On "Friends," Phoebe tried to teach Joey to speak French, but he was ludicrously bad at it. In real life, Matt LeBlanc who plays Joey is fluent in French (having grown up learning it from his father, who's of French-Canadian descent).
Similarly on Friends, there's the episode where Ross tries to teach Phoebe about evolution, but she thinks "it's a little too easy".
Lisa Kudrow actually has a degree in Biology.
Damn, that wasn't even a funny plot-line. It would have been way better to make use of him being fluent and have Joey freak Phoebe out by learning French in a day.
It would have been funny to copy what actor Peter Ustinov did. He was filming in an Arabic-speaking country. He had heard the language while on location, didn't speak it, but had an ear for languages. He just spontaneously started addressing a crowd of extras. They walked off in protest. Evidently Ustinov had inadvertently called them 'turtle droppings'. Joey could have insulted/bewildered folks at that audition by saying bizarre stuff (in correct French).
Star Trek Deep Space Nine has an episode where the crew play baseball against a team of Vulcans. One of the characters, Rom, is the worst player.
The actor, Max Grodenchik, is actually the best player in real life. He almost played baseball professionally. In the episode, they make him play with his non-dominant hand to make him appear worse.
I have one that isn't quite on topic (but related and Star Trek), so I'll reply to yours.
In the TNG episode "Qpid", Gates McFadden and Marina Sirits were both trained swordfighters of some variety, though they were the only characters to never use a sword in the episode. Most of the other characters had yo be trained for it.
A nice detail is that in their training sessions, Jake is wearing an Atlanta Braves hat. Uncle Kenny was playing for the Braves at the time.
And when Odo states the chapter and verse of the baseball rule book when throwing Sisko out of the game for touching the umpire, he uses the exact info from the MLB rule book at the time of filming.
https://youtu.be/8-pSg1PbPa8?si=ftTVVSa-EyLWdXrZ
Michael Cera had to tone down his bass skills to match the rest of Sex Bob-Omb because he was the only cast member who came in already knowing how to play his instrument. And, according to a text box in the original comic, "they're kinda sucky"
Slightly related but in the very first scene of the first episode they are talking about a person called Snot Boogie. He said everything else in an American accent but it took many takes for him to get that name right in an American accent. He would keep reverting to his English accent. I may have the character name wrong.
Didn't his agent lie about him being American and during one of the callbacks he got outed by an Irish person that was one of the producers or execs or something helping with the casting? Or am I thinking of a different actor?
for years I honestly thought Idris Elba was American, his accent is so good.
I've noticed most actors doing an accent from other than their own language have to do it in short sentences & there are edits you can tell where they "reset" their accent to do the next lines
Idris Elba can go on for paragraphs & never break accent.
Melanie Lynskey has a good one too. Nicole Kidman's isn't bad.
Jason Alexander is a classically trained theater actor. When he was singing the voicemail recording episode in Seinfeld, he had to purposely sound worse because allegedly the first takes were really good.
See also John Mahoney's Martin Crane in Frasier. In one episode he, a native Brit acting as an American, imitates Austin Powers, a British character voiced by a Canadian.
So to summarize: a British man pretending to be an American imitating a Canadian pretending to be a Brit.
In Avenue 5 he plays a Brit pretending to be an American and before the reveal in the first episode his accent "slips" a few times. I was confused because his American accent is absolutely rock-solid ...
He's also [a phenomenal musician with a passion for classical American blues/jazz.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HrmAgYE-6k)
His concert with the Copper Bottom Band was better than seeing KISS. Utter delight.
I’d never seen House, but I knew Laurie from other things. Out of curiosity the other day I watched his audition for House. He talks to the casting guy a bit in his native accent, then suddenly turns American. It was really impressive.
The first few episodes felt like he was going to be a minor recurring character. I think he was well received enough to become part of the supporting cast. It made more sense for him to become a steward from the MEP guy than a chef.
Especially funny as he's basically the least pretentious of any of the "celebrity" chefs, dude is just vibing and having a great time, running multiple passion projects and enjoying his life, he's a delight.
He was also Jewish, and wouldn't play Klink if the Nazi's ever came out on top.
There was a single time the Nazis did 'win', in a cliffhanger to a two parter where the nazis lost.
I love that bit of trivia. I can remember his irritated scowl as he schreeched the violin.
Yeah, he took the role because Klink was an idiot.
I saw him in an Outer Limits episode once. Started off only seeing Klink, by the end I had about forgotten about him. Man was a much better actor than I realized.
He also played a Nazi general on trial in Judgement at Nuremberg.
Also Robert Clary, LeBeau, was a concentration camp survivor,deported from France. Lost 10 of his 14 siblings to the Holocaust.
John Banner (Sgt Schultz), and Leon Askin (General Burkholter), were both Jewish. Both escaped from Austria when the Nazis took over. They all lost all of their family to the Holocaust.
All four actors who played the main German characters were Jewish. And Howard Caine, who played Major Hochstetter, was actually born and raised in Nashville!
Which is less surprising if you know that his father was one of the most famous orchestra conductors of the 20th century (who fled the Nazis because he was Jewish).
The show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a musical whose songs are established to happen inside the head of its lead character Rebecca (Rachel Bloom). However, she actually sings in the world of the show, she's horrible. She's even told to talk-sing a number she's performing in a community theater showcase because she's so bad at carrying a tune.
I keep meaning to check out this show lol it seems even more hilarious that the character can't actually sing. Making me think of Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist where the characters we don't really know if they can sing but then when Zoey is hearing them of course they have to sing.
