Said Billy Bob Thornton, talking to Joe Rogan about the Southern accent.
Scroll back to 25:35 if you want to hear Joe link the Southern drawl to hookworm infection. I didn't think I'd hear Joe talking about "dewormers" again, but he does.
November 8, 2025
"And I did my little audition and they said can you do it more southern? And I'm like, are you shitting me?"
"It's like, you got to be shitting me. I said, well, what you have to understand is I actually did just get off the turnip truck from back there and this is how you talk.... And it was like, oh, I, I see what they're getting at. Yeah. So they wanted the Foghorn Leghorn — you know, now, ovah heah, what we have is — and... I grew up down there. I never heard that.... There are a lot of performances over the years where people who are not from the South played the part that actually used that accent. And they win Academy Awards and stuff. And I'm like, wow. So anyway, I didn't get this part. And the guy who got the part literally sounded like he was in the Bronx, but he was doing that thing, you know, I thought, wow, this is gonna be tough out here...."
Posts
58 comments:
They won’t call it black face or racist, but that is what it is, if they were honest. Fake a Mexican, Asian, or Native American accent, and they will call that out. It is safe to be racist to southerners.
The piece referenced starts at around 29:45. Billie Bob is an interesting character, it's a little hard to get line-of-sight on his stardom, isn't it?
I guess they weren't talking about 'Sling Blade' (1996)
Monologue clip
He's great in Landman.
Imus loved 'Sling Blade'.
Sorry, I thought I had it cued up properly. Fixed now.
The audience demands the world conforms to its tropes.
LANDMAN is coming soon... yea I do like Billy Bob's acting to.
And a lot of what he says on the show IS TRUE... how do I know? I'm a Texican. Born and raised here. I know some of the oil patch to.
So they wanted the Foghorn Leghorn — you know, now, ovah heah, what we have is — and... I grew up down there. I never heard that....
I find that hard to believe. I knew one or two people in my life that fit that description. In general they are rare, but they do exist.
Chekhov used a real beggar in one of his plays. The beggar, as they say, drew focus. People don't want to see reality. They want to see a depiction of reality, a depiction that sharpens some edges and smooths others out.
Dirty words.
George Tells A Date He Likes Manure
Ma and newer. Long story short, the girl has a boyfriend. A teachable moment.
’I guess they weren't talking about 'Sling Blade'’
An acquaintance of mine was in that movie and had a few good lines, including: ‘I stand on the hill, not for a thrill, but for the breath of a fresh kill.’
RIP Col. Bruce
They wanted a caricature of a Southerner, not a real one. I always thought that the Southern writers who came to prominence in the 30s through the 60s more or less had to provide that to be viable. Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, even Faulkner in Hollywood. Could say the same thing about Inge's midwest characters.
David Ogden Stiers got to put his impressive range on full display in Doc Hollywood.
The overwrought Southern accent isn't what makes Foghorn Leghorn funny - it's the pure obnoxiousness of his behavior. Inside every human heart is the desire to hold an adversary by the tail, paddle his ass with a fence picket, and to get by with it. If you can paint his tongue green, even better.
Root for the chicken hawk well almost
Nothing is more fake southern than the male country music singers now. They all sound like the same guy, like it's the Nashville studio accent. Dudes, you're supposed to be authentic.
Urbane expectations.
I’ve never seen the show Landman, but I wonder if it has the old joke about the dumb farmer who would not accept one sixth of the oil as royalty and demanded one eighth or he would not sign.
Southern accents were more varied and often quite subtle. After the Civil War, the exaggerated "Southern accent" we think of today came to predominate. It's fading, I think. You have to listen hard to catch the Southern notes in Mike Johnson's voice. A few decades back a Louisiana representative's accent would have been much more pronounced.
Its easier for actors with an upper class or mainstream way of talking to do accents or lower class speech, then the other way round. Leslie Howard, Olivia de Haviland and Vivien Leigh could so southern but I doubt clark Gable or Jimmy cagney couldn't done a Oxford accent.
Simiarly its much easier for an actor who naturally talks fast to slow down, then the other way round. Brando had a real problem with witty comedies, because he talked so slowly.
