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This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

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Fake Nationality

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Sean_Connery_X4_5593.jpg
Sean Connery clockwise from top right: Egyptian (dressed as a Spaniard), Irish, Scottish, and Japanese James Bond.note 

Chandler: Alright boys, I confess. I was Abie the fish peddler.
Ravelli: How did you get to be Roscoe W. Chandler?
Chandler: Say, how did you get to be an Italian?
Ravelli: Never mind. Whose confession is this?
— Animal Crackers

When an actor plays a native of a nationality or area other than their own. Not counting those actors who play an extraterrestrial, who are never from the same place as their character. Probably. Nowadays can be known as Colorblind Casting (though that focuses more on the actor and character's race than their nationality).

Israeli Jewish and Arab actors tend to wind up playing each other quite frequently (though Israeli-for-Arab is more common than the other way around). Gung-ho movies made during World War II featured every kind of Asian except Japanese, since the Japanese-American actors were otherwise occupied. Many Nazi characters were played by Jewish actors, with some of the actors being European Jews who fled Nazi persecution. And very few Russian characters during the Cold War were played by native Russians. For foreign actors who are frequently employed to play foreign characters, see Plays Great Ethnics.

This is much more common in voice-acting because the actor's appearance is irrelevant, and a good voice actor can hide their accent or imitate well a foreign one.

The Queen's Latin is a related trope where characters in Ancient Grome or other classical-to-medieval settings are usually played by Brits, no matter what part of Europe they're actually from. See also: Fauxreigner where the character is pretending to be a nationality they aren't (or acting more stereotypical than they actually usually do).

If you are actually from the area in question, you may remember one or more of these examples as "That foreigner with a strange accent. Where are they supposed to be from?" On the other hand, some actors are really good at it. An added complication is that human appearance varies even within nationalities and ethnicities. As a result when playing a historical character the foreigner might have been selected because they greatly resembled the original.

An actor who often does this well Plays Great Ethnics. When done poorly, it can result in Questionable Casting. Compare Irony as She Is Cast.

See Pass Fail when, for whatever reason, the actor isn't convincing as another nationality.

Sub-tropes:

Examples:

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    Multiple examples 
  • As mentioned above in the article, almost any fictional work set in Ancient Rome will invariably cast British actors as Romans. HBO's Rome in particular took this to the next level by not only casting British and Irish actors for all the Romans, but bringing a few actual Italians in... to play Germanic and Celtic characters. The same treatment also extends to Greek and Egyptian characters in other media with very few exceptions.
  • Good luck trying to find any actual Russians playing Russian characters in Western media. It's so common that there is an entire trope focusing on non-Russian actors in the roles of Russians and occasionally other nationalities that were part of the Soviet Union or satellites to it (e.g. Ukrainian, Georgian etc.).
  • Films based on The Bible tend not to have Middle Eastern actors, at least for the lead roles. This is probably because most Christians and Jews are non-Middle Eastern (or in the case of Jews, sometimes seem not to be), and people expect to see their spiritual forebears portrayed as if they were their ethnic forebears too.

    Advertising 
  • In 1991, Old Milwaukee Beer had a series of commercials featuring the "Swedish Bikini Team". The commercials played on the Sexy Scandinavian stereotype and every girl on the team was blonde, busty, and beautiful. In reality, the team was made up entirely of American models wearing platinum blonde wigs.
  • The Crying Indian was actually Sicilian. In this case however, it was a deliberate deception on the part of the actor, "Iron Eyes Cody" (Espera Oscar de Corti) rather than a producer or casting agent's decision.
  • Miss Cleo, the popular Psychic Readers Network spokeswoman, claimed to be a mystical shaman from Jamaica. Despite a notoriously over-the-top and inconsistent Jamaican accent, it wasn't common knowledge that she was actually American, born and raised in Los Angeles, until her employer was sued by the FTC in 2002.
  • In 2006, Outback Steakhouse made a series of commercials in New Zealand starring Jemaine Clement, a native New Zealander, doing an Australian accent. Served as sort of an in-joke for his family since his father actually is Australian.

    Anime and Manga 
  • Whenever an anime features characters who aren't Japanese, all of the voice actors are still Japanese. The few half-foreign and foreign voice actors there are in Japan aren't limited to playing foreigners. In dubs into other languages, voice actors likewise aren't limited by their nationality or ethnicity.