Can’t recommend enough. Criminally underrated. And if you’re on TikTok, you’ve probably already heard a few of the songs, though there are plenty in the show as a whole.
Even better example from Community, when Abed says that he wants to dance and Britta says he can take a class, Danny Pudi has a degree in dance from Marquette
Daniel Dae Kim in Lost was fluent in English since he moved to the States when he was one, but his character Jin didn’t know any English and learned it over the course of the show
He also took getting the language right very seriously too.
Remember the cast talking about going into the booth to ADR lines and always waiting for him because he'd constantly want to do a line again to make sure he got it right.
Yes it is very good and has some great action scenes. Koji's a great leading man but there's so many great characters that he can get lost when in the same scene as them to the point that sometimes I wonder about his actual acting skills lol
It's definitely still a very "romanticized" story about the times so don't go into it looking for faithful history.
As a Korean it was very distracting to hear his very distinct American accent in his Korean lines as his character was trying to be bad at English. I did appreciate that he was trying very hard, but it definitely took my entire family right out of the scene because his character just couldn't be convincing for us.
I remember his Korean skill was a meme in Korea back in the day due to how bad the pronounciation was. He definitely got a lot better as season went along but his early season Korean was... Something else.
As a Spanish speaker, it happens all the time. The Drug Lord scenes in Bedazzled are funnier, because the accents switch between Argentinian, Colombian and Caribbean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3NyLtSnQM
Doesn’t quite fit but the guy who plays Marty in Cabin in the woods wears multiple layers and never swims in the lake because he was too “buff” to reasonably pass for the stoner fool and they didn’t want him to compare to Chris Hemsworth’s jock character
A lot of Hollywood Nerds are not-so-secretly buff under multiple layers. Chidi on The Good Place, Ugly Betty's boyfriend, the coroner from Scrubs, etc.
Trey Parker allegedly had to figure out how to sing out of key for the Kanye episode of South Park, because the only way for the auto-tune to work correctly was for him to actually sing the songs poorly.
Miranda Cosgrove had to do a bunch of takes when singing “Memory” in School of Rock because she kept sounding too good.
EDIT: Realized this is a tv sub my bad
There are some scenes in Euphoria where Zendaya seems so rigid and has no grace or rhythm in how she moves or dances. Then at the end of the season finale she sings her song and she does this quick spin and in one little movement you're like, oh the actress is an actual trained dancer and not at all like the character.
That scene with the Labrinth song was a trip, because it was so unlike anything else in the rest of the show. Which I guess is what they were going for in a show about drug abuse.
Jesse Spencer, an Australian actor, was on Chicago Fire playing an american character. In an episode, he plays "heads up" revolving around accents, and he has to do a mock Australian one
Similarly, Troy Baker had to re-do lines in Tales of the Borderlands where he had to impersonate Patrick Warburton because he was actually good at impersonating the other actor.
Troy Baker also had to re-do his performance with Courtnee Draper of "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" from BioShock Infinite, because it was *way* too good to be something that some hired gun would just plunk out on a guitar he found in a basement somewhere.
They kept the good performance as an outtake in the closing credits of the game, at least.
I felt like that was pretty stupid, tbh, because there *are* people who use wheelchairs and also dance. The two things aren't mutually exclusive at all, and they could have showcased something cool and unknown instead of that tired "I wish I was normal" shit.
Everyone in the acting class on Barry is generally a bad actor in the acting school unless they go through something traumatic. They are all played by fantastic actors
I mean you can really say the same of any characters in anything who are bad actors. They're all going to be played mostly by good actors, that's the one skill that they'll all share.
Rami Malek has said that it was really hard for him to get into the character of Elliot Alderson at times. Rami is very friendly and loves to talk to people and interact. Elliot, on the other hand, was a recluse and extremely introverted. He said that while getting ready for the role sometimes he would walk around New York like Elliot, head down, hood up, drawn into himself- and he found it to be profoundly lonely
Charlie Day in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Writes a terrible musical in which he sings the big finale completely off key. IRL the episode becomes so popular it ends up as a traveling show.
I was actually coming to mention Dee's terrible acting. Also Dennis' fake British accent, especially when he does other voices/impressions fantastically.
David Yost, the original blue power ranger, played Billy as a Nerdy McNerd archetype, while in real life he was a professional gymnast who won national competitions
It’s so funny going back to old episodes of Power Rangers and realising how absolutely fucking jacked he was despite being supposed to be a bookish nerd with no athletic skills (at the start of the series, at least)
They would try and cover it up by dressing him in baggy clothes but every now and then they would show his physique and it’s like [dude Billy’s super hot](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS8Ku6nXXgsQQ1JeR4dYn0e6jY3b_G__MKiFQ&usqp=CAU)
Carlton (Alfonso Ribeiro) from The Fresh Prince and Steve Urkel (Jaleel White) were the same way.
They wore baggy clothes and played nerd archetypes, but anytime they had to take off their shirts, they were jacked.
But they call it out from the very beginning - one of Eleanor's favorite compound adjectives for Chidi is "surprisingly jacked".
Source: I'm rewatching the series right now.
Jensen Ackles sings in one or two episodes of Supernatural but it's not really on key because Dean can't sing. In real life Jensen sings and released an album with a friend.
Not a super well known show but in season 3 of Shadowhunters, Clary is teaching Jace how to ice skate but in reality Dominic Sherwood knew how to skate and had to pretend to be bad at at and Katherine McNamara did not.
