Fake Nationality: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|'''Roscoe W. Chandler:''' I confess! I ''was'' Abie the Fishman!

'''Ravelli:''' Well, how did you get to be Roscoe W. Chandler?

'''Roscoe W. Chandler:''' [[Lampshade Hanging|How did you get to be an Italian?]]

 

When an actor plays a native of a nationality or area other than their own. (Not counting those actors who play an [[Alien Tropes|extraterrestrial]], who are ''never'' from the same place as their character. One would hope.)

 

{{examples}}

* Iron Eyes Cody, the actor who portrayed the "[[Crying Indian]]" in a legendary [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM public service announcement] from the 1970s, made a living portraying Native Americans over the course of seven decades. Despite claiming to be (and living in the fashion of) a Native American, he was in fact an Italian-American born Espera DeCorti.

 

* [[Judge Dredd]]'s landlady/maid ([[Depending on the Writer|it varies sometimes]]) Maria has always talked with a heavy Italian accent, but years later when it was revealed that she had died and left a large inheritance to Dredd, it also turned out that she never really ''was'' Italian and was faking her accent "for some reason" the entire time.

 

* In the 2000 Korean movie ''JSA'', 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 [[Misplaced Accent|accent doesn't]].

** 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.

** African Nyota Uhura in the 2009 [[Star Trek (film)|Star Trek]] reboot.

** Cayman Island native Andrea in ''Haven''.

* [[wikipedia:Yoshiko Ōtaka|Yoshiko Otaka]] (aka Shirley Yamaguchi) made a career under the false identity Li Xianglan, playing the role of a Chinese woman in [http://fyeahasianhistory.tumblr.com/post/6322790557/the-colonial-romance-from-imperial-japan propaganda films]{{Dead link}} in colonial Manchuria. In fact, most people at the time believed she ''was'' Chinese because her grasp of the language was that good.

* [[Edward Furlong]] played a white skinhead in ''[[American History X]]'', when in reality he's actually part Mexican and Native American.

* [[Ron Perlman]] is an American who played French strongman One in the French film ''[[The City of Lost Children]]'', [[Faux Fluency|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]]''.

* [[South Africa]]n actress [[Charlize Theron]] has yet to play a South African character.

* Most non-French film adaptations of ''[[The Three Musketeers (novel)|The Three Musketeers]]'' qualify; ''[[The Three Musketeers (1993 film)|The Three Musketeers 1993]]'' had exactly ''one'' French person in the cast (Julie Delpy), which is still one more than ''[[The Three Musketeers (2011 film)|The Three Musketeers 2011]]'' (and neither of them were even filmed in France, going for Austria and Germany respectively).

* In ''[[Marcel Proust|Time Regained]]'', American [[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.

* ''[[The Manchurian Candidate (novel)|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.

 

 

* ''[[Star Trek]]'' has a lot of these:

** Chicago-born, Lithuanian German-descended Walter Koenig as Russian Pavel Chekov. ([[Chekov's Gun|He's the one with the gun.]])

*** 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. I guess it's better in the 24th century...

** In Boreanaz's case his character's nationality wasn't revealed until two seasons in, while he had been speaking with a basic American accent and his Irish accent in flashbacks was rather poor so he continued to speak with his regular accent.

** See [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0219206/board/thread/67815602?d=90619232&p=1#90619232 here] for some of the natter about how Alexis Denisof's American accent sounds fake and put-on...

** In the later part of that series, Korea ''itself'' was cast [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|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 Oscar Homolka (Austrian).

* 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.

* Ahmad Kahn on ''[[NYC 22]]'' is an Afghan refugee-turned-[[New Meat|NYPD rookie]]. His actor is British of Arab or Persian descent.

 

* This is fairly common in pro wrestling. Many monster foreign heels of the 70's and 80's, such as Ivan Koloff and the original Sheik, were actually North Americans posing as foreigners. In addition, a number of caucasian wrestlers, such as Paul Diamond and Jamie Noble, have posed as orientals wearing masks.

* [[The Iron Sheik]], an Iranian, had a brief run in the early 90's as Col. Mustafa, an Iraqi.

* Also, Mexican wrestler Hunico's new bodyguard/running buddy Camacho is billed from Juarez Mexico, but is played by the Samoan Tevita Fifita.

 

* The title character in ''[[Othello]]'' has been played by a Caucasian (with or without blackface) more often than would make one [http://newsletter.nlb.gov.sg/issue_Oct_nov06/hotvideos/images/q9.JPG comfortable.]{{Dead link}} Do they figure [[Viewers are Morons|no one]] will notice?

** Indeed, this was how it was done in Shakespeare's day. The first black actor to play Othello was in 1825, but don't think just because they went black they never went back - Constantin Stanislavski played him in 1896, Sir [[Laurence Olivier]] in 1964, Paul Scofield in 1980, Anthony Hopkins in 1981.

* In the premiere of ''Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World'', Musa, an Egyptian, was played by an East Indian actor, and Gamila, also Egyptian, was played by a white American actress.

* [[Sound Horizon]] usually does this for their live shows out of necessity. The band is Japanese, but almost all of the [[Rock Opera]] albums are set outside of East Asia (Ancient Greece, 14th century Germany, France, etc). Obviously, it's rather difficult to find German or French performers that can sing live in fluent Japanese, so Japanese people playing Westerners it is.

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Characters and Casting]]

[[Category:Race Tropes]]