Why Brits get top billing in US TV drama
Earlier this year when Ruth Wilson took to the stage in Beverly Hills to collect her best actress Golden Globe, the audience heartily cheered. The 33-year-old had been universally praised for her harrowing role in the US TV series The Affair, as a waitress from New York state grieving for her son.
But when Wilson started her acceptance speech, jaws dropped in astonishment. Her broad, Yankee accent had gone, replaced by completely different, pure British tones. The toast of Hollywood was, it transpired, a Surrey girl.
Wilson is very far from alone as a British actress putting her US rivals in the shade, on their home turf.
Transatlantic TV blockbusters could be filled with home-grown talent, but instead casting agents and producers are rejecting US actresses, in favour of Brits. Take Kelly Reilly, 37, who’s abandoned her English accent to play a mob boss’s wife in the second series of the popular crime drama True Detective.
Or Archie Panjabi, 42, from Edgware, north London, who’s just announced – after six years and 112 episodes – that she’s quitting blockbuster law show The Good Wife, in which she played the tough investigator Kalinda Sharma.
Kelly Macdonald, 39, already had a glittering British career in films like Trainspotting and Nanny McPhee, but she’s now also a US household name after replacing her Glaswegian accent with an Irish lilt for her leading role in Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire.
Yorkshire-bred Lena Headey starred as the eponymous heroine in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the Terminator spin-off series. At least she doesn’t have to affect a US accent as Queen Cersei Lannister in HBO’s phenomenon Game of Thrones, which also stars Berkshire public schoolgirl Emilia Clarke, playing Daenerys Targaryen. The horror series Penny
Dreadful has no US actresses in its main cast, instead featuring Brits Billie Piper and Helen McCrory. (Its star is French but as an Anglophile who has lived in London for years, Eva Green might as well be one of ours.)
Londoner Hayley Atwell plays a distinctly more uppercrust, tough-talking Brit in the starring role in Agent Carter, based on the Marvel comic book.
Of course, Hollywood films have long depended on female acting talent from Britain – from Julie Andrews and Elizabeth Taylor to Kate Winslet and Keira Knightley. But the TV phenomenon is relatively new – and incredibly lucrative: the star of a hit US TV series can be paid as much as £18 million a season – sometimes more – and that amounts to roughly seven months’ work. Even a newcomer may earn around £130,000.
“This is definitely a golden time for British actresses in America,” says the casting director Lucinda Syson, whose credits include the upcoming Mission Impossible film and X-Men: First Class.
“It’s been growing for some time now, boosted hugely by series like Downton Abbey and The Tudors, to the lovely point when casting directors can look exactly for who’s right for a role and don’t have to worry at all about nationality.”
According to the US Department of Homeland Security, the last year has seen a 500 per cent increase in the number of approved visa petitions from British actors, actresses and directors looking to work in the entertainment industry.
According to Syson, initially the Brits’ huge advantage was they come slightly cheaper than their US counterparts, though once they’ve made a name, their earning power is limitless. It also helps that they can now be auditioned on Skype, rather than flown to Los Angeles, and their flawless US accents complete the package.
“British actresses grew up with shows like Kojak and Starsky and Hutch, so we’ve tuned into the US accent from a very early age,” Syson says.
More important, however, is their training. “British drama schools are very noseto-the-grindstone. The majority of British actors have worked bloody hard and have a lot of theatrical background, which makes them very unstarry and grounded,” Syson says.
A British agent with several A-list actresses on his books puts it more bluntly. “British actresses punch way above their weight,” he says. “They have far more glamour and style and panache and Americans are totally charmed by their exoticism.
“There are an awful lot of good US actresses but there is also a huge number of smalltown dimwit former beauty queens who take the bus to Los Angeles, get their teeth, t–––– and lips done within half an hour of arriving and think that’s what it takes to be the next Meryl Streep.
“Even the sparkier Americans like Lena Dunham [creator of Girls] don’t have the versatility of a Brit, who’s spent three or four years training to play a wide range of parts.”
Edward Kemp is director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, whose alumnae include Peckham’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste, known here for her recent role in Broadchurch but better known in the US for her seven years on the police TV series Without A Trace. Kemp says such is the clout of British drama schools that over the past six years, the number of Americans auditioning for Rada has more than doubled from 70 a year to 150.
“Rada’s the place they want to come because of all the people they are seeing succeeding on their TV shows,” he says.
The attraction, he says, is the British drama schools’ classical approach, where actors tackle a role by focusing on adjusting voice and posture. In contrast, US drama schools tend to prefer Method acting, as embraced by Marlon Brando, where actors are encouraged to “think” themselves into a character by drawing on personal experiences.
“The technically based British approach used to be slightly sniffed at, but if you know the techniques for transforming yourself into somebody else it’s much easier to play someone quite distant from yourself, than if you’re relying on aspects of your own life,” says Kemp.
It also makes British actresses very reliable. “Filming costs a huge amount of money: you don’t want to have do a shot again and you certainly don’t want to waste time with someone who’s got to think themselves into character for an hour.
“I am often struck by the ability of British-trained actors to make the ludicrous lines in space movies – ‘Moving to warp factor nine in sector Z3337’ – sound like they really know what they’re talking about. I suspect this may be an interesting side effect of fretting over the more obscure lines of Shakespeare and Restoration comedy.”
The downside for many Brits, dreaming of playing Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra at the National, is that TV work can sometimes be relatively unchallenging.
“Television doesn’t give you the visceral thrill of being in front of a live audience,” Kemp says. “One of our former stars who is now a very big name in US TV compared working on a series to working in a glorified version of Tesco’s: you turned up every day, were told what to do, did the job and went home – but you got a very big pay cheque which you wouldn’t get in Tesco’s.”
Or at Stratford. The Equity minimum pay for a West End actor is £518 a week. A leading role in a big TV series might pay between £5,000 and £10,000 a week, but that’s still a fraction of US wages.
“A US series can tie you down for several years, but it can set you up for life financially and afterwards you’ll be considered for huge movie roles,” Kemp says.
“Plus working nights in theatre is tiring, while movie sets are often far-flung and filming schedules erratic. A TV series is the nearest thing in this business to a secure nine-to-five job.”
Happily for his graduates, US producers are lining up to offer them such work. “The biggest problem I have now with casting is availability,” Syson says. “I’ll see someone who’s wonderful but when I check availability I find they’re signed up to a US TV series for six months of every year. Everyone wants our wonderful actresses.”