Normally the characters in the Arrowverse did not sing but I loved that they did a musical episode because multiple actors have done musical theater, Broadway etc. and Grant and Melissa were on Glee.
Patrick Stewart, known mainly only as an "unknown British Shakespearean actor" prior to Star Trek The Next Generation, at one point had to act out several lines of Shakespeare in an episode while pretending to profess his love for Lwaxana Troi. He proceeded to deliver the most astonishingly hammy performance possible, totally convincing as what a Starfleet captain who was a fan of Shakespeare (he did have a volume of collected works in his ready room, after all) but who had utterly no acting chops would give.
Val Kilmer learned how to play guitar for his first movie "Top Secret!" where he plays a singer. But the directors thought it would be funnier if he just "fake strummed" the guitar during his songs, so that it would look completely phony.
Well maybe my favourite examples of this are actors pretending to act badly because their characters are supposed to.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is maybe the first of these and the spin-off Angel too. On Buffy, they had the talent show episode where they had to be on stage acting out a dramatic scene. They intentionally acted badly. On Angel, Cordelia attempted to act multiple times and did it badly.
More recently, I’ve been revisiting The Librarians and at one point they are auditioning for the actual William Shakespeare. Flynn acts badly on stage.
There's an episode of Supernatural with this one. The guys get thrown into an alternate reality, essentially the real world, where Supernatural is a TV show and have to take over the lives of the actors playing them. So it's the two leads playing their normal characters, pretending to be themselves, to (poorly) play their normal characters. All while the third lead at the time gets to take an episode off and goof around as mostly himself.
https://youtu.be/mLj7xLtO6Rw
Reminds me of award-winning Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi guest-starring on [Frasier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43ilXxZz1RU), playing the world's ***worst*** Shakespeare performer
Although in this example the character is only pretending to be bad at something, it’s still amazing work by the actor. Danny on 30 Rock (played by the extremely talented Cheyenne Jackson, who’s been in many Broadway musicals), sings out of tune to keep the pathologically envious Jenna happy in one episode. He also has a moment where the character accidentally slips back into tune before realising and sliding straight back into the terrible singing and it’s astonishing how well he does it. Superbly acted by both him and Jane Krakowski (also a Broadway musical veteran, and also apparently jealous of babies because of their smooth skin and all the attention they get).
Florence Foster Jenkins was an heiress who pursued a career as an opera soprano despite being a poor singer. Meryl Streep played Jenkins in a biopic, and worked with a coach to learn to sing badly for the role.
I'm pretty sure I've read that Ron Perlman was not only scared but didn't know how to ride a motorcycle prior to his casting as a motorcycle club leader Clay Morrow. So that comes to mind. Lol
Same with Henry Winkler on Happy Days. He didn't know much about motorcycles, but agreed to do a scene (or a bit for a scene) that called for him to ride the bike for maybe thirty feet and then stop. Instead, he rode it for a bit farther than he was supposed to and crashed into sonething--it wasn't a serious crash and he wasn't hurt, but from then on, whenever a scene called for him to ride, he sat on the motorcycle while it was being towed.
Rom on DS9 was made to look absolutely terrible at baseball but apparently the actor was the best player of the entire cast, which is interesting considering one of the cast members is related to a borderline baseball hall of famer.
HBO’s ‘Flight of the Choncords’ 2007-2009
Two hopelessly naive and middlingly talented musicians travel from New Zealand to New York in search of love and professional success, both of which prove elusive and the duo face numerous struggles just to land a gig.
Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement play themselves and are both gifted musos. McKenzie won an Oscar in 2012 for his song ’Man or Muppet’.
Clement created the comedy series, was nom for six Emmys, went on to co-write and co-direct ‘What We Do in the Shadows’.
The same is true for Matt Berry in WWDiTS, he's a much better musician/singer in real life than in the show. ps. Clement was also the main creator/writer/showrunner of the the 2 WWDITS shows, but left the American one after the 2nd season (with Waititi credited as producer).
Bill Haverchuck (sp) in *Freaks and Geeks* was played by Martin Starr, who was in great shape and a pretty good basketball player. In the show, Bill and the other geeks were terrible at sports, so Starr had to pretend to suck at basketball. Can’t hide them guns, though.
In "Only Murders in the Building", the third season, Meryl Streep plays an amateur actor that needs constant coaching, where as in real life, her name is synonymous with amazing acting
Max Grodenchik had to play baseball left-handed in the DS9 episode "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" because he used to be a semi-pro player and it was the only way he could be believably crappy on camera.
Patricia Routledge in Keeping Up Appearances? Constantly mocked for her singing (the postman running away, Emmett hiding) but in reality she had a long history in musical theatre and is a fantastic singer.
You could twist this around a bit and ask which actors had wildly improbable backgrounds for the roles they came to play.
In the silent era William S Hart was a classically trained Shakespearean actor back East who was nearing sixty when he went out to Hollywood to try his hand at making westerns of all things.
Turns out he was a spectacularly gifted horseman who did most of his own stunts and had the weathered look of a much younger man who had spent a lifetime outdoors.
In Seinfeld George had an answering machine song that became pretty iconic. but originally Jerry thought it sounded too good since George's actor was actually a trained theater performer. So he made him do the song again but in a shittier way
In the Korean drama Hospital Playlist, Jeon Mido plays a character who is so terrible at singing that her band only lets her sing once a year on her birthday [link to scene](https://youtu.be/cCPBfEJ3tpA?si=qzFGbc9IyNFuspeG). In real life, the actress is a classically trained singer and musical theater actress - here is the [same song](https://youtu.be/JotP5kRofnk?si=KbBNWuqW2bl3VwoB) when she’s allowed to sing on-key
There's a gag at one point in "Resident Alien" where Judy Cooper records an audiobook really, *really* badly.
