An accent is one of the first things an audience notices, and one of the hardest things to fake for two hours. Plenty of Australian performers have built careers in Hollywood by sounding like they grew up in Ohio, Florida or Brooklyn.
The four actors below are a good case study. Each has played American characters often enough, and well enough, that many viewers never think to check where they were born.
Margot Robbie
Robbie was born in Dalby, Queensland, and first became known to Australian audiences on the soap opera Neighbours. Her American breakthrough came in The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013, where she played Naomi Lapaglia with a Brooklyn accent that many viewers assumed was her natural voice.
She kept going from there. She played the title figure in I, Tonya, a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. She also played Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and starred as Barbie in the 2023 film. Across all of them, her American voice rarely draws attention to itself.
Jacob Elordi
Elordi was born in Brisbane. Most viewers first met him through American teen stories, including The Kissing Booth films and, above all, HBO’s Euphoria, where he played the volatile high school athlete Nate Jacobs. The role required a flat, confident American delivery, and it made him a recognizable face in the United States.
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He then took on a real American icon in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, playing Elvis Presley. Elvis is a tricky target because his Southern speech is so widely imitated. Elordi’s version drew attention when the film premiered in 2023, and he did it without leaning on caricature.
Rose Byrne
Byrne grew up in Sydney and had an established Australian career before she moved into American television. On the legal drama Damages, she played Ellen Parsons, a young lawyer, across several seasons in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Her accent held steady through the show’s long, twisting run.
Later work pushed her range further. In Apple TV+’s Physical, she played Sheila Rubin, a housewife in 1980s San Diego, and she was funny as the polished Helen Harris III in Bridesmaids. In 2025 she won the Silver Bear for best leading performance at the Berlin International Film Festival for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, another American role.
Ben Mendelsohn
Mendelsohn was born in Melbourne and was already a familiar name in Australian film before Hollywood came calling. He played the villainous businessman John Daggett in The Dark Knight Rises and the corporate antagonist Sorrento in Ready Player One. Both parts called for American voices.
His most persuasive turn may be Danny Rayburn in the Netflix series Bloodline, a troubled member of a Florida Keys family. The performance won him the Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series in 2016. The role showed that a rough, lived-in American voice could come from someone who grew up half a world away.
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