Thorton talks about "yankees" doing southern characters in movie and films. The most absurd was Carroll O'Connor doing a southern sherriff in TV series "Heat of the Night". Of course that was better than Tele Savalas being a fake southernor in the "Dirty Dozen" or Tony curtis in "the defiant ones".
The popular 40s radio show with Fred Allen, had allen's alley with New England farmer Titus Moody (catch phrase "Howdy Bub"), Brooklyn housewife Pansy Nussbaum, irate Irishman Ajax Cassidy, and Southern Senator Beauregard Claghorn who coined the catch phrase "That's a joke, son."
I think that's where Foghorn Leghorn comes from.
I really enjoyed Landman. It is based on a documentary podcast 3-4 episodes, called "Boomtown" by a fellow who lived there and worked in "The Patch". I listened after I had watched Season 1 of the show and can see where much of the show took its ideas.
Podcast is nowhere near as interesting as the show but well worth a listen if you like the series.
Anxiously waiting season 2.
Search Boomtown by Christian Wallace & Texas Monthly on Podcast or your favorite podcast app. 12 episodes total.
John Henry
Foghorn Leghorn was created by Robert McKimson (Colorado) and most famously voiced by Mel Blanc (San Francisco)also Jeff Bergman (Philidelphia), Frank Gorshin (Pittsburgh) and others.
So yeah, it was about as authentic as Obama.
Gordie Tapp (Canada) used to play a charicature of Foghorn Leghorn on Hee-Haw.
Have any southerners ever played a Foghorn Leghorn accent?
John Henry
I used to think Archie Bunker's accent, mispronunciations and malapropisms were absurd and slightly offensive (but funny) until I came to Roosevelt Roads. I worked with an EM2 named "Duke" Schneider, not sure he even had a real first name.
It was like norman Lear told Archie "Follow Duke around for a month but I want you to tone it down a bit. Nobody would believe Duke is real."
Great guy and a pleasure to work with once you learned to understand him.
Sleep well, shipmate, wherever you are.
John Henry
Per Wikipedia:
"Foghorn Leghorn was directly inspired by the character of Senator Claghorn, a blustery Southern politician played by Kenny Delmar on Fred Allen's popular 1940s radio show. Foghorn adopted many of Claghorn's catchphrases, such as "I say..." and "That's a joke, son!"
Senator Claghorn first appeared in 1945. And foghorn leghorn debuted in 1946.
The Foghorn Leghorn accent does exist. It is lowland Southern, think Savannah or Charleston. Billy Bob's is upland Alabama or Mississippi. Although I was born and reared in Atlanta, I ended up with my cousins' South Alabama accent, much like Billy Bob's, but less so. In court, I admit, some Foghorn would slip in.My wife's accent is different still. Coming from Bristol, Virginia her's has a lot of hillbilly in it, although tempered by education and living 25 years in NYC. People who talk about the Southern accent don't know what they are talking about. It all depends upon class, race and location of the speaker.
RcoceanII: "Its easier for actors with an upper class or mainstream way of talking to do accents or lower class speech, then the other way round."
"Would that it t'were so easy!"
Mike Johnson has very little accent to my ear, but Sen. John Kennedy (R.-LA) keeps the tradition alive.
My wife and I once shared a train ride with a Croatian who lived in Austria, but had spent several years working on the New Jersey docks . . . he had a very strange accent, Croatian with a Joysey tinge.
Kenny Delmar was from Boston
John Henry
I have always found it easy to tell a fake Appalachian accent from real one but I can't tell a fake Bronx accent from a real one. One other interesting thing to me are British/Irish actors who do bland "American" accent- I can detect it immediately because it sounds like no American accent at all.
I concur it’s Savannah. The guys at the supper club all sound like that…
"The Foghorn Leghorn accent does exist."
I'm quite familiar with both Charleston and Savannah, and I've never heard anyone, native or not, talk like Mel Blanc doing Foghorn Leghorn. an animation character modelled on Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a character created for Fred Allen's radio show and voiced by Kenny Delmar, a Boston Yankee. And so the wheel keeps turning.
"It is lowland Southern, think Savannah or Charleston."