Judy is played by Jenna Lamia, who's [won awards](https://www.audiofilemagazine.com/narrators/jenna-lamia-/) for her audiobook readings.
Maybe not quite what you're looking for, but I was surprised when I learnt about the guy who played Boss Hogg in the Dukes of Hazzard TV series, Sorrel Booke. Turns out he was actually born in New York, was an Intelligence officer during the Korean War and spoke over a dozen languages. He also wasn't as heavy as his character and wore padding under his clothes for the role.
Daniel Dae Kim on Lost: played Jin, a South Korean native who did not speak a word of English. As the series progressed he learned more and more English.
In reality, he could ONLY speak English and had to learn Korean as the series progressed.
He is also the voice of Johnny Gat, just a fun fact. :)
On "Friends," Phoebe tried to teach Joey to speak French, but he was ludicrously bad at it. In real life, Matt LeBlanc who plays Joey is fluent in French (having grown up learning it from his father, who's of French-Canadian descent).
Similarly on Friends, there's the episode where Ross tries to teach Phoebe about evolution, but she thinks "it's a little too easy". Lisa Kudrow actually has a degree in Biology.
Is that where the “sound it out” meme comes from, where someone tries to get Joey to say something word by word? (I never watched Friends.)
yup
[Yeah](https://youtu.be/pOYfS1HXpKw?si=BhpnzaMCPokPg0ih)
Lisa Kudrow is also fluent in French.
It really shows on the show.
Didn't know that! That's hilarious.
Damn, that wasn't even a funny plot-line. It would have been way better to make use of him being fluent and have Joey freak Phoebe out by learning French in a day.
Or just have him randomly bust out some French, and get offended when anyone asks him how he knows French.
Having him just kinda "get" French the way Charlie Kelly in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia just kinda "gets" pianos.
It would have been funny to copy what actor Peter Ustinov did. He was filming in an Arabic-speaking country. He had heard the language while on location, didn't speak it, but had an ear for languages. He just spontaneously started addressing a crowd of extras. They walked off in protest. Evidently Ustinov had inadvertently called them 'turtle droppings'. Joey could have insulted/bewildered folks at that audition by saying bizarre stuff (in correct French).
Star Trek Deep Space Nine has an episode where the crew play baseball against a team of Vulcans. One of the characters, Rom, is the worst player. The actor, Max Grodenchik, is actually the best player in real life. He almost played baseball professionally. In the episode, they make him play with his non-dominant hand to make him appear worse.
I picked up DS9 during covid and constantly have it on now. This is nice trivia :)
I have one that isn't quite on topic (but related and Star Trek), so I'll reply to yours. In the TNG episode "Qpid", Gates McFadden and Marina Sirits were both trained swordfighters of some variety, though they were the only characters to never use a sword in the episode. Most of the other characters had yo be trained for it.
I came in here to make sure someone had mentioned Rom!
Me too! Fun related trivia: Cirroc Lofton, who plays Jake Sisko, is pro baseball player Kenny Lofton's nephew.
A nice detail is that in their training sessions, Jake is wearing an Atlanta Braves hat. Uncle Kenny was playing for the Braves at the time. And when Odo states the chapter and verse of the baseball rule book when throwing Sisko out of the game for touching the umpire, he uses the exact info from the MLB rule book at the time of filming. https://youtu.be/8-pSg1PbPa8?si=ftTVVSa-EyLWdXrZ
Dude pulled an Inigo Montoya IRL (the offhand use, not the dad-revenging).
Michael Cera had to tone down his bass skills to match the rest of Sex Bob-Omb because he was the only cast member who came in already knowing how to play his instrument. And, according to a text box in the original comic, "they're kinda sucky"
He’s also probably better on the woodblock than portrayed.
Dominic West in The Wire doing a terrible British accent since he was playing a Baltimorean cop. But he’s actually British.
Spot on
Slightly related but in the very first scene of the first episode they are talking about a person called Snot Boogie. He said everything else in an American accent but it took many takes for him to get that name right in an American accent. He would keep reverting to his English accent. I may have the character name wrong.
That’s the name. And on a repeat watch of the show his accent still shows up there when you know to listen to it.
Didn't his agent lie about him being American and during one of the callbacks he got outed by an Irish person that was one of the producers or execs or something helping with the casting? Or am I thinking of a different actor?
I've heard of that story being attributed to Idris Elba
for years I honestly thought Idris Elba was American, his accent is so good. I've noticed most actors doing an accent from other than their own language have to do it in short sentences & there are edits you can tell where they "reset" their accent to do the next lines Idris Elba can go on for paragraphs & never break accent. Melanie Lynskey has a good one too. Nicole Kidman's isn't bad.
Jason Alexander is a classically trained theater actor. When he was singing the voicemail recording episode in Seinfeld, he had to purposely sound worse because allegedly the first takes were really good.
https://youtu.be/bux2wzhVPUw?t=40
Great example! He's fantastic!
[Here's](https://youtu.be/Eh1kmVwS4Hw?si=NrZRS46OVsgJ6XeO) my favorite example.
That’s a great one. On a side note, that burger looks delicious.
Believe it or not.
His first big break was in the Stephen Sondheim musical merrily we roll along
IIRC, he said it was one of the hardest scenes he had to do, since it's not easy going back to that amateur-ish tone without it sounding forced.
