I Don't Like How You Say With Your Face All Scrunched Up: You're French, Aren't You?

We at the Hollywood Suggestion Box are language nerds. We're almost indecently prejudiced in favor of actors with adorable foreign accents. We believe it to be a sin when an actor with a perfectly lovely Scottish accent, for instance, acts only in American accents. (This is of course no issue for the wonderful Ewan MacGregor, who has a long tradition of playing inexplicably Scottish characters in otherwise run-of-the-mill American settings. Scottish janitor? Check. Jumpy Scottish convenience store robber? Check. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera ...)



But there are a few actors who break the mold. There's a strange alchemy, sometimes, in an accent. Some people are just more appealing when pretending to be from another country. Here are five folks and the accents that make them more appealing than their own:

1) Kevin Kline, French Kiss. Kline's French accent is somehow accurate and over-the-top at the same time. He's undoubtedly hammy, but somehow the French accent makes him sexy too. In his American guise Kline is an Everyman; in French Kiss he's magnetic.

2) James Marsters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Off camera, Marsters is handsome but unmemorable. In his role as Spike, his bleached hair and leather jacket accented by a working-class punk British accent, he steals every scene out from under the rest of the cast. We'd like to ask Joss Whedon to give Marsters a comeback role ... but only if his accent stays on the other side of the pond.

3) Gwyneth Paltrow, Sliding Doors (& many others). She comes off badly in interviews: overly patrician, oblivious to the masses, aloof. But when she's playing British she appears sophisticated, reserved, and even occasionally charming. She made a good start by marrying a Brit; now we'd like to see her fully become one.

4) Hugh Laurie, House. Laurie is immensely talented. His turn in Jeeves and Wooster is brilliantly daffy. But we frankly prefer the Brit as a grizzled, misanthropic doctor on House -- perhaps mostly due to his deep, oddly sexy American accent.

5) Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean. Three words: Captain. Jack. Sparrow. Need we say more? OK, fine. It's not just the rakish pirate angle that draws us in; the timbre of Depp's voice changes when he's playing a Brit. He's smokin' hot anyway, of course, but Jack Sparrow wouldn't be the same without the accent. Savvy?