‘Naur, the dingo’s got my baby!’: The best and worst Aussie accents on screen

If you were to watch Netflix’s new drama series Apple Cider Vinegar with your eyes closed, you might think its lead actress, Kaitlyn Dever, is a true-blue Aussie.

Playing a “true-ish” version of wellness scammer Belle Gibson, Dever expertly conceals her American accent, delivering a ’Strayan performance so convincing it matches her actual Australian co-stars Alycia Debnam-Carey and Aisha Dee.

Of course, mastering the accent didn’t happen overnight. It required months of training, which she underwent with Melbourne-based voice and dialect coach Jenny Kent.

“Kaitlyn has certainly set a new extraordinary benchmark, showing precision and accuracy over six episodes and an enormous amount of dialogue,” she says.

Kent has trained many actors throughout her 25-year career, including Dev Patel, Sean Harris and Julia Ormond. No matter who she’s working with, she finds one piece of advice comes up time and time again: less is more.

Kaitlyn Dever (left) worked with voice coach Jenny Kent (right) for months before filming Apple Cider Vinegar. It paid off.Credit: Netflix

“A good Australian accent is one that an audience doesn’t notice, one that seems effortless,” Kent says. “It takes into account that the vowels can be very simple and not always broad. For example, ‘here’ doesn’t have to turn into ‘hee-yah’, or ‘buy’ doesn’t have to be ‘boy’.”

Another top tip is preparation: “Start preparing early. Listen to a wide variety of Australian speakers. Sometimes, the most well-known Australian voices internationally are not always accents widely used or suitable for a particular role.”

Nailing the Australian twang is a notoriously tough task for many actors. Dever managed to, but she’s one of a rare few. Let’s take a look at some of the best and worst attempts to date – from the masterfully convincing to the downright embarrassing.

Best: Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke! and The Dressmaker

We may as well give Kate Winslet citizenship because she has been mastering the Australian accent since 1999. The British actress debuted her Strine (yes, there’s an official word for it) in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke!, where she played a young Australian woman brought under the influence of a religious guru.

Unlike many international actors, she avoids the trap of turning statements into questions. “There’s a common misconception that Australians finish every sentence with a rising intonation,” Kent says. “This ideally should be used very sparingly, if at all.”

Winslet then perfected her accent in The Dressmaker (2015), reciting iconic lines like “I’m back, you bastards” as if she’d spent every day of her life in Victoria. Speaking to Vogue last year, she said the best Aussie accent is rather soft, and comes from the back of the throat – both tricks she learned from dialect coach Victoria Mielewska.

Best: Dev Patel in Lion

Dev Patel has said he doesn’t have an ear for accents, but that won’t ring true for anyone who has seen Lion. The British actor delivers some of the strongest accent work in cinematic history in Garth Davis’ 2016 film, occasionally even sounding more Aussie than his co-star Nicole Kidman.

According to Kent, who coached Patel for eight months, highly emotional scenes (which are plentiful in Lion) often pose the greatest challenge during accent work.

“Australians don’t move their mouths a great deal in speech, so the difficult step can be walking the tightrope of limited movement in the mouth along with freedom and ease of performance. The vowels can be very tricky. Actors can over-shoot a vowel, especially sounds like ‘ay’ in day or late, ‘eye’ in why, might, and ‘ow’ in round or about.”

Nevertheless, Patel’s accent only seems to improve when emotionally charged.

Best: Caleb Landry Jones in Nitram

Speaking of emotional performances, Caleb Landry Jones blew audiences away with his Aussie drawl in Nitram. Despite having a relatively strong Texan twang in his natural voice, Jones was able to convincingly transform into Port Arthur shooter Martin Bryant, largely thanks to three months of voice coaching with Kent.

According to Nitram’s director Justin Kurzel, Jones also watched reruns of shows like Hey Hey It’s Saturday, Neighbours and Home and Away while in quarantine after arriving in the country (the film was made during the pandemic). And while filming, he only spoke with an Australian accent – even when off camera.

Like Winslet and Patel, Jones learned that going too “big” would simply result in caricature. The secret is in the subtlety.

Worst: Robert Downey jnr in Natural Born Killers

One of the hall-of-fame bad Australian accents.

In some ways, Robert Downey jnr’s ridiculously broad accent in Natural Born Killers (1994) suits his over-the-top TV journalist character. His tendency to exaggerate every vowel is almost disguised by his manic energy. However, it ultimately comes across as a bizarre mash-up imitation of Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee.

Downey jnr somewhat redeemed himself in 2008 when he briefly reattempted the accent in Tropic Thunder, even if he did sound more Russell Crowe than average Aussie.

Worst: John Lithgow in Pitch Perfect 3

Some actors’ voices are simply too iconic to be convincingly transformed. This includes John Lithgow. After all, his lilting American accent is one of the defining elements of 3rd Rock From the Sun.

As Rebel Wilson’s father in Pitch Perfect 3, Lithgow seemingly combines Cockney English, standard British, and (inexplicably) Russian to develop his version of an Australian accent.

He falls into the oh-so-common trap of over-extending all ‘e’ and ‘i’ sounds – “fishes” becomes “feeeshes”, Jessica becomes “Jeeeesica”. It’s almost as if he followed the misguided belief that simply pinching your nose while speaking results in perfect Strine.

Worst: Kirby Howell-Baptiste in The Good Place

There are plenty of non-Australians on TikTok who believe they’ve discovered the perfect strategy to master the Australian accent (the “R-N-R” trick is a particularly popular one). There’s just one hitch: they never actually work. Unfortunately, it appears as if Kirby Howell-Baptiste watched a string of those videos as part of her homework for The Good Place.

As fun as it is hearing her say “naur” over and over, it’s a butchering of the accent. Perhaps we’ve gotten to the point where The Simpsons has parodied our accent so many times that non-Australians now simply believe that’s how we sound.

Up for debate: Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark

Sam Neill and Meryl Streep in a scene from the film A Cry In The Dark, 1988.Credit: Getty Images

The most memorable scene in the 1988 thriller A Cry in the Dark (aka Evil Angels) sees Meryl Streep’s character discover her baby has been taken by a dingo, culminating in the iconic (or notorious) line “the dingo’s got my baby”. Though everyone agrees it’s a tense and upsetting scene, few can settle on the effectiveness of Streep’s Strine.

Streep defenders argue it’s one of the best examples of accent work to date, especially considering she was playing Lindy Chamberlain – who lived in Australia but was born in New Zealand. A review from the LA Times went so far as to describe her accent as “so understated and natural that it’s difficult to believe she wasn’t born within sight of a kangaroo or two”.

Others argue her accent was strained – perhaps closer to a South African English accent (words like “backpack”, “six-pack” and “cracked” seem to have that slight twinge typical of Afrikaans). Journalist Marc Fennell described it as “more of an impression than an interpretation”.

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