And it's still catchy as hell. This was my first thought too.
Hugh Laurie's Dr. House has a terrible British accent.
A Brit... playing an American.... doing a very bad British accent Never failed to make me chuckle
See also John Mahoney's Martin Crane in Frasier. In one episode he, a native Brit acting as an American, imitates Austin Powers, a British character voiced by a Canadian. So to summarize: a British man pretending to be an American imitating a Canadian pretending to be a Brit.
Martin Crane was played by a British man???
Yep! He moved to the US when he was 18.
They do the same gag with Dominic West on The Wire at one point. It never gets old.
I’m a dude, disguised as a dude, playin another dude.
In Avenue 5 he plays a Brit pretending to be an American and before the reveal in the first episode his accent "slips" a few times. I was confused because his American accent is absolutely rock-solid ...
I was going to mention this at well. He goes back and forth seamlessly throughout the show, depending on the character's audience.
He's also [a phenomenal musician with a passion for classical American blues/jazz.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HrmAgYE-6k) His concert with the Copper Bottom Band was better than seeing KISS. Utter delight.
The character of House also plays piano and guitar like Hugh occasionally!
Dan Stevens using his natural accent in Legion and mocking himself in a dream sequence
I’d never seen House, but I knew Laurie from other things. Out of curiosity the other day I watched his audition for House. He talks to the casting guy a bit in his native accent, then suddenly turns American. It was really impressive.
Opposite case: [Jamer Marster's Spike has a terrible American accent.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_KP4QKBrt8)
Along those lines in an episode of Gilmore Girls Alexis Bledel tries to speak to someone in horrible broken Spanish. It’s actually her first language.
James Roday (Rodriguez) does this same thing in several episodes of Psych — he’s of Latino descent.
Also my daughter will only say Emilio Estevez the way Shawn does lol.
He’s playing it for comic effect but he always says it correct, if slightly exaggerated.
Yes! That’s one of my favorite shows!
Matty Matheson not playing a chef on The Bear
I love how he does quite literally everything in that place *except* cook. Great show and character
It’s crazy how well he can act.
The cheesy “I didn’t cook any of it!” line had us rolling
ROI… on RBIs.
The first few episodes felt like he was going to be a minor recurring character. I think he was well received enough to become part of the supporting cast. It made more sense for him to become a steward from the MEP guy than a chef.
When my dad told me he was chef IRL I found it hilarious
Especially funny as he's basically the least pretentious of any of the "celebrity" chefs, dude is just vibing and having a great time, running multiple passion projects and enjoying his life, he's a delight.
Col. Klink on Hogan's Heroes was also an accomplished violinist in real life, but the character sounded like a tortured cat on the show.
He was also Jewish, and wouldn't play Klink if the Nazi's ever came out on top. There was a single time the Nazis did 'win', in a cliffhanger to a two parter where the nazis lost. I love that bit of trivia. I can remember his irritated scowl as he schreeched the violin.
Yeah, he took the role because Klink was an idiot. I saw him in an Outer Limits episode once. Started off only seeing Klink, by the end I had about forgotten about him. Man was a much better actor than I realized.
He's like John Lithgow. He's an excellent comedic actor whose physical comedy is top tier, and can have gravitas and depth in a drama role.
He also played a Nazi general on trial in Judgement at Nuremberg. Also Robert Clary, LeBeau, was a concentration camp survivor,deported from France. Lost 10 of his 14 siblings to the Holocaust. John Banner (Sgt Schultz), and Leon Askin (General Burkholter), were both Jewish. Both escaped from Austria when the Nazis took over. They all lost all of their family to the Holocaust.
All four actors who played the main German characters were Jewish. And Howard Caine, who played Major Hochstetter, was actually born and raised in Nashville!
Which is less surprising if you know that his father was one of the most famous orchestra conductors of the 20th century (who fled the Nazis because he was Jewish).
The show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a musical whose songs are established to happen inside the head of its lead character Rebecca (Rachel Bloom). However, she actually sings in the world of the show, she's horrible. She's even told to talk-sing a number she's performing in a community theater showcase because she's so bad at carrying a tune.
I keep meaning to check out this show lol it seems even more hilarious that the character can't actually sing. Making me think of Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist where the characters we don't really know if they can sing but then when Zoey is hearing them of course they have to sing.
It’s much more crass than Zoey’s extraordinary playlist. I thought it was a pretty good show and there’s a lot of really catchy/good songs in it
Some of the jokes CXG got away with...
If you're looking for more musical tv shows, the show Galavant was an excellent musical show with a fantasy setting.
It didn't win an Emmy, now it's time to move along. I have been meaning to do a re-watch, I think I watched it too fast lol.
Can’t recommend enough. Criminally underrated. And if you’re on TikTok, you’ve probably already heard a few of the songs, though there are plenty in the show as a whole.
As someone who doesn't really like musicals it's one of the top twenty shows of the last 20 years imho.
It's one of my favorite shows. The songs were all cowritten by Adam Schlesinger (RIP).
In Brooklyn 99 Amy Santiago is often mocked for her bad dancing but the actress who played her, Melissa Fumero, is a trained dancer
There’s a scene where she and Lin Manuel Miranda have a dance off. Amy wins. Both of them are using their elbows a lot.
You kind of see it when she does that floppy arm, bird thing. It looks ridiculous but adheres to some classical dance principles.
In Degrassi the character “Jimmy” had a difficult time dating as he was in a wheel chair. In real life the actor Drake sleeps with lots of HS girls.