    Films — Animation 
  • The Emperor's New Groove: None of the characters are voiced by actual Peruvians, with most voiced by white people (Cuzco, Pacha, Kronk) or for Eartha Kitt who voiced Yzma who's black.
  • Pocahontas: Disney used Native American actors as the voice talent for the main Native American characters (Irene Bedard, Michelle St. John and Russell Means). But of course they cast Mel Gibson as the Englishman John Smith. The main (British) villain is also played by an American, David Ogden Stiers.
  • Mulan at least has three Chinese-Americans (Mulan, Shang, and Chi-Fu), otherwise Mushu is African-American, Shan Yu is Irish-Puerto Rican, Fa Zhou is Korean-American, Yao is Jewish-American, Chien-Po, Ling, the head Ancestor, and the Emperor are Japanese-American, Mulan's singing voice actor is Filipina, and Shang's singing voice actor is a white American.
  • The Prince of Egypt has Jewish voice actors for Aaron (Jeff Goldblum) and Yocheved (Ofra Haza), but all the other characters are non-Jewish and non-Egyptian (Miriam's singing voice and her younger voice are provided by Jewish actresses Sally Dworsky and Eden Riegel, respectively).
  • Turning Red: While otherwise doing a good job at averting this, there are still some non-Canadian actors, such as the Americans James Hong, Ava Morse, and Lori Tan Chinn. Additionally, Sandra Oh (Ming) is Korean Canadian, not Chinese Canadian.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Belgium and France have their own equivalent of Limey Goes to Hollywood, in that a lot of Belgian actors are cast in French films as French characters (overwhelmingly Walloons, who can speak French without accent), including the likes of Marie Gillain, Cécile de France, Jérémie Renier, Émilie Dequenne, Benoît Poelvoorde, Déborah François, Bouli Lanners, Yolande Moreau etc.
  • Big Brother (2018): Zufa is Pakistani. His actor, Gordon Lau, is half-Nigerian and half-Hong Konger.
  • In High School Musical, Vanessa Hudgens, who is of Filipino, Irish, Spanish, Chinese, and Native American descent portrays Mexican-American Gabriella Montes.
  • Cliff Curtis, a New Zealander-Maori actor, is the epitome of this trope. has played characters who were Indian, Arab, Latino, Samoan, lightskin African-American etc. He has been described as Hollywood's "go-to guy" for ethnic portrayals.
  • The British-Jewish Sacha Baron Cohen has done this a lot and used it in his movies:
    • Borat: He's Kazakhstani. The "Kazakh" village in the movie is in Romania, as are the extras (who are Roma, or "Gypsies") playing Borat's family. His cameraman Azamat, was played be Ken Davitian, who is of Armenian descent.
    • In Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Borat does this In-Universe, pretending to be a (very stereotypical) American. His co-star Maria Bakalova, who plays his daughter, is Bulgarian.
    • Bruno: An Austrian
    • Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby: He plays a Frenchman.
  • Spectacularly averted by the main cast in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Nearly every character in this cast of Funny Foreigners is played by an actor or actress of their own nationality. Stuart Whitman plays the spirited Combat Pragmatist American pilot Orvil, James Fox is the stuffy British eccentric Richard, Alberto Sordi is the devout and boisterous Italian Catholic, Gert Fröbe is the efficiency-obsessed Prussian, Jean-Pierre Cassel is the suave Frenchman more interested in wooing beautiful women than actually competing, and Yujiro Ishihara plays... an intelligent and articulate Japanese pilot with a love of fine scotch whiskey.
  • Often crossed over with Creator's Culture Carryover in Canadian "tax shelter films" of the 1970s and 80s, encompassing everything from Black Christmas (1974), to much of David Cronenberg's early filmography. These films were usually set in the United States, since the films intended audience was there. Thus, the mostly-Canadian cast would be playing Americans, usually not even attempting to cover up their native accents. In rare cases where these films were explicitly set in Canada, they would nonetheless cast American or British leads in order to widen the film's international appeal. Thus, Americans would be playing Canadians.
  • Jin Yan was one of the most famous actors of early Chinese cinema, appearing in Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, Wild Rose (1932), and many other productions over a span of 30 years, 1928-1958. He was called the "Film Emperor". He was Korean.
  • The 2000 Korean movie Joint Security Area:
    • Korean actress Yeong-ae Lee plays Swiss army Major Sophie E. Jean, who's supposed to have grown up in Switzerland. The film includes some daring stunt linguistics with Sophie opposite a more senior Swiss officer, played by Christoph Hofrichter (who is German). For some reason, they speak mainly English. He gives a reasonable approximation of a Swiss German accent. She just has a thick Korean accent.
    • The same movie has a Swedish officer played by a German actor. The looks work, the accent doesn't.
  • The Malay Chronicles: Bloodlines, a 2010s Malaysian epic film, has a Roman Prince played by Gavin Steinhouse, an Australian actor. In fact, all the Romans who appeared in the film are Australians, loaned by a boarding school in Kuala Lumpur where the students are more than eager to be part of an epic film. In a slightly more downplayed example, the film also has a Chinese admiral played by Craig Fong, a Britian-born Chinese.
  • Very cleverly and subtly spoofed in the Jim Carrey film The Majestic, set in the 1950s. In the movie-within-the-movie, Sand Pirates of the Sahara, the villain is "The Evil but Handsome Prince Khalid" who is played by B-movie actor "Ramon Jamon". "Ramon Jamon" is played by Cliff Curtis, a Polynesian Maori from New Zealand, who has made a career out of playing various ethnicities.
  • Peter Sellers played ...
  • In The Quiet American (1958), the Vietnamese heroine, Phuong, is played by Italian actress Giorgia Moll, and her sister by reputedly Algerian (actually French) actress Kerima. Likewise, the Viet Cong leader is played by Chinese-American actor Richard Loo.
    • The 2002 remake also casts a Chinese-American actor (Tzi Ma) as the Viet Cong character, as well as the Croatian Rade Šerbedžija as a French police inspector.
  • Mickey Rooney as Holly's awfully stereotyped, Yellow Face Japanese neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany's. While he claimed in an interview that East Asians found his portrayal funny, he later expressed regret and stated that he wouldn't have done the role if he knew people would be offended in the long term.
  • Ben Kingsley, a Brit of Indian ancestry, has played...
  • The American actor Tony Shalhoub, who is of Lebanese descent, is often hired to play Italians (Wings, Big Night, Cars) due to his curly dark hair and swarthy Mediterranean features.
    • Lampshaded in a Wings episode: "Joe, please explain to the nice man with the gun that I am not a Libyan terrorist."
    • Shalhoub memorably created an entire language and accent for his cab-driver character in the comedy film Quick Change. (Or it would be memorable if anyone had ever seen the flick.)
    • Shalhoub's character of Fred Kwan spoofed this practice in Galaxy Quest when he mentioned that Kwan is a stage name used to fit his character of Tech Sergeant Chen's Asian nationality. Interestingly, when the Thermians are naming the crew, he narrows his eyes when his character's name is spoken. Apparently, that's supposed to be enough to make him seem Chinese.
  • 1999's The Mummy is a festival of Fake Nationality. Its Egyptian/Arabic characters include Ardeth Bey (portrayed by Israeli Oded Fehr), professor Terrance Bey (Erick Avari, British-Indian), Gad Hassan (Omid Djalili, British-Iranian), and of course its titular mummy Imhotep, played by Arnold Vosloo (Afrikaner South African) as well as his ancient girlfriend Anck Su Namun (Patricia Velasquez, Venezuelan). The Mummy Returns adds in The Scorpion King, played by Dwayne Johnson (Samoan–Black Canadian–American).
    • It gets better: Arab-British Evelyn Carnahan (she states her mother was Egyptian) is played by Jewish-English actress Rachel Weisz, while her brother (presumably from the same mother) is played by Scottish actor John Hannah, and American Rick O'Connell, is played by Canadian Brendan Fraser. Fehr himself is something of an expert in Fake Nationality, as he also played Saudi terror mastermind Faris Al-Farik in the TV show Sleeper Cell. His character in Sleeper Cell even lampshades this by pretending to be Jewish.
    • There's also Benny, who according to supplemental materials is supposed to be Hungarian, is played by Chicago-born Irish-American Kevin J. O'Connor.
  • The 2017 The Mummy again has a mummy that is African but not Egyptian, with Princess Ahmahnet played by an Algerian, Sofia Boutella.
  • The 2018 film The Lie has Canadian actors Cas Anvar and Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs. Anvar's character Sam is established to be of Pakistani origin. Anvar is the son of Iranian parents. Yet the actress playing his daughter is indigenous. Jacobs was born in Kahnawa:ke Mohawk territory.
