James Frain, the 31-year-old actor who shares a steamy love scene with Natalie Portman in the current drama Where The Heart Is, is no newcomer to the movies. But if audiences still don't recognize the chameleonic Englishman, it's not so surprising. Frain not only alters his looks for every role he plays, he also completely changes his voice. When it comes to accents, in fact, he's something of a male Meryl Streep.
"I've done a lot of accents before, but British to American is particularly hard," says Frain, a classically trained actor who got his start on the London stage. "It comes with a psychological block." While shooting both Where The Heart Is (in which he plays a naive small-town librarian) and last spring's Reindeer Games, Frain kept his American accent even off the set. "I didn't want people on the set to think of me as a foriegner," he says. "The first time I went into a store in Texas and got away with it, I was so psyched!"
In his latest film, Sunshine, due out in June, Frain joins Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weiss, Jennifer Ehle and William Hurt in a multigenerational saga set in hungary. Playing a cynical Hungarian was no big stretch for Frain, who's already transformed himself into a Spanish ambassador (in Elizabeth) and an Argentinian classical musician (in Hilary and Jackie), as well as an uptight count and a slum-dwelling former child abuse victim in productions on British television.
The actor, who's still based in the U.K., says he's currently hoping for more American work and is heading to L.A. soon to audition for a round of films. "It's great to be able to work on two continents," he says. "Even with the British projects, it helps to have an American profile. Look at Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlye. It's increasingly one market with one epicenter."
Not that all cultural differences between London and L.A. have dissappeared. Of all the accents he's tried on in the past few years, Frain still gets the strangest reactions to the one he uses in real life.
"When people in the U.S. hear my British accent, they project on to me that I must be very intelligent -- or very pompous," he says. "They think if you're British, you must have servants. But there seem to be a hell of a lot more servants in L.A. than anywhere else I've been."
W magazine, June 2000