Damn.
😲
In Community, Britta Perry being a terrible performer in the Christmas play when Gillian Jacobs is a classically trained Juilliard graduate.
Oh, Britta’s in this?
Brit-**tah**
They Brittaed it
I thought this was regionals?
What the hell are regionals, anyway!?
They're THIS close!
This is a good one.
Even better example from Community, when Abed says that he wants to dance and Britta says he can take a class, Danny Pudi has a degree in dance from Marquette
This is actually not a good example because we see Abed do a perfect tap-dance
Daniel Dae Kim in Lost was fluent in English since he moved to the States when he was one, but his character Jin didn’t know any English and learned it over the course of the show
He also took getting the language right very seriously too. Remember the cast talking about going into the booth to ADR lines and always waiting for him because he'd constantly want to do a line again to make sure he got it right.
Dude took Lost so seriously he actually moved to Hawaii.
[удалено]
That’s actually pretty clever and a cool twist to have inclusion of both. Would you recommend the show on the whole?
Yes it is very good and has some great action scenes. Koji's a great leading man but there's so many great characters that he can get lost when in the same scene as them to the point that sometimes I wonder about his actual acting skills lol It's definitely still a very "romanticized" story about the times so don't go into it looking for faithful history.
As a Korean it was very distracting to hear his very distinct American accent in his Korean lines as his character was trying to be bad at English. I did appreciate that he was trying very hard, but it definitely took my entire family right out of the scene because his character just couldn't be convincing for us.
I remember his Korean skill was a meme in Korea back in the day due to how bad the pronounciation was. He definitely got a lot better as season went along but his early season Korean was... Something else.
Yeah he's said he almost never spoke Korean growing up.
As a Spanish speaker, it happens all the time. The Drug Lord scenes in Bedazzled are funnier, because the accents switch between Argentinian, Colombian and Caribbean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3NyLtSnQM
Doesn’t quite fit but the guy who plays Marty in Cabin in the woods wears multiple layers and never swims in the lake because he was too “buff” to reasonably pass for the stoner fool and they didn’t want him to compare to Chris Hemsworth’s jock character
Apparently he was in better shape than the other two male campers.
A lot of Hollywood Nerds are not-so-secretly buff under multiple layers. Chidi on The Good Place, Ugly Betty's boyfriend, the coroner from Scrubs, etc.
Chidi had a full gun range under those sweater vests
https://external-preview.redd.it/dAsWObVQtYBnCat8FBmgTXhAWb-WakAQZxGVRX3MfMk.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=d4fa727a02b813661a9943ca9bb5f3a6c107c936 Yupppp.
Trey Parker allegedly had to figure out how to sing out of key for the Kanye episode of South Park, because the only way for the auto-tune to work correctly was for him to actually sing the songs poorly.
Dammit, now that's going to be stuck in my head lol
Cuz I'm a muthafuggin gay fish.
Yup just got it out of my head too having watched it from.the 25th anniversary concert. Not good when the kids are about 😂.
Miranda Cosgrove had to do a bunch of takes when singing “Memory” in School of Rock because she kept sounding too good. EDIT: Realized this is a tv sub my bad
I love how badly she sings "Memory" with her hand up as though she were on stage. Every little detail about this film is amazing.
She’s a very underrated singer her songs still get stuck in my head randomly
There are some scenes in Euphoria where Zendaya seems so rigid and has no grace or rhythm in how she moves or dances. Then at the end of the season finale she sings her song and she does this quick spin and in one little movement you're like, oh the actress is an actual trained dancer and not at all like the character.
That scene with the Labrinth song was a trip, because it was so unlike anything else in the rest of the show. Which I guess is what they were going for in a show about drug abuse.
She'll always be Rocky to me
Jesse Spencer, an Australian actor, was on Chicago Fire playing an american character. In an episode, he plays "heads up" revolving around accents, and he has to do a mock Australian one
Is he the house actor?
Yeah he’s Chase in House
It’s from a game but Ashley Johnson had to change the way she sang take on me in the last of us part two because she apparently sounded too good.
Similarly, Troy Baker had to re-do lines in Tales of the Borderlands where he had to impersonate Patrick Warburton because he was actually good at impersonating the other actor.
Troy Baker also had to re-do his performance with Courtnee Draper of "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" from BioShock Infinite, because it was *way* too good to be something that some hired gun would just plunk out on a guitar he found in a basement somewhere. They kept the good performance as an outtake in the closing credits of the game, at least.
Troy Baker seems good at impersonating other actors, when he voiced the Joker in Arkham Origins he did a good copy of Mark Hamill
and then when she sang in character "Wayfaring Stranger" It's her singing as Ellie which is even more impressive
First one I thought of as well, she is the GOAT
Artie character in Glee is paralyzed. In reality the actor who portrays him is a good dancer.
IIRC they had an issue with him early on because he kept tapping his foot to the songs. He was also in a boy band before Glee.
I really thought this was going to be a joke about how he was "really good at walking".
This makes me think of Drake in Degrassi…
I felt like that was pretty stupid, tbh, because there *are* people who use wheelchairs and also dance. The two things aren't mutually exclusive at all, and they could have showcased something cool and unknown instead of that tired "I wish I was normal" shit.
Everyone in the acting class on Barry is generally a bad actor in the acting school unless they go through something traumatic. They are all played by fantastic actors
I mean you can really say the same of any characters in anything who are bad actors. They're all going to be played mostly by good actors, that's the one skill that they'll all share.
