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I think most British people who say they can do an American accent are so bad at it. I find it excruciating. I find it excruciating the other way around, too.

Americans like the British kind of quirkiness and the strange accent. They find it kind of cute or something, with a certain charm.

Whenever I'm in the U.K., people say I have an American accent. Which is, obviously, funny.

My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.

In the U.K., we're surrounded by American accents. Anything we watch in television. We have 'How I Met Your Mother' and all these other shows here, so it's not something that's really alien to us.

When I travel round the country, people can't place my accent; if there's someone in the audience, they'll be like, 'You're from Philadelphia', but everyone else will say, 'Where are you from, California?' I get England sometimes - bizarre!

I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.

For whatever reason, we relate to anything godlike with an English accent. The English are very proud of that. And with anything Roman or gladiators, they have an English accent. For an audience, it is an easy trick to hook people in.

I spent a lot of time in London when I was growing up and I've always picked up accents without even really meaning to. It used to get me into trouble as a child.

Don't let the American accent fool you. I am British.