  • Italian-American Al Pacino as Cuban Tony Montana in Scarface (1983), although there were some actual Cuban (Steven Bauer) and other Latino actors. To be fair, in the credits, they denounce all the criminal acts in the film, and state that Cubans are hard-working people.
  • Yet another Israeli, Mark Ivanir, a Soviet-born Russian Jewish immigrant, is a master of Fake Nationality. A partial list follows: a Pole in Schindler's List, a French mercenary in Walker Texas Ranger, a German in Monk, a Yugoslavian in The Terminal, and a Greek in Dollhouse.
  • In Moonstruck, the Italian-American Castorini family includes Cher (Armenian-American), Olympia Dukakis (Greek-American), and Feodor Chaliapin (Russian).
  • The Mask of Zorro gives us Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones (both Welsh) as the original Don Diego and his daughter. Spanish-born Antonio Banderas plays a Mexican... who goes undercover as a Spaniard. The antagonists of the film - evil governor Don Rafael Montero (probably Spanish as it takes place during the war of independence) - and its sequel - French Jerk Count Armand - are played by Englishmen.
  • The Spanish Antonio Banderas:
    • Plays a Mexican again in Desperado and its sequel, in which he played El Mariachi.
    • Plays a Chilean in The 33, where in spite of being about Chilean miners who got trapped after a collapse, only two actors are from the country (meanwhile there are Americans, Colombians, Mexicans, a Frenchwoman and a Brazilian).
  • In the first and third Die Hard movies, Englishmen Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons played German terrorist brothers Hans and Simon Gruber. A scene was added to the first film when the producers discovered how well Rickman could also fake an American accent.
  • Highlander: The Scottish Sean Connery plays an Egyptian masquerading as a Scotsman. Frenchman Christopher Lambert plays a Scotsman and tries his best to hide his accent, which gets called out in the film. The Kurgan, hailing from Neolithic Russia, is played by an American, Clancy Brown.
  • Sean Connery:
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger's roles usually don't bother explaining his accent, but some explanations differ from his actual Austrian-American background:
  • In the film The Peacemaker, with George Clooney, the Bosnian terrorist trying to nuke the United Nations building is played by Marcel Iureº, a Romanian.
  • Jean-Claude Van Damme is another actor that's prone to playing other nationalities than his own Belgian, especially American. Much like Arnold, he rarely bothers with anything but his own Belgian accent, even when playing American Colonel Guile in the Street Fighter movie.
    • Very few Belgians have the 'Belgian accents' depicted in movies. Most Belgian Francophones have an accent similar to that of Northern France (not including Paris). In Belgium, the stereotypical 'Belgian accent' tends to be either played for laughs or bashed mercilessly; the few people who do have this accent often face prejudice. Van Damme has used a few variations of his French accent including Cajun (Universal Soldier, Hard Target) or French-Canadian (Sudden Death). Not mentioning Legionnaire, where he is French.
    • In Double Impact he plays twins of who were orphaned at birth by gangsters who killed their British parents. The French accent of both is explained by one twin baby being taken in and raised by French nuns (in Hong Kong!) while the other was taken to France to hide him from the gangsters, and raised there.
  • Erick Avari, an Indian who grew up in the Himalayan foothills, has played members of over 24 nationalities, including ancient Egyptian in both the original Stargate movie and in Stargate SG-1.
  • Vin Diesel's indeterminate ethnic phenotype allows him to convincingly play many different nationalities, from Italian-American to ancient Carthaginian.
  • Peter Stormare, a Swede, has made a career out of playing just about every European nationality, from Spanish to Russian; has also been Fake American and even Fake Mexican.
  • James Bond has many examples.
  • American Don Cheadle played a Fake Rwandan in the movie Hotel Rwanda. And got an Oscar nomination for it.
  • 300:
    • Very few members of the Persian army even look Persian, much less are played by Persians. Xerxes is played by a Brazillian.
    • The Spartans are played predominantly by British and Irish actors rather than Greeks. They speak the Queen's Latin. Fittingly, when Spartan dialogue in classic literature was translated into English, it was usually given a Scottish Funetik Aksent to evoke the similar stereotypes embodied by the Spartans and Scots in their respective cultures.
  • Once Upon a Time in America is about Jewish-American mobsters in the 1920s and 30s yet almost none of the characters are played by actual Jewish actors, with the exceptions of Larry Rapp as Moe, Estelle Harris as Peggy's mother, and Jennifer Connelly as young Deborah.
  • Sniper 2 had Tom Berenger as the titular sniper battling villainous Hungarian-speaking Serbs in Cuban-style military uniforms through the streets of Budapest, Serbia (the actual capital is Belgrade, Budapest is the capital of Hungary). Three cheers for looking up basic facts on the Internet...
  • In Behind Enemy Lines, all of the Serbian characters were portrayed by Croatian actors.
  • Gerard Butler, a Scot, as Attila the Hun, who historically would have come from as far East as modern Mongolia, in the dramatized Attila.
  • The Conqueror has John Wayne playing Genghis Khan.
  • Subverted by Peter MacNicol's character Janosz in Ghostbusters II: He spouts a bizarre accent throughout the movie, and when someone finally asks him where he's from, he replies in confusion: "The upper vest side."
  • Pierce Brosnan is so well known for playing James Bond that many people are surprised to find out he is actually Irish (and not British). Brosnan himself seems to have gotten tired of this and most of his more recent films have him play Irish, or Irish-American, or simply an Irish accented American. Lampshaded in After the Sunset:
    Woody Harrelson: It's okay to be happy to see me. Just because you're English doesn't mean you need to hide your emotions.
    Pierce Brosnan: I'm Irish. We let people know how we feel. Now f*ck off.
  • Cary Elwes, an Englishman, plays Americans in Twister, Kiss the Girls and Hot Shots!.
  • Young Frankenstein has three Transylvanian characters (Transylvania is part of Romania). In ascending order: Inga (Teri Garr, American), Frau Blucher [WHINNY] (Cloris Leachman, American) and Inspector Kemp (Kenneth Mars, American). Plus all the folks playing the villagers.
  • You Don't Mess with the Zohan:
    • The American Adam Sandler plays the Israeli titular character. Though it's somewhat of a subversion since like the character, he is Jewish.
    • Emmanuelle Chriqui, a Canadian of Sephardic (Jewish) Moroccan descent plays the Palestinian hair salon owner and Love Interest of Adam Sandler.
    • The Italian-American John Turturro plays a Palestinian terrorist.
    • Rob Schneider, an American of Filipino and Jewish descent, plays a Palestinian cab driver who bears a grudge against Zohan for taking his goat.
  • Jean Reno was born in Morocco to Spanish Andalusian parents who moved to France after World War II and is commonly known as a French actor. Apparently, that range has driven producers to see fit to cast him as Italian (in The Professional), German (in Mission: Impossible) and Belgian (in Hotel Rwanda). He also played an Italian (Enzo) in The Big Blue (which was produced in France). and an Iraqi in the Italian film, The Tiger and the Snow.
  • Famke Janssen has never played a Dutch character.
  • Rutger Hauer only played Dutch characters while working in his native Netherlands, never in Hollywood.
  • Juliette Binoche played a Bosnian woman in Anthony Minghella's Breaking And Entering, occasionally speaking her "native language" with a strong French accent. She was also the French-accented Czech (or Slovak?) Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
  • Rade Šerbedžija's international career has consisted of playing all kinds of fake nationalities, usually Russians (The Saint (1997), Mission: Impossible II, Snatch., Space Cowboys, 24), but he's also played a Czech (Duet), a Greek (The Truce), an Albanian (Taken 2), an Italian (Stigmata), and the Fake American homeless guy from Batman Begins. He's actually Croatian.
  • Russian Oleg Menshikov and Lithuanian Ingeborga Dapkunaite played a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Muslim, respectively, in Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness.
  • Christopher Lee played all kinds of fake nationalities, including Chinese. Being a prolific actor capable of speaking many languages helped. His favorite role he ever played was the Gujarati-born founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. And despite not being remotely South Asian, he pulled it off pretty well, mainly because he was a dead ringer◊ for Jinnah◊.
  • Jewish American Mandy Patinkin plays Inigo, a Spaniard, in The Princess Bride. Another Jewish American, Wallace Shawn, played Italian Vizzini, and wrestler/actor André the Giant, born in France to Bulgarian and Polish parents, played the Turk Fezzik.