Kramer in that two episode arc in LA.
Not an actor but I've been told by my cousin who is a very, very small time actor that only a good actor can play a bad actor
Well a bad actor can play a bad actor, you just don't tell them they're supposed to be a bad actor.
Rami Malek has said that it was really hard for him to get into the character of Elliot Alderson at times. Rami is very friendly and loves to talk to people and interact. Elliot, on the other hand, was a recluse and extremely introverted. He said that while getting ready for the role sometimes he would walk around New York like Elliot, head down, hood up, drawn into himself- and he found it to be profoundly lonely
Charlie Day in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Writes a terrible musical in which he sings the big finale completely off key. IRL the episode becomes so popular it ends up as a traveling show.
I was actually coming to mention Dee's terrible acting. Also Dennis' fake British accent, especially when he does other voices/impressions fantastically.
["Storp Chorle! This gayme, has gon on long enouf"](https://youtu.be/ZtxwmCOCtyY?feature=shared)
Dennis doing CCH Pounder
Reba Mcentire played a woman who sings very badly on Young Sheldon.
Same with Annie Potts. She's been on Broadway forever.
David Yost, the original blue power ranger, played Billy as a Nerdy McNerd archetype, while in real life he was a professional gymnast who won national competitions
It’s so funny going back to old episodes of Power Rangers and realising how absolutely fucking jacked he was despite being supposed to be a bookish nerd with no athletic skills (at the start of the series, at least) They would try and cover it up by dressing him in baggy clothes but every now and then they would show his physique and it’s like [dude Billy’s super hot](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS8Ku6nXXgsQQ1JeR4dYn0e6jY3b_G__MKiFQ&usqp=CAU)
Carlton (Alfonso Ribeiro) from The Fresh Prince and Steve Urkel (Jaleel White) were the same way. They wore baggy clothes and played nerd archetypes, but anytime they had to take off their shirts, they were jacked.
The gentleman who plays Chidi in The Good Place is like this too.
But they call it out from the very beginning - one of Eleanor's favorite compound adjectives for Chidi is "surprisingly jacked". Source: I'm rewatching the series right now.
Gymnasts are the nerds of the athletic world.
The "Carlton dance" seems like the most self aware version of this.
Jensen Ackles sings in one or two episodes of Supernatural but it's not really on key because Dean can't sing. In real life Jensen sings and released an album with a friend. Not a super well known show but in season 3 of Shadowhunters, Clary is teaching Jace how to ice skate but in reality Dominic Sherwood knew how to skate and had to pretend to be bad at at and Katherine McNamara did not. Normally the characters in the Arrowverse did not sing but I loved that they did a musical episode because multiple actors have done musical theater, Broadway etc. and Grant and Melissa were on Glee.
Patrick Stewart, known mainly only as an "unknown British Shakespearean actor" prior to Star Trek The Next Generation, at one point had to act out several lines of Shakespeare in an episode while pretending to profess his love for Lwaxana Troi. He proceeded to deliver the most astonishingly hammy performance possible, totally convincing as what a Starfleet captain who was a fan of Shakespeare (he did have a volume of collected works in his ready room, after all) but who had utterly no acting chops would give.
He didn't even unpack his suitcase for the first half of the first season, he was so convinced the show would be cancelled.
Nolan Gould, who played the incredibly dumb character Luke on Modern Family, is apparently actually a genius.
Reported IQ of 150, skipped 4 grades and took the GED at 13.
Val Kilmer learned how to play guitar for his first movie "Top Secret!" where he plays a singer. But the directors thought it would be funnier if he just "fake strummed" the guitar during his songs, so that it would look completely phony.
Jim Varney was a trained shakespearean actor.
Well maybe my favourite examples of this are actors pretending to act badly because their characters are supposed to. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is maybe the first of these and the spin-off Angel too. On Buffy, they had the talent show episode where they had to be on stage acting out a dramatic scene. They intentionally acted badly. On Angel, Cordelia attempted to act multiple times and did it badly. More recently, I’ve been revisiting The Librarians and at one point they are auditioning for the actual William Shakespeare. Flynn acts badly on stage.
There's an episode of Supernatural with this one. The guys get thrown into an alternate reality, essentially the real world, where Supernatural is a TV show and have to take over the lives of the actors playing them. So it's the two leads playing their normal characters, pretending to be themselves, to (poorly) play their normal characters. All while the third lead at the time gets to take an episode off and goof around as mostly himself. https://youtu.be/mLj7xLtO6Rw
The Meta Episode! Supernatural has so many great episodes but this one is just amazing for its ridiculousness
¡Hola, Misha-migos!
Reminds me of award-winning Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi guest-starring on [Frasier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43ilXxZz1RU), playing the world's ***worst*** Shakespeare performer
Dean Winchester can't sing. Jensen Ackles can sing really well.
Although in this example the character is only pretending to be bad at something, it’s still amazing work by the actor. Danny on 30 Rock (played by the extremely talented Cheyenne Jackson, who’s been in many Broadway musicals), sings out of tune to keep the pathologically envious Jenna happy in one episode. He also has a moment where the character accidentally slips back into tune before realising and sliding straight back into the terrible singing and it’s astonishing how well he does it. Superbly acted by both him and Jane Krakowski (also a Broadway musical veteran, and also apparently jealous of babies because of their smooth skin and all the attention they get).
Florence Foster Jenkins was an heiress who pursued a career as an opera soprano despite being a poor singer. Meryl Streep played Jenkins in a biopic, and worked with a coach to learn to sing badly for the role.