The term is low country, a cultural complex endemic to the seacoasts of the Carolinas and Georgia, embracing everything from carpentry to cuisine, but to outsiders, it's mostly the food, much like Acadian culture is more than jambalaya. There are a variety of accents and dialects, ranging from Gullah to Hoi Toide. Thanks to the racial preoccupations of Northern elites, Gullah is far more familiar to most Americans, since it belongs to the descendants of West African slaves. Hoi Toide, the native dialect of North Carolina's Outer Banks, gets its name from how its speakers pronounce "high tide", a speech pattern descended from the accents of England's West Country. Think of caricatured pirate talk, and you're in the neighborhood.
New Yorkers like to think of themselves as cosmopolitans, but they are, by and large, the most provincial Americans.
Reminds me of our friend Hillary: "I don't feel no ways tahrd."
wild chicken said...
Nothing is more fake southern than the male country music singers now. They all sound like the same guy, like it's the Nashville studio accent...
11/8/25, 10:32 AM
Haha, totally agree. The whiny, nasal twang of some kind of southern drawl, just awful. That and the music, the tunes sound like some leftover pop-rock crap. Country Music today is neither, in my estimation.
New Yorkers like to think of themselves as cosmopolitans, but they are, by and large, the most provincial Americans.
With the shittiest accent, oddly enough.
There are four distinct Southern accents in Alabama alone. I don’t sound anything like someone from Mobile and the peeps in Birmingham sound completely different from old school Montgomery folk (mon-GOHM’ree).
I was born in south Texas and had an accent when we moved to California when I was 10. I wanted to fit in so I worked at sounding like my classmates.
We visited Austin a few years ago and I was really surprised by how little accent the people I ran into had.
Either I had a lot less accent than I imagined I did at 20 or the south Texans of today have lost most of theirs.
I make a point of seeing everything Billy Bob does. He’s the best actor around as far as I’m concerned.
That's because Austin isn't populated by South Texans anymore.
I grew up in the northeast with five years in the UK. First lived in the South when we moved to Richmond Virginia for seminary. Five years later moved to south Louisiana.
I've learned there is no such thing as a southern accent. There are southern accents. Sometimes watch a show or movie set in New Orleans and I think "are you serious??? that's not how they talk".
Just an old country lawyer said...
"People who talk about the Southern accent don't know what they are talking about. It all depends upon class, race and location of the speaker."
I was born in Panama City, Fla.in 1951. Moved to Greenville, Miss. at at 5. moved to San Antonio, Tx. at 14 moved to Kansas City, Mo. where my parents were from. When I enrolled in public school in KC I was sent to a speech lab twice a week. So I'm sitting around twice a week with five fellow students with lisp and studers reading text into a tape recorder for the therapist. One day the class had a sub. After reading the text into the recorder the sub asked me were I grew up. I told her, she handed me a note to take to the front office, the front office gave me a note for my home room teacher. The therapy was done.
I wish I could take credit for this description of current country music, but I can't: bro-country hip pop. But then, I used to listen to Mickey Gilley and suchlike.
They never expect the black actors to talk like slaves.
"Country Music today is neither, in my estimation."
As they say in West Texas, all hat and no cattle.
In about 1965 a nice lady came out to the house with a tape recorder. She was a speech therapist (from the clinic that eventually became the graduate UM Dept of AUSLP where I ran the library for some years in the late 70s-early 80s but I digress).
Anyway, my next brother had a bad speech impediment, which was corrected over a few months IIRC, and we all got introduced to the wonders of modern recording technology.
When I heard what I sounded like, it was embarrassing as hell, and from that moment I worked hard to minimize the 'neck delivery, and by high school was often chosen to read in class.
Most of the imported faculty I ended up colleaguing with at UM didn't know I was a local--which led to some interesting insights.
Thank you Quasetor, I was about to say everything you just did with some real live contempt. If you want to heal low country southern listen to “For Free” by the Pinebox Dwellers. Great, lovely song.
"I was about to say everything you just did with some real live contempt."
Lumping the dialects (very plural) of Savanah and Charleston is a mistake. The Charlestonian accent, per se, owes much to 17th-century Poitevin–Saintongeais via the Huguenots settled there under James II.
