmo Jarvis’s “painfully good” performance as an Australian criminal in the prison drama Inside. Other recent convincing Aussie accents have come from Andrew Lincoln in the family drama Penguin Bloom (2020), while Rudi Dharmalingam’s accent in the ABC series Wakefield (2021) was so flawless that I didn’t realise until much later that he was English.

What makes the Australian accent so hard to master?

There are several varieties of Australian accent, which linguists have historically categorised as broad (also known as Strine – think Steve Irwin or Paul Hogan), general (Hugh Jackman, Chris Hemsworth), and cultivated (Cate Blanchett).

Because of the variations, it can be difficult to manage what an Australian audience is expecting to hear, says Melbourne-based voice and dialect coach Jenny Kent. As well as working with Dever for Apple Cider Vinegar, Kent trained Dev Patel for his role as Saroo Brierley in Lion (2016), widely considered among the best Australian accents by a foreigner in recent years. She also helped George Mackay in The True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), Caleb Landry Jones in Nitram (2021) and Sean Harris in The Stranger (2022) to nail their Aussie accents.

She usually begins by playing the actor a wider range of examples of Australian accents, so they “can hear the nuance and variety” before they begin exercises. The difficulty for non-Australians is usually finding “where the accent is placed in the mouth”, she says. “Australians don’t move their mouths a great deal, so the tricky part can be walking the tightrope of limited movement in the mouth along with freedom and ease of performance.”

“It’s very flat and back in its placement,” says Gabrielle Rogers, an Australian voice and dialect coach who trained Sigourney Weaver for The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. “It’s so far back in the mouth, it’s like we’re trying to swallow it.”

Another factor that poses difficulty, particularly for Americans, is that the Australian accent is non-rhotic, meaning that the “r” sound is not always pronounced as written, particularly in words ending in “er”. For the word “butcher”, for example, “Americans would say ‘butch-err’ and Brits would say ‘butch-uh’ – they have what we call a neutral schwa [vowel] ending,” Rogers says. Australians use a different vowel sound closer to “butch-ah”, which is “habitually harder to shift because it is so unique”.

Complicating things is that the Australian accent has an “intrusive r”, says Amy Hume, a lecturer in voice at the Victorian College of the Arts. “When a word is not spelt with an r, but it ends in a vowel and the next word starts with a vowel, then an r is pronounced.” She uses the phrase “I saw it” as an example: pronounced “I saw rit” in the Australian accent. Hume often uses the phrase “law and order” as a teaching example, pronounced “law rand ord-ah” in the Australian accent, as opposed to “law and ord-err” in American English.

Then there are our long vowels – think of the famous H2O: Just Add Water line: “No, Cleo”.

“Generally, the length of the vowels in the Australian accent is quite different to, say, an American or British accent, where they tend to be more finite,” Hume says. The word “no”, she has pointed out, is pronounced with either a diphthong (a combination of two vowel sounds in one syllable), starting on “oh” as in “dog” and ending on “oo” as in “put”; or a triphthong, starting on an unstressed “a” as in the end of “sofa”, before the “oh” and “oo”.

Kent says Australian vowels can be “very slippery” – which is why an actor might overshoot sounds like “ay” in “day” or “late”, “eye” in “why” or “might”, and “ow” in “round” or “about”.

Why are foreign actors finally getting Australian accents right?

“It used to be that actors found it very difficult to do the Australian accent,” says Rogers, who points to wider global exposure to the accent through Australian celebrities such as Margot Robbie, Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett and Kylie Minogue.

“Years ago our accent was not necessarily a familiar one, aside from a few prominent voices,” Kent says. “Now it is much easier to hear Australian accents from a broad range of people, all from the convenience of our phones or computers.”

“I also think the awareness is greater now about the time and support an actor needs with a coach to get the accent right,” she adds.

Social media and YouTube has played a significant role in broadening exposure, Hume believes, which she thinks has changed audience expectations. “There is less tolerance for a generalised accent – people want the specifics of a sound,” she says.

Australian-made shows on global streaming platforms, such as Wellmania, Colin from Accounts and Heartbreak High, have found huge audiences internationally – and, of course, Bluey, the juggernaut that was the most streamed TV show in the US last year and is resulting in American children speaking in Australian vernacular.

There is good evidence for the influence of broadcast media: one study found that after watching either a British or American television series daily for a fortnight, teenagers learning English showed pronunciation changes characteristic of the accent they were exposed to. The phenomenon is known as phonetic convergence, where the way people talk becomes more similar to others over time when they engage in social interactions, or even listen passively to speech. Research has shown it is affected by social attitudes, such as how positively people view Australians.

There has also been a shift in drama school training globally, Hume says. Decades ago, students were taught specific accents such as cultivated Australian, received pronunciation, and a general American accent. “Now, it’s about really learning your equipment … having control of the lips, the cheeks, the tongue, flexibility of the jaw, being able to move all the articulators around so that you can take on any oral posture to learn any accent.”

“We have unprecedented access to great Australian dialect work 1746242018 … but dialect coaches have always been there,” Kent points out. “People often recall the [accents] that went astray, but many have gone right.”

Kate Winslet has long been praised as “the queen of Australian accents” for her masterful performances in Holy Smoke! (1999) and The Dressmaker (2015), while Liev Schreiber in Mental (2012) and Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013) are also commended by voice coaches. And despite criticism at the time, Meryl Streep in Evil Angels (1988, released overseas as A Cry in the Dark) was “actually really true to Lindy Chamberlain”, who is a New Zealand-born Australian, Hume says. “That’s an example of the actor and the dialect coach doing really incredible work, but the audience perception being different.”

Is artificial intelligence playing a role too?

In January, Oscar-winning film The Brutalist courted controversy when its editor revealed he had used an AI tool to improve Hungarian dialogue spoken by actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. The film’s director, Brady Corbet, issued a statement clarifying that Brody and Jones had worked with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to “perfect their accents” and that no English dialogue was changed. But the row raised the question: might technology do away with the need for rigorous dialect training?

Not anytime soon, according to Paul Pirola, a sound designer who has used AI voice tools in films he has worked on. No AI is capable yet of changing an actor’s accent wholesale, he says. An individual’s voice can be cloned from high-quality audio, then used to generate audio from text inputs. Known as text-to-speech AI, it can be used to replace the odd line of dialogue – but for it to spit out convincingly accented speech, it must be trained on audio of that same actor speaking with the accent.

There is also speech-to-speech AI, where you can input your speech and have it say the same words in someone else’s voice. But with speech-to-speech, Pirola says, “you can’t change accent. It’s only changing the quality of the voice.”

“It’s all new territory,” he says. “People would be treading cautiously about overusing [AI voice technology].”

For now, at least, dialect coaching remains “a mixture of science and art”, as Rogers puts it. She’s currently developing a documentary about her industry, though, because she fears the human touch may disappear: “I’m such a devotee and, at my age, I’m looking like being the last of this generation of voice teachers. If we are going to press a button and clean it up, then all this incredible physiological work, this legacy, has not been documented.”