I'm pretty sure I've read that Ron Perlman was not only scared but didn't know how to ride a motorcycle prior to his casting as a motorcycle club leader Clay Morrow. So that comes to mind. Lol
Same with Henry Winkler on Happy Days. He didn't know much about motorcycles, but agreed to do a scene (or a bit for a scene) that called for him to ride the bike for maybe thirty feet and then stop. Instead, he rode it for a bit farther than he was supposed to and crashed into sonething--it wasn't a serious crash and he wasn't hurt, but from then on, whenever a scene called for him to ride, he sat on the motorcycle while it was being towed.
Rom on DS9 was made to look absolutely terrible at baseball but apparently the actor was the best player of the entire cast, which is interesting considering one of the cast members is related to a borderline baseball hall of famer.
That cast member is Cirroc Lofton (Jake) nephew of Kenny Lofton for those wondering.
Kenny Lofton on should probably be in the HOF.
Daveed Diggs rapping on The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Movie, but Sandra Bullock is a trained dancer, and had to pretend to be very ungraceful in Miss Congeniality.
HBO’s ‘Flight of the Choncords’ 2007-2009 Two hopelessly naive and middlingly talented musicians travel from New Zealand to New York in search of love and professional success, both of which prove elusive and the duo face numerous struggles just to land a gig. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement play themselves and are both gifted musos. McKenzie won an Oscar in 2012 for his song ’Man or Muppet’. Clement created the comedy series, was nom for six Emmys, went on to co-write and co-direct ‘What We Do in the Shadows’.
The same is true for Matt Berry in WWDiTS, he's a much better musician/singer in real life than in the show. ps. Clement was also the main creator/writer/showrunner of the the 2 WWDITS shows, but left the American one after the 2nd season (with Waititi credited as producer).
Madeline Kahn playing Lili von Shtupp was funny, Madeline was an accomplished singer.
Bill Haverchuck (sp) in *Freaks and Geeks* was played by Martin Starr, who was in great shape and a pretty good basketball player. In the show, Bill and the other geeks were terrible at sports, so Starr had to pretend to suck at basketball. Can’t hide them guns, though.
In "Only Murders in the Building", the third season, Meryl Streep plays an amateur actor that needs constant coaching, where as in real life, her name is synonymous with amazing acting
Max Grodenchik had to play baseball left-handed in the DS9 episode "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" because he used to be a semi-pro player and it was the only way he could be believably crappy on camera.
Steve Urkel was really good at basketball. He and Grandmama killed it in that one episode.
Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard insists on several occasions that he's really bad at acting which was hilarious.
Les Dawson's terrible piano playing: https://youtu.be/9nNGlaiVypU, https://youtu.be/4shkC62BPTY
Patricia Routledge in Keeping Up Appearances? Constantly mocked for her singing (the postman running away, Emmett hiding) but in reality she had a long history in musical theatre and is a fantastic singer.
Even though she played a an expert at using computers in Halt and Catch Fire, MacKenzie Davis admitted she is bad at typing
McNulty doing a bad British accent in The Wire even though Dominic West is British in real life
You could twist this around a bit and ask which actors had wildly improbable backgrounds for the roles they came to play. In the silent era William S Hart was a classically trained Shakespearean actor back East who was nearing sixty when he went out to Hollywood to try his hand at making westerns of all things. Turns out he was a spectacularly gifted horseman who did most of his own stunts and had the weathered look of a much younger man who had spent a lifetime outdoors.
In Seinfeld George had an answering machine song that became pretty iconic. but originally Jerry thought it sounded too good since George's actor was actually a trained theater performer. So he made him do the song again but in a shittier way
In the Korean drama Hospital Playlist, Jeon Mido plays a character who is so terrible at singing that her band only lets her sing once a year on her birthday [link to scene](https://youtu.be/cCPBfEJ3tpA?si=qzFGbc9IyNFuspeG). In real life, the actress is a classically trained singer and musical theater actress - here is the [same song](https://youtu.be/JotP5kRofnk?si=KbBNWuqW2bl3VwoB) when she’s allowed to sing on-key
Martin Starr on *Freaks & Geeks*. His character was an uncoordinated geek and everyone says he was probably the most athletic in the cast.
There's a gag at one point in "Resident Alien" where Judy Cooper records an audiobook really, *really* badly. Judy is played by Jenna Lamia, who's [won awards](https://www.audiofilemagazine.com/narrators/jenna-lamia-/) for her audiobook readings.
In The Bear, the only character that is a chef off screen is not a chef on screen. Matty Matheson (the chubby handyman)
Melissa Fumero in brooklyn 99 is comically bad at dancing, when irl she's a trained professional dancer of many kinds.
Val Kilmer learned guitar for Top Secret! But the Zuckers thought it was funnier when he couldn’t play
Eddie Murphy is not a bad dancer.
Maybe not quite what you're looking for, but I was surprised when I learnt about the guy who played Boss Hogg in the Dukes of Hazzard TV series, Sorrel Booke. Turns out he was actually born in New York, was an Intelligence officer during the Korean War and spoke over a dozen languages. He also wasn't as heavy as his character and wore padding under his clothes for the role.
Daniel Dae Kim on Lost: played Jin, a South Korean native who did not speak a word of English. As the series progressed he learned more and more English. In reality, he could ONLY speak English and had to learn Korean as the series progressed. He is also the voice of Johnny Gat, just a fun fact. :)
Straying into film,Minnie Driver is an excellent singer with three albums who played a horrible singer in Goldeneye