Henry Cavill Had Trouble Using His English Accent After Adopting an American Accent for Movies

Henry Cavill normally doesn’t have a problem with putting on an American accent in films like Man of Steel. But sometimes he adopts the accent for so long that it’s difficult to switch back to his natural way of speaking.

Henry Cavill once had difficulty switching back to his English accent

There are hardy any traces of Cavill’s English accent in Man of Steel and its sequels. Cavill shared that honing the accent carried the same amount of effort as working out any other muscle in his body.

“If you pick up the heaviest weight possible and try and clean and press it, you’re going to pull something. So, you need to warm it up and then you can go into doing all the heavy weight exercises,” Cavill once told Collider.

But Man of Steel wasn’t the first film Cavill did an American accent for. He already had prior experience in changing the way he spoke that helped him in the Superman feature.

“I had done American accents before, and I’d worked with this coach before as well. Some bits, initially tricky because you’re rusty, but then they got easier as time went on and it does become quite natural,” he added. “I often find during a day of shooting I will speak in an American accent all day long when I’m doing dialogue. At the end of the day, it often takes an effort when I’m talking to my fiancée to bring my English back just because you’re so used to speaking that way.”

Henry Cavill had a difficult time doing his accent for ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a 2015 Guy Ritchie film that was based on the 1960s television series of the same name. It starred Henry Cavill as CIA agent Napoleon Solo who works alongside a KGB agent played by Armie Hammer to avert a possible nuclear catastrophe. Because Ritchie had a particular type of American in mind for Napoleon, Ritchie required Cavill to adopt a specific accent for the film. Which gave Cavill a hard time.

“I think the hardest thing for me was the accent. When we started, Guy said, ‘Okay, I want something a bit like Clark Gable, but not Clark Gable.’ And I said, ‘Okay, cool.’ So I sat down with Andrew Jack, our dialect coach, and he ran me through some Clark Gable stuff. We worked on it. We kind of got it down, and then we started shooting,” Cavill once said in an interview with FlavourMag.

But even while shooting, it still took some time for Cavill to get his England accent down accurately.

“And Guy kept on saying, ‘Okay, no, that word sounds wrong. Come listen to it.’ I say, ‘Yeah, okay, it sounds weird. And what’s weird about it?’ He says, ‘It just sounds too English,’ or ‘That one sounds too American.’ So we had to try and finesse it in different ways and eventually, a quarter way through the movie, it became an affected American accent, which was transatlantic and dated. And that’s why Napoleon sounds the way he sounds now,” Cavill explained.

Henry Cavill’s American accent was given a high rating by professionals

In 2017, Variety reported that the language app Babbel asked several professional actors to rank the accents of other actors. According to the publication, English actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s American accent earned the highest rating with a score of 4.5/5.

But Cavill tied with Batman Begins star Christian Bale for the second highest score of 4.2/5. Kate Winlset’s American accent in Titanic had the lowest score with just a 2.4/5 rating.