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I was never there, I only read the book, I only saw the film
A double-header at this afternoon's medical appointment: the tech not only expressed surprise at my calendar age, but assumed from my voice that I was either foreign-born or had spent significant time out of the country, specifically she thought in the UK. Given the current climate, I should be clear that she was curious, not hostile; one of her children had been a staffer in the Obama administration and two others had been some kind of federal employee and she had considerable feelings on subjects from vaccines to tanks. But after I had gone through the standard litany clarifying the rather pathetic fact that I have lived my entire life in New England and the Boston area for most of it, she still thought I sounded British. "You should go over there. You'd blend right in." She herself had an old-school Boston accent. "People from anywhere, they can tell where I'm from." I am not good at other people's ages, but I don't believe that I look younger than my early forties, especially after the last few ravaging years, and I expect to be heard as American by anyone who actually has one or more of the plethora of accents on offer in the UK. Weirdest instance of trying to place my voice remains the time I was told by a very drunk Australian that I sounded like a Norwegian. Someday the question of my vocal origins will come around again because it has been doing so since my childhood and I will answer "Lisson Grove" just to see what happens.
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I fell abruptly into his acting in July and am about three films behind on recording the experience. He was a cousin of
but oddly I think that particular clip you've linked is a mix between the bit of my home accent that makes people think there's Scottish influence (the roundness of the o's and some of the consonants being clipped off, t's and s's in particular) and the OPPOSITE of what makes people think there's Scottish influence (I have joked that there are non-rhotic accents, there are rhotic accents, and then there are hyper-rhotic accents, and that last is what Scottish people and I have, if there's an r in it we will hit that r hard, harrrd). If I ever call someone Captain Larsson, by God you will know that there is an r in that name.
I was hoping for your ear! The non-rhoticity is part of what gives him the mid-Atlantic quality to mine, although every now and then it too flickers in a way that makes me really want to hear what he sounded like in his teens, before he had any kind of training. I can tell when he's working on his American accent because he shortens his vowels, especially that O; it slips back if he's seriously using his voice. The Scottish-ish intonation comes out unpredictably but as far as I can tell he never lost it, hence my assumption it was part of the baseline. I've heard him do a Scottish accent and think it may be the only one he could.
(You will also know there's an s in that name rather than a z. I have more than one Lars in my life, and one of the accent things that makes me want to scream is when people call them Larzzzzz.)
Please tell them I sympathize, since I have on a near-daily basis the experience of saying my name to someone who says it right back wrong.