  • Dark skinned, dark-haired Jewish American New Yorker Eli Wallach made a career out of playing all kinds of darker white characters and people of color, usually pulling it off very well. He has played:
  • In Ramona and Beezus, Selena Gomez, who is of Mexican and Italian descent, portrays fully-white Beezus.
  • The Welsh actor Hugh Griffith played various English characters in Shakespearean theater and English and French characters on film. He had a tour de force performance as the Arab Sheikh Ilderim in Ben-Hur (1959) and was nominated for a Tony for playing American Southerner W.O. Gant in Look Homeward Angel. He did get to play Welshmen now and then.
  • John Rhys-Davies, the Anglo-Welsh actor, has played a Portuguese sea captain (Rodrigues in Shogun), an Egyptian (Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark), a Frenchman (Porthos in two different productions, and a Norman knight in one production of Ivanhoe), a Dwarf, Americans, Leonardo da Vinci (on Star Trek: Voyager) and occasionally a generic Englishman. Despite all this, he's still respectful of his heritage and has even performed in Welsh for TV. He especially insists he's English in several Sliders episodes. Once, when he's mistaken for Luciano Pavarotti, and again when he's asked by Rembrandt if he can fish. "I'm English. We invented fishing."
  • While we're in Indiana Jones: Alison Doody said she didn't expect to play Elsa in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, "since they were asking for an Austrian 30-year-old, not an Irish 22-year-old". Also, the only villain with his or her own nationality is Mola Ram: Paul Freeman and Ronald Lacey are British, Belloq is French and Toht is German; Julian Glover is British, Donovan is American (but considering he played a Greek James Bond villain...); and Cate Blanchett is Australian, Irina Spalko is Soviet - Ukraine, actually.
    • Glover's (natural?) Scottish-sounding accent slips in a scene near the end, when he is saying: "The Nazis want to write themselves into the Grail legend....take on the world." I don't think this hurts the film too much; I just took it to mean that Donovan either was an immigrant or had one or two foreign-born parents, and so grew up with that accent before he tried to change it.
  • Nearly every Spaghetti Western ever filmed has Spaniards playing Mexicans, since they were shot in Spain and Spanish actors were more readily available than genuine Mexicans. Also, for obvious reasons, Italians played characters from both sides of the border. And then, in a class by himself, we have New Yorker [Eli Wallach as Tuco Ramirez, "The Ugly".
  • Alfred Molina is a London-born actor whose father and mother are from Spain and Italy, respectively. He has played:
  • Gary Oldman, a famous British actor, has played numerous American characters over the years (i.e. JFK, The Professional, The Fifth Element and The Dark Knight Trilogy) as well as Russian (Air Force One), Romanian/Transylvanian (Bram Stoker's Dracula), German (Immortal Beloved) and Scandinavian (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead).
  • British actor and director Kenneth Branagh not only is often cast as American, he also played the Fake Russian Big Bads in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Tenet, Germans from the Third Reich in Valkyrie and Conspiracy (2001) and the Danish physician Nils Bohr in Oppenheimer. He also stars as Belgian derective Hercule Poirot in a series of films based on the books by Agatha Christie.
  • The 1998 adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask featured an eclectic array of fake Frenchmen. Most notable were Englishman Jeremy Irons as Aramis, Irishman Gabriel Byrne as D'Artagnan, American John Malkovich as Athos, American Peter Sarsgaard as his son, and American Leonardo DiCaprio as King Louis XIV, none of whom particularly bothered to disguise their country of origin. This was made particularly noticeable by having an actual Frenchman, Gérard Depardieu, round out the cast. Hilariously, the only accents that did match were John Malkovich and Peter Sarsgaard, playing father and son, and only because both men happen to hail from St. Louis.
  • In Time Regained, John Malkovich plays Baron de Charlus, entirely in French, going the trope one better. Some reviewers noted that the halting style of a non-native speaker worked in his favor for a scene late in the film, in its present, where Charlus has gone senile.
  • Conversely, Jeremy Irons' turn in the title role in Swann in Love almost two decades earlier was dubbed into French, along with that of the Italian who played Odette, because neither of them spoke the language well enough.
  • John Malkovich played le Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons but then topped his two French characters by playing the King of France Charles VII in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.
  • He also played Uruguayan Carlitos at the beginning of Alive.
  • Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård has played characters who are German (conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler in Taking Sides), Saxon (Cerdic in King Arthur (2004)), ambiguously French (Lambeau in Good Will Hunting), presumably British (Bootstrap Bill Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean), and Spanish (Francisco de Goya in Goya's Ghosts). He also has several Fake Russians on his resume.
  • An odd aversion occurred in the film Shattered Glass. The real Kambiz Foroohar is Iranian-American. Upon watching himself portrayed in the movie, he posted an entry on a popular Iranian-American blog lamenting that although he was the first Iranian character depicted on film after 9/11, he had been portrayed as "generic ethnic guy", by an actor he had been told by the film's producers was Indian-Canadian. The "Indian-Canadian" actor in question then wrote into the same blog and clarified that actually, he was Iranian as well. Awkward...
  • Tony Randall played the titular Chinese wizard in 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Although as the title also implies, the character can appear in pretty much whatever form he wants.
  • X-Men Film Series:
    • Halle Berry attempted a strange Kenyan accent for Storm (an actual African) in the first X-Men film, although she dropped it after this film.note  Canadian Wolverine is played by an Australian; Magneto (Polish) is played by an Englishman; German Nightcrawler is Scottish.
    • X-Men: First Class features German-Irish Michael Fassbender as Magneto (who according to the comics is either German or Polish, but definitely not Irish).
    • Played straight in The Wolverine with Korean Will Yun Lee playing Japanese Kenuichio Harada. Averted with all the other plot-important Japanese characters who are portrayed by actual Japanese actors.
    • X-Men: Days of Future Past has Mexican Adan Canto as Sunspot (Brazillian) and Canadian Brendan Pedder as Apocalypse (Egyptian).
    • X-Men: Apocalypse: The eponymous villain is now played by the Guatemalan-American Oscar Isaac, an Australian as Nightcrawler, and another American as a young Storm.
    • Despite the multiple British actors playing American characters throughout the X-Men movies, ironically the one British X-Man, Psylocke, has only been played by American actresses: Meiling Meloncon in X-Men: The Last Stand and Olivia Munn in Apocalpse. (though the latter's Asian heritage fits how Psylocke is effectively in a Japanese woman's body)
    • Logan: Laura is the child of an unknown Mexican woman who was impregnated with Logan's genetic material. She's played by Dafne Keen, who is mixed English and Spanish.
    • The New Mutants has Brazilian Alice Braga as the American of Puerto Rican descent Cecilia Reyes.
  • The Australian who played Wolverine, Hugh Jackman, has been a Fake Brit (Kate & Leopold, The Prestige, a voice role in Flushed Away), Fake American (most of his roles, such as Swordfish), Dutch (if Van Helsing is like Van Helsing) and French (Les Misérables (2012)). Probably his only post-Wolverine roles featuring his true nationality are, appropriatedly, Australia and as the Australian Easter Bunny in Rise of the Guardians.
  • In Short Circuit and its sequel, Fisher Stevens (an American Jew) plays the Indian-American Ben in brownface.
  • The English Patient has Juliette Binoche (French) as Hana (French-Canadian); Willem Dafoe (US American) as Caravaggio (Canadian); and Naveen Andrews (British Indian) as Kip (an Indian Sikh). Ralph Fiennes, who plays the title (Hungarian) character, is English.
  • Mighty Joe Young: Naveen Andrews plays an African. Add an Arab, that's three ethnicities by the same guy.
  • Elsewhere, Willem Dafoe has played a Mexican in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Jesus in The Last Temptationof Christ.
  • The early '80s film Night Crossing, about a family that escaped East Germany by balloon, featured British actors in the main adult roles, Americans as the kids, and Germans in practically every other role.
  • Slumdog Millionaire's titular Mumbai "slumdog" is played by (ethnically Indian) Briton Dev Patel.
  • The pan-Scandinavian movie I Am Dina, set in nineteenth century rural Norway, featured illustrious actors from all three countries and then some - like Gérard Depardieu, playing one of the male leads. For the sake of realism (one assumes), it was decided to do this in English. The result was hotly debated, but the biggest irony was probably that the only English actor, Christopher Eccleston, was cast as a Russian.