Okay, Northern midwest guy that I am, the only thing that I really know is a Minnesota accent (of which, I can't quite seem to rid myself of).
But as actors go, I thought the best southern accent I ever heard was from Slim Pickens - but he was a Californian!
On BBT, first of all kudos to him for sporting a "Knucklehead's Saloon" tee shirt - great fun place in KC. Kansas City in my mind is a pretty cool town in that it's equal parts Midwestern, Southern and Western. And in my view you can hear that in the way that they speak.
Also, BBT is I think a pretty fun actor to watch -but kind of the same most of the time. I saw season one of Landman, and I thought that the writing got worse and worse by the episode.
And "back in the day", THE Hollywood accent (that was sometimes used and sometime's kind of erased, was the mid-atlantic accent. which still sounds great if you can find it any more. Think: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jackie Kennedy or William F. Buckley. I'd go to a therapist to sound like that.
Vogt: “ BBT is I think a pretty fun actor to watch -but kind of the same most of the time.”
He comes right out with that in the interview- says that he basically plays all his roles the same. CC, JSM
And In my view the worst accent out there is the southern Milwaukee accent. It pulls together the lowest parts of both the Chicago (southern Chicago) and Minnesota (say St. Cloud) and glues them together. Sorry, but I can hear it and I don't like it.
Rick67: “ Sometimes watch a show or movie set in New Orleans and I think "are you serious??? that's not how they talk".”
Yes, whenever I go to NOLA I think the natives sound like Archie Bunker. At first I conjectured there is some NYC-NOLA retirement ratline. But on further research, it’s just because both are port cities with many of the same groups of immigrants over the years. CC, JSM
The problem my husband and I had with Landman was that if any company lost however many people as they did in their first few episodes, they'd be sued out of existence and shut down by the government.
I will say that one rig I worked on as a mudlogger, way back in the late 1980s in the Central Valley of California,was the envy of every roughneck because even though the toolpusher - the rig boss - was a hardass, no one ever got hurt on his rig - he insisted on constant maintenance. If you weren't doing something else, you were painting. (Painting protects metal, which protects you AND keeps you aware of every bolt and rail and step. I didn't have to do rig maintenance - mudloggers don't work for the rig company - but I surely appreciated Cotton's commitment to a safe working environment.)
On the other hand, there was another rig I was on where, once, out of the clear blue, one of the tongs* just suddenly swung from one side of the rig floor to another, narrowly missing several roughnecks.
* These are like giant pipe wrenches, suspended by thick chains from high above the rig floor. On the onshore rigs of that size of those days (offshore rigs might already have automated this - I never worked offshore - but the big geothermal rigs in The Geysers that went to something like 30,000 feet used the same system), one length of drill pipe was screwed onto another using two of these, moved into place by two roughnecks; they clamped into the drill pipe, one above and one below the joint, and pulled in opposite directions. More or less. It's hard to explain, easy to understand when you see it. The point is, they were the size of a car engine block and could easily kill you if they weren't secured.
The fog horn leghorn accent does exist, but it’s not as extreme as it appears to be - several commenters have noted the character makes the accent seem one dimensional. It’s much more than that and has some real depth. Mentioned also is Savannah. That’s definitely a place I’d associate with that classic, I’d call it melodious, accent.
South Carolina former governor and longtime Senator, the late Fritz Hollings, was about as close to a real life Foghorn as there ever was. He had a melodious voice and was fun to listen to.
What is this Southern accent of which you speak? Does it include a Teas twang? Or is it some Cajun just out of the swamp. A Virginian going to the cotillion. Maybe the West Virginian auto mechanic....
There are wide and varying accents across the south.
Actors drive my Alabama born wife crazy. Especially when she sees a movie scene where two southern family members speak. One will choose an over the top Scarlett O'Hara while the other does the Arkansas hill billy, trailer park trash stereotype.
Mass media has toned the differences down over the years. But the multitudes remain.
"Reminds me of our friend Hillary: "I don't feel no ways tahrd."'
If she runs again she could say, "Reminds me of our friend Hillary: "I don't feel no ways re-tahrd."
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.