Casting Conversations: Notes from a Danish Actress with an American Voice
- Liv Hansen
- Jul 4
- 2 min read
I’ve had casting conversations where someone pauses and says, “You’re Danish?” Sometimes there’s a look at the CV. Sometimes just a quiet, curious pause.
I’ve played Canadian officers, American nurses, and a few characters without a fixed place. All in English. Most in what they’d call an American accent.
For me, it’s simply how I speak.
A Voice That Stayed
I didn’t train into this voice. I lived into it. A year of high school on the West Coast of the U.S. shifted how I spoke. I didn’t set out to keep the accent, but it stayed. Over time, it became the voice I worked in. And eventually, it became part of how I get cast - something I wrote more about in this earlier piece.
Not in a deliberate way—there’s no trick to it. Just a voice that, for better or worse, doesn’t quite match what people expect when they read Danish actress on a casting brief.
Where the Voice Lives
On a Canadian film set, the boom operator assumed I was local. On a voiceover job, the note was: “Let’s do the U.S. take first. ”When I’m taping for roles here in Denmark or the UK—ones that sit somewhere between Los Angeles and Standard American—the voice tends to fit.
At some point, I stopped explaining it. It’s not a character choice, the way it is when I shift into a London accent. It’s not a trick. It’s simply the voice I use—because it’s the voice I have. And most of my work lives there now.
The industry is full of assumptions—about how we’re meant to sound, where we’re from, how we fit. Sometimes the most effective thing you can do is quietly break those patterns: do the work, let it speak, and trust that someone on the other side will see it.
That’s the approach I take.
And when the questions come—about the accent, the background, the in-between space I occupy—I usually just say I’m from Copenhagen. And then I get on with the work.
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