  • This caused a mild uproar in the US (and a huge uproar in Asia) when Chinese actresses Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li and Chinese-Malaysian Michelle Yeoh were cast as Japanese characters in Memoirs of a Geisha. The film was Banned in China and Zhang stated that it was like an American faking a French accent while speaking Russian (they performed in English with fake Japanese accents).
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula:
    • Keanu Reeves (a Canadian of British, Chinese, Hawaiian and Portuguese descent) and Winona Ryder (an American Ashkenazi Jew) play British characters.
    • Like with many of his roles, Gary Oldman plays the Romanian Dracula.
    • Welshman Anthony Hopkins plays the Dutch Van Helsing.
  • The cast of the 2006 film adaptation of Perfume: Story of a Murderer has British actors/actresses, and German actresses playing Frenchmen/women. Only Dustin Hoffman, an American, was playing an Italian living in France.
  • 1900 is set in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna with a huge amount of characters. It's All-Star Cast includes American (Robert De Niro, Sterling Hayden, Burt Lancaster), French (Gérard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda), one lone Canadian (Donald Sutherland), and German actors playing the locals (Werner Bruhns, Anna Henkel-Grönemeyer, Ellen Schwiers).
  • The Godfather has several Italian-American characters played by non-Italian actors, including Marlon Brando (German, Dutch, Irish, English), James Caan (German-Jewish), Abe Vigoda (Russian Jewish), Richard Bright (Scottish), and Eli Wallach (Polish-Jewish). It also, ironically, stars Italian-American actor Alex Rocco as Kosher Nostra Moe Greene.
  • The 1978 film adaptation of The Boys from Brazil features Gregory Peck (American) as the German Josef Mengele and Laurence Olivier (British) as Austrian Jew Ezra Lieberman.
  • In Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, Kurdish Saladin is played by Syrian Arab Ghassan Massoud.
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy is another festival of Fake Nationality, mostly of British actors pretending to be American, such as Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, and Tom Wilkinson. Other Fake Americans include Irishmen Cillian Murphy and Liam Neeson (note: it was never stated Ducard was American, but Neeson uses an American accent), Dutch Rutger Hauer, and Australians Heath Ledger and Ben Mendelssohn. In fact, the only actual principal American actors on set were Morgan Freeman, Katie Holmes, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart. Singaporean Chinese actor Chin Han played the Chinese Lau, and French actress Beatric Rosen pulled a Fake Russian as Natascha, prima ballerina of the Moscow Ballet. The third film retcons Ducard as vaguely Middle Eastern, though he doesn't look the part. It's also possible he was simply an American in the employ of the warlord. And his daughter is played by a Frenchwoman who passes as Fake American. And from the same place comes Bane (half-British and half-Latin American in the comics), played by a Brit.
  • Irishman Liam Neeson also played a Scot in Rob Roy, a German in Schindler's List a Frenchman in Les Misérables (1998), and a (presumably) Spanish Jesuit in The Mission. He again played an American in the Taken series.
  • Meryl Streep has portrayed multiple nationalities other than her American one:
  • Audrey Hepburn, born to British and Dutch parents, played American (Breakfast at Tiffany's), Russian (War and Peace (1956)), French (Love in the Afternoon) Belgian (The Nun's Story), and Native American (The Unforgiven) characters.
  • Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet, both English, play Germans in The Reader with accents.
    • Fiennes played an Austrian in Schindler's List.
    • Fiennes played a Hungarian at least twice, both from the same era: in The English Patient, as noted above, and also in the less-well known Sunshine, which was about a Hungarian Jewish family during World War II.
    • And he plays another Central European (this time of unknown nationality) in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
  • Pete Postlethwaite plays Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects. Not much can be said about the character for certain due to an Unreliable Narrator, but the name sounds Japanese and the actor is very white. It could be a code name of course.
  • Most of Peter Lorre's (an Austrian-Hungarian Jew) career is built on this trope. A small list of the nationalities he was cast as:
    • Japanese (the Mr. Moto series) - although he reportedly refused heavy makeup and relying on stereotypes
    • Chinese (They Met In Bombay) - where he did wear heavy makeup and rely on stereotypes
    • French (Mad Love, Passage to Marseilles)
    • Russian (Background to Danger) - bizarrely, frequent costar Sydney Greenstreet (an Englishman) plays a German agent
    • Mexican (Secret Agent) - although another character states he's "not really a Mexican..."
    • German - innumerable movies made in WWII, with the then all-too-common irony of a Nazi character being played by a Jewish actor who fled Germany when Hitler came to power.
  • The Producers:
    • In the original film, Lee Meredith, an American actress from New Jersey, plays the Swedish Ulla. In an interview, she said that her use of stilted, formal Swedish, and her fake, vaguely Scandinavian accent, made Norwegians assume she was rural/small town Swedish, while the Swedes thought she was Norwegian.
    • In the 2005 musical remake, Ulla is played by Uma Thurman, who, although American-born, is at least half-Swedish.
  • Most of Lou Diamond Phillips' early roles were Mexican-American characters (La Bamba, Stand and Deliver, Young Guns), but his ancestry is quite mixed note . More recently, he has played both King Arthur and the King of Siam on stage.
  • The 1943 film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (which is about the Spanish Civil War) had all kinds of foreign actors playing Spanish characters: Swedish (Ingrid Bergman), Greek, Russian, Mexican, Maltese, German, Hungarian. There was one Spanish actor too.
  • Machete brings us American Steven Seagal as a Mexican drug lord. And no, he doesn't try at an accent.
  • Angels & Demons has quite a bit of this, notably Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer as the Italian Vittoria Vetra. The character of the camerlengo had his nationality changed from Italian to Irish in the film, where he is played by the Scottish Ewan McGregor.
  • The 2004 film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera has this all over the place. It is set in France, and it is assumed that most characters are French. While the Phantom's nationality and family background is never explicitly stated, it can be assumed that he probably wasn't Scottish like his actor Gerard Butler. The British Miranda Richardson plays the French Madame Giry, her daughter Meg is played also by a British actress (Page Three Stunna Jennifer Ellison), Christine Daae, of Swedish descent, is played by the American Emmy Rossum and the Italian diva Carlotta is played by the British Minnie Driver.
  • The little-known lowish-budget Christian film Hansie, about South African cricketer Hansie Cronjé, was shot almost entirely in South Africa, with some scenes intended to be in India; all the characters in the movie are either South African or Indian, and most if not all the actors, writers, etc., are South African. Inexplicably, Hansie Cronjé's wife, Bertha, is played by American actress Sarah Thompson. Her Afrikaans accent is, quite frankly, terrible to the point of causing the audience's ears to bleed (it's like something between Dutch and German and maybe a little Australian). To be fair, the Afrikaans accent can be described as something between Dutch, German and Australian, ... but not in the way she portrayed it. At all. But ja, at least she tried, hey. If it wasn't painfully obvious how hard she was trying, her accent would have fallen under As Long as It Sounds Foreign.
  • Most of the Tibetans in 2012 were not played by actual Tibetans: Tenzin is played by Singaporean Chinese actor Chin Han, and his brother Nima by Canadian Chinese actor Osric Chau. Also, the Croat-Danish actor Zlatko Buric portrays the Russian Yuri, and his also-Russian girlfriend Tamara is played by French actress Beatrice Rosen, who also pulled a Fake Russian in The Dark Knight.
  • A most absurd one in the Thai superhero film Mercury Man. The Big Bad is an Afghan terrorist named Osama bin Ali, but he is played by a Thai actor. No effort is made to change his appearance or voice to remotely sound Middle Eastern.
  • British actor Orlando Bloom has played:
    • American (Oregon) Drew Baylor in Elizabethtown.
    • American (North Carolina) Harris Parker in Main Street.
    • Scottish Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean.
    • Irish Australian Joe Byrne in Ned Kelly.
    • American Todd Blackburn in Black Hawk Down.
    • Cayman Island native Shy in Haven (but with his British accent).
    • Frenchman Balian in Kingdom of Heaven (again, with his British accent).
    • Played for laughs in the DVD extras of Knocked Up, where he participated in a skit in which Judd Apatow hired him for the male lead role (played in the movie by Seth Rogen) thinking he would use an American accent, which he refuses to do, leading Apatow to assume that he just can't. Bloom tries to play it off by saying that a British man can get a woman pregnant just as easily as an American man can.
  • Zoe Saldaña, who was born in New Jersey and spent her teen years in the Dominican Republic has played:
  • India-born British Vivien Leigh's most memorable roles were as a Southern Belle in both Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. The role of Scarlett O'Hara has also been played by England-born Joanne Whalley.
  • Troy (2004) featured Greek and other Mediterranean characters, but not a single Greek actor. A sampling:
  • The Brothers Grimm had Jonathan Pryce playing the French baddie, complete with a hilarious French accent.
    Gnl. Delatombe: Zis is what I call Victorhy!
  • Pat Morita's heavy Japanese accent in The Karate Kid is notable due to his natural American accent. Supposedly, he didn't have this accent during his first audition and was rejected as a result. He then went to his uncle, who coached him in the "proper" Japanese accent and came back for a second try.
  • Johnny Depp is this trope. Aside from his legendary portrayal of English pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, he's broken out the British accent for several roles; better still, in Don Juan de Marco, he played—ready for this?—an Italian-American who reinvented himself as a Mexican lothario—who speaks with a Castillian accent. He also did a Frenchman in Mortdecai.
    • He has claimed Native American ancestry.
  • Pick an old Western with Indians in it. Any of them. Mostly portrayed by Jews and Italians in brownface, for the characteristic plains Indian big nose (this also leads to unusual blue-eyed Indian◊, such as the one from The Searchers). More recently, Asian actors have had such roles, as evidenced by Brotherhood of the Wolf. At the same time, white actors have claimed indigenous ancestry to make it seem "less racist" that they're playing nonwhite characters. Examples include Johnny Depp (Tonto in The Lone Ranger) and Noah Ringer (The Last Airbender).
  • Around the World in 80 Days (1956) had Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess.
  • In Taking Lives, most of the main French Canadian characters are played by French actors using their own French accents. The difference between Quebec French and Metropolitan French is as big as the one between British English and American English. Even more bizarre, the movie itself was shot in Quebec City and there are some bona fide French Canadians as secondary characters.
  • Angelina Jolie has played several non-American characters:
  • Anna Paquin was born in Canada but moved to New Zealand with her parents. Because of this, she has rarely ever played her actual nationality except in Fly Away Home (where her character is a New Zealander who moved to Canada). Some of her most notable Fake Nationality roles include:
  • My Big Fat Greek Wedding is full of this.
    • Nia Vardalos is a Greek-Canadian playing a Greek-American. Again it is a subversion similar to Adam Sandler in You Don't Mess With the Zohan, since she is in fact Greek.
    • Lainie Kazan is of Russian and Turkish Jewish descent.
    • Andrea Martin is an Armenian-American; the scene where Rodney & Harriet try to recall the ethnicity of Rodney's secretary, which turns out to be Armenian, may be a reference to this.
    • Joey Fatone is Italian-American.
  • Yoshiko Otaka (aka Shirley Yamaguchi) made a career under the false identity Li Xianglan, playing the role of a Chinese woman in propaganda films in colonial Manchuria. In fact, most people at the time believed she was Chinese because her grasp of the language was that good.
  • Ron Perlman is an American who played Russian strongman One in the French film The City of Lost Children, he learned his French lines phonetically and is also doing a Russian accent in the language he doesn't speak.
  • Most of the cast in the American remake of The Debt (the main Israeli characters are played at various points in the film by England's Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson, Ireland's Ciarán Hinds, Australia's Sam Worthington, New Zealand's Marton Csokas and the USA's Jessica Chastain).
  • The "Somali" pirates in The Expendables are very obviously not Somali, but played by Americans of West African descent. Peoples from those two regions look nothing alike.
  • South African actress Charlize Theron has yet to play a South African character; even in Mad Max: Fury Road (which was filmed in Africa) she plays an Australian - albeit with an American accent.
  • Most non-French film adaptations of The Three Musketeers qualify:
  • In War, Inc. Hilary Duff plays a Central Asian pop star, and unlike some people with Fake Nationality she doesn't drop the accent when singing.
  • The 1962 adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, in addition to Khigh Dhiegh (American of Egyptian and Sudanese descent), has Henry Silva (Sicilian-American) as a Korean, and Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey as Americans, Not Even Bothering with the Accent. The 2004 remake/second adaptation didn't follow this trope and cast Americans as Americans, Englishmen as Englishmen, and this one guy of European extraction played by a Swiss actor.
  • Mortal Kombat: The Movie has an interesting, if complicated example with the character of Kano. In the video game his character was supposed to be of Japanese/American descent, but for the film, his character was played by the white, Australian accented Trevor Goddard. Unfortunately, Goddard was a Brit who only pretended to be an Australian in the belief that it would further his acting career, and his fake Australian accent makes Kano sound more like some sort of iffy Cockney. Thus not only did the character have a Fake Nationality but the man portraying him did as well. If that wasn't enough, the game developers liked Goddard's performance so much that they eventually decided to Retcon the character to be wholly Australian, but since the actor's nationality was fake it meant that the character's still was too.
  • Spanish actor Antonio Banderas has played a Spanish-Californian in the Zorro franchise, a Mexican as 'El Mariachi', and Arabs in The 13th Warrior and Black Gold.
  • Egyptian actor Omar Sharif (who was of Lebanese descent) made a career out of playing various ethnicities:
  • The 2002 remake of The Four Feathers has Heath Ledger (Australian), Kate Hudson and Wes Bentley (American) playing upper class Victorian English people. In a movie directed by Shekhar Kapur (Indian), to boot.
  • Alec Guinness (an Englishman) has played, among others:
  • Genghis Khan is rarely played by an actual Mongol in movies. He has been played by an Egyptian (Omar Sharif), an American (John Wayne), and a Japanese (Tananobu Asano), among others.
  • Super Troopers has Brian Cox (Scottish) play Captain John O'Hagan of the Vermont Highway Patrol, an American of Irish descent, based on his last name and his catch phrase being "I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet" in a fake Irish accent. The catch phrase and the accent are later mocked by Farva near the end of the film.
    • One of the running gags in the film is the fact that no one can quite figure out Ramathorn's ethnicity, if only by the process of elimination, due to him being Ambiguously Brown (he's not black, Mexican, or Arab). The actor Jay Chandrasekhar is actually American of Tamil descent.
  • British actor Mark Strong, who is of Austrian and Italian descent, is often cast in Middle Eastern roles, playing an Iranian in Syriana, a Jordanian in Body of Lies, and an Arab in Black Gold.
  • Omar Sharif and Keenan Wynn as Mexicans, and Julie Newmar and Ted Cassidy as Apaches in Mackenna's Gold.
  • Almost everyone in Ever After, Hugo and In Secret is British playing a French character. The exceptions are Americans and other non-Brits playing French characters with English accents like Drew Barrymore in the first, Chloë Grace Moretz in the second, and Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange and Oscar Isaac (born in Guatemala to Guatemalan and Cuban parents) in the third - the fake nationality triple play.
    • Hugo lead actor Asa Butterfield is English and has played a German, a Frenchman and an American before his fifteenth birthday*. Kid's gunning for Christian Bale's record.
  • In 21 and Over, the Korean-American Justin Chon plays the Chinese-American Jeff Chang. Furthermore, the version released in China changes him from an American-born Chinese to a Chinese-born exchange student.
  • Japanese-American actor Sessue Hayakawa was early Hollywood's go-to guy for any ethnic minority. He was offered roles as Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs.
  • G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation have quite a few (given they went from "real American heroes" to multinational, not surprising):
    • Both Jonathan Pryce (Welsh) and Sienna Miller (English, born in NYC) are Fake American (the President of the US and Anna Lewis/The Baroness).
    • Snake-Eyes is American but is played by the Scottish Ray Park.
    • Lee Byung-Hun is a Korean actor playing the Japanese Storm Shadow. As a boy, he's played by a Chinese-American, Brandon Soo Hoo (who also played a Vietnamese drug lord in Tropic Thunder).
    • The possibly European Zartan is played by South African actor Arnold Vosloo.
    • French-Cambodian actress Elodie Yung plays the Japanese Jinx.
    • The Irish Ray Stevenson plays a Southern-American, Firefly.
  • In Pacific Rim, Max Martini (American) and Robert Kazinsky (British) portray Hercules and Chuck Hanson, the Australian pilots of Striker Eureka. American Raleigh Becket is portrayed by the British Charlie Hunnam.
    • The Chinese Wei triplets are played by the Vietnamese Luu triplets.
    • Robert Maillet and Heather Doersken (both Canadian) play the Russian pilots Aleksis and Sasha Kaidanovsky.
    • Newt and Hermann (both German) are played by an American (Charlie Day) and a Brit (Burn Gorman but born in the states)
  • Congo has Tim Curry playing Romanian.
  • Cloud Atlas: In a way, since multiple non-Asian actors, including Hugo Weaving and Halle Berry, appear in heavy makeup as Koreans in the Neo Seoul storyline. Also, actress Doona Bae, a South Korean, appears as a Hispanic in the San Francisco story and as a white woman in the 1849 story.
  • In The Heat Kaitlin Olson cameos as Tatiana, a Bulgarian prostitute.
  • In the 1982 film version of Annie, Trinidadian actor/choreographer Geoffrey Holder played Warbucks' Indian bodyguard Punjab.
  • The Rookie (1990) cast Puerto Rican Raúl Juliá and Brazilian Sonia Braga as Germans.
  • The Damned (1969) provides one of the more extreme examples. While a few of the main cast (Helmut Griem, Albrecht Schoenthals, Rene Koldehoff) are German, most are a bizarrely eclectic mix of nationalities. Most speaking English in their native accents, at that!
    • Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling (English);
    • Helmut Berger (Austrian);
    • Ingrid Thulin (Swedish);
    • Umberto Orsini and Nora Ricci (Italian);
    • Renaud Varley (French);
    • Florinda Balkan (Brazilian);
    • John Frederick (American)
  • Dolph Lundgren is Swedish, but has played mostly Americans as well as a couple of Russians (in Rocky IV and Red Scorpion) and a German (in The Expendables).
  • Cinema Paradiso has three French actors playing Italian characters - including star Philippe Noiret as Alfredo, as well and Jacques Perrin and Brigitte Fossey as the adult Salvatore and Elena.
  • A lot of the cast of Into the Storm (2009). Brendan Gleeson is an Irishman portraying the Englishman Churchill, the actor who portrays FDR is actually Canadian, the King of England is portrayed by Iain Glein, a Scot, India-born Englishman Ismay is portrayed by a Welshman, and Clement Attlee is played by another Scot.
  • Averted in Godzilla (2014). Alongside Serizawa, the power plant workers, Ford Brody's teacher, the teenage Yanki boy, his parents, and the boy (who Ford Brody bonds within the train scenes) and his parents are all actually Japanese. Played straight with Aaron Taylor-Johnson himself, who is from England.
  • West Side Story (1961): Maria is a Puerto Rican character. The folks in charge of casting looked at the Russian-American Natalie Wood and said, "Eh, close enough." Maria's brother, Bernardo, is played by George Chakiris, a Greek-American.
  • In the live-action adaptation of the life of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, the titular character is played by the Spaniard actor Óscar Jaenada. Keep in mind Cantinflas in Real Life spoke with a very thick lower-class accent, and even Mexicans themselves struggle to imitate that kind of accent, but Jaenada himself manages to pull a really good accent anyway. For a better analogy for English-speaking audiences, it's like a classical British actor trying to imitate the stereotypical American ebonics accent.
  • Milla Jovovich, who is of Ukrainian and Serbian adescent, identifies as Ukrainian and American. She's played mostly Americans, the very occasional Russian, and people who are French (The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, The Three Musketeers and an episode of Married... with Children).
  • Nastassja Kinski (German with some Polish ancestry) has played people who are Italian (Stay As You Are, Unfaithfully Yours), English (Tess, To The Devil... A Daughter), Polish (The Claim), French (Les Liaisons dangereuses), American (many examples) and Russian-pretending-to-be-American (Terminal Velocity). Confusingly, she once played an American in a German movie! (Passion Flower Hotel)
  • The Princess Bride:
    • Mandy Patinkin, who plays Inigo Montoya, is an American Jew, not Spanish.
    • Although it's never stated in the movie, in the book Fezzik is Turkish. André the Giant, who plays him, was a French-born son of Bulgarian and Polish immigrant parents.
    • Wallace Shawn (Vizzini) is not actually Sicilian and is also Jewish.
  • In the 1989 movie Hellgate, set in California but shot in South Africa, Ron Palillo is the only actual American in the cast.
  • In Paddington (2014), the Peruvian bears are voiced by the English Ben Whishaw, Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon. The English villain is played by Australian Nicole Kidman. The German Mr Gruber is played by English Jim Broadbent. Scottish-Italian Peter Capaldi and English Julie Walters have essentially swapped nationalities.
  • Under the Skin features the American Scarlett Johansson as an alien disguised as an English woman.
  • The Love Guru has Canadian Mike Myers as an American, while actual American Jessica Alba plays a Canadian, with Justin Timberlake playing a French-Canadian.
  • Noah has Hebrews played by New Zealanders (Russell Crowe and Marton Csokas), English (Emma Watson, Ray Winstone and Douglas Booth), a Welshman (Anthony Hopkins), Americans (Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman (who is Jewish), Madison Davenportnote  and Finn Witrocknote ) and at least one Canadian (Dakota Goyonote ). Several of them, notably the American actors, go for a Fake Nationality triple by donning English accents.
  • A great deal of the major or supporting characters in Mortdecai are played by someone not from the same country as them.
    • Spinoza, apparently a Frenchman, is played by Welsh actor Pal Whitehouse.
    • Emil Strago is definitely not an Australian, but his actor, Jonny Pasvolsky, is.
    • Hong Kong gangster Fang Fat is played by Phillipine actor Junix Inocian.
  • Notably averted in Inglorious Basterds, in which every character with a speaking role is played by an actor of the correct nationality.
  • The 1979 British movie Arabian Adventure is even more lacking in actual Arabs in main (or any) roles than Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, with the likes of Milo O'Shea, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing (!) Oliver Tobias, Emma Samms, Mickey Rooney (!!), Shane "Scott Tracy" Rimmer (who's Canadian), and freaking John Ratzenberger in the cast.
  • Dennis Haysbert, an African-American actor known for his roles in 24 and The Unit, played the Cuban character Pedro Cerrano in the Major League movies.
  • In Deadly Sisters, based on a pair sisters found guilty of killing their mother, casts American Abigail Breslin and English (not always that well hidden) Georgie Henley as Canadians.
  • Holocaust 2000: The Israeli Sara Golan is played by Italian actress Agostina Belli.
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice adds Israeli Gal Gadot as the Themysciran Greek Wonder Woman to the Fake American Henry Cavill as the Man of Steel.
  • Cate Blanchett is a dual citizen of Australia and the US but was raised in the former country and therefore her natural accent is Australian. However she has only played an Australian a handful of times in her whole film career and only in smaller, lesser known films. The rest of the time she has played characters who are:
  • Romanian-Jewish actor Edward G. Robinson's best known roles were as Italian-American mobsters (Rico Bandello in Little Caesar, Johnny Rocco in Key Largo).
  • Mary Pickford was one of the most famous actresses during the 1920s and was known as "America's Sweetheart". She was actually born in Canada, though she spent most of her life as an American.
  • The Swedish Alicia Vikander has rarely played her own nationality onscreen. Her roles range from Americans (Ex Machina and Jason Bourne) to Brits (Tomb Raider (2018) and Testament of Youth) and everything in-between (i.e. Danish and German).
  • Help!: All the cultists from 'the East' are played by English actors. This is Lampshaded when the Beatles visit the Indian Restaurant "seeking enlightenment as to rings" from someone from "the mystic East" but quickly learn that everyone working there is English.
    Ringo: He's from the West!
    Restaurant Host: No, the East... Stepney.
  • Hannibal Rising:
    • Hannibal Lecter himself is revealed as Lithuanian, yet he's played by Frenchman Gaspard Ulliel. Then again, his previous portrayers, Anthony Hopkins and Brian Cox, are both British (specifically Welsh and Scottish respectively) and later the role would go to a Dane, Mads Mikkelsen.
    • Hannibal's sister Mischa is played by Czech child actress Helena-Lia Tachovská.
    • Lady Murasaki is a Japanese immigrant to France played by Gong Li, who is Chinese.
    • Inspector Pascal Popil is a French police detective played by Dominic West, who is English.
    • Vladis Grutas, the Lithuanian war criminal, is played by Rhys Ifans, a Welshman.
  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe has some noteworthy examples:
    • Iranian-Jewish actor Shaun Toub as the Afghan Ho Yinsen
    • The Norwegian-American Erik Selvig is portrayed by a Swedish actor, Stellan Skarsgård.
    • Thor played by Chris Hemsworth, an Australian pulling off an RP accent
    • British Andy Serkis as South African bandit Ulysses Klawe
    • Brits Tom Holland and Benedict Cumberbatch as the American Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.
    • Cases from two fictional countries:
      • Sokovia (Eastern Europe): Elizabeth Olsen (American), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (British), and Daniel Bruhl (German-Spanish)
      • Wakanda (Southeast Africa): Chadwick Boseman (American of West African descent), Winston Duke (Tobagonian-American), Daniel Kaluuya (British of Ugandan descent), Letitia Wright (Guyanese-British), and Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett (both Americans). Partially averted with Lupita Nyong'o (Kenyan-Mexican), John Kani (South African), and Danai Gurira (Zimbabwean-American). Played with Michael B. Jordan who is an American yet his character is of both African-American and Wakandan descent.
    • Chinese-Canadian Simu Liu playing the Chinese-American Shang-Chi.
  • 1958's The Inn of the Sixth Happiness took this to Questionable Casting levels by having Swedish blonde Statuesque Stunner Ingrid Bergman as Gladys Aylward, the short dark-haired Cockney maid-turned-missionary whose story the movie was based on; Robert Donat as the Mandarin of Yang Cheng (after Sean Connery didn't get the role), and German-Austrian Curt Jürgens as Captain Lin Nan.
  • This is endemic to the cast of Pride (2014). It's based on the true story of gay and lesbian activists in London organizing to help Welsh miners during the 1984-85 strike. Most of the Welsh characters are played by English actors: Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy, and Paddy Considine; an exception is Gethin, played by Irishman Andrew Scott. And the hero of the film, English-born/Irish-raised Mark Ashton, is played by New Yorker Ben Schnetzer. Oddly, this doesn't at all detract from the quality of the film.
  • Night Train to Lisbon: Most of the main cast who play Portuguese characters are not. They're largely English (Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Huston, Christopher Lee) with the French Mélanie Laurent, Swiss Bruno Ganz, Swedish Lena Olin and Swiss Sarah Spahl as well.
  • The Promise (2016): Of the main cast who play Armenians, only Angela Sarafyan actually is (she's a US citizen, as her parents moved there when she was four). However, most of the Turks really are played by actors at least ethnically Turkish.
  • In Sky Riders, French-Armenian Charles Aznavour plays a Greek cop.
  • Below Her Mouth: Erika Linder is Swedish, not Canadian. A couple of minor characters are American and Slovak.
  • Wind River: Kelsey Chow, who played Natalie (a Native American), is half Chinese and half white. As a result of the film, she claimed to be part Cherokee, but there's no evidence for this.
  • I Can't Think Straight: Tala is Jordanian-Palestinian, played by Canadian Lisa Ray who's of Indian and Caucasian ancestry. Leyla is British Indian, and played by Sheetal Sheth who's an Indian-American.
  • First Girl I Loved: Brianna Hildebrand plays Sasha, who is a Latina (though it's not emphasized). However, she reportedly has Mexican ancestry. This plus her looks being similar to the actors playing Sasha's parents make the casting work (she also never speaks Spanish, unlike Clifton).
  • Dora and the Lost City of Gold: Due to being filmed in Australia, a number of the minor characters are either Australians or New Zealanders playing Americans. Sammy was Hispanic American but played by Aboriginal Australian Madeleine Madden.
  • Jojo Rabbit, befitting its absurdist Black Comedy, has Adolf Hitler (or, rather, Jojo's Imaginary Friend version of him) played by the film's writer and director, Taika Waititi. Taika is of mixed Māori, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. And that's only the start of a cast of Fake Germans.
  • In Valdez is Coming, the Hispanic Bob Valdez is played by Burt Lancaster, an American of Irish descent (all four of his grandparents emigrated from Northern Ireland).
  • Margarita with a Straw: Leila is played by French-Indian actress Kalki Koechlin, who was born in India to French parents and descendant of Eiffel Tower engineer Maurice Koechlin. In the film however she's just Indian, and looks absolutely nothing like her on-screen parents (played by Indian actors). Khunam meanwhile is Pakistani-Bangladeshi and portrayed by the Indian actress Sayani Gupta.
  • Revenge (2017): French Jerk Richard is played by Belgian actor Kevin Janssens. The latter can be given a pass due to Belgium being straight north of France and having French as one of three official languages.
  • Cinema Paradiso: Alfredo, adult Salvatore, and adult Elena are all Siclians, and are all played by French actors (Philippe Noiret, Jacques Perrin, and Brigitte Fossey, respectively).
  • This was a staple of Italian movies throughout the 1950s to the 1980s, where multinational financing and export markets would mean that non-Italian actors would be playing Italian characters and vice versa.
  • Clara: The film is set in Toronto, so Troian Bellisario (who's American) must be playing a Canadian here.
  • The Color of Friendship: Nearly all of the South Africans are played by Americans, except for Merle Bok (South African actress Susan Danford portrayed her).
  • Margarita: Nicola Correia-Damude is a Guyanese-Canadian, playing a Mexican woman.
  • The World Unseen: Sheetal Sheth (an Indian-American), Lisa Ray (an Indian-Canadian) and Parvin Dubas (an Indian) play South Africans of Indian descent.
  • In the Fade: Not entirely fake, but Numan Acar plays an ethnic Kurd while he is a Turk by ethnicity, though both come from Turkey.
  • The Report: Iraqi-Canadian Fajer Al-Kaisi plays Lebanese-American Ali Soufan.
  • John Van Dreelen, the son of a Dutch actor, fled Nazi-occupied Holland to go into the family business in America. He spent his career playing characters from just about everywhere in Europe, including Germans in World War II-set films like Von Ryan's Express and series like Combat! (1962).
  • The Namesake: Zuleikha Robinson, a Briton with Indian, Burmese, English, Scottish and Iranian ancestry plays an Indian-American, Moushimi.
  • Uncle Frank: Lebanese actor Peter Macdissi plays Saudi Walid/Wally.
  • Rooney Mara's American and played Swedish Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (then later Annu from Don't Worry He Won't Get Far On Foot).
  • PBS made three TV film adaptations of Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn & Chee series. Although the series is about the Navajo Tribal Police, not a single lead role was played by a Navajo actor; instead, it has the American Cherokee Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn, Canadian Saulteaux Adam Beach as Jim Chee, Canadian Mohawk Alex Rice as Janet Pete, and several others. This is ironic because of an in-universe example of this trope in Sacred Clowns: Jim Chee, Janet Pete, and a Comanche agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs attend a screening of a film about Comanches that actually used all Navajo. The characters commented that Hollywood apparently thinks all Native Americans look alike.
  • Man on Fire: Several of the Mexican characters are played by non-Mexicans.
    • The Ramos family are portrayed by US actors. At least the wife is supposed to be an American immigrant... but is played by an Australian!
    • Manzano is played by Italian Giancarlo Giannini. This gets a Lampshade Hanging when his character mentions that he worked for Interpol in Rome for a few years before returning to become director of the AFI.
    • Aurelio Rosas Sanchez, the Voice's brother, is played by a Brazilian actor.
    • Mariana Garcia Guerrero, the reporter who helps Creasy, is played by Rachel Ticotin (mixed American with a Puerto Rican mother and a Russian-Jewish father).
  • Freshman Year: CJ's father Chukwumah is a Nigerian who immigrated to the US. His actor Benjamin Ochieng is Kenyan-American.
  • Red Cliff mostly averts this, with a largely Chinese cast. Ken Watanabe was originally selected to play Cao Cao, but was replaced with Zhang Fengyi after protests from Chinese audiences. However, the half-Japanese-half-Taiwanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro was apparently Chinese enough to play Zhuge Liang. The only other non-Chinese (including Taiwanese) actor was Shido Nakamura as Gan Ning.
  • Yoga Hosers: Most of the Canadians were played by Americans or other foreigners.
  • In Lea To The Rescue, indigenous Brazilian Aki is portrayed by African-American Storm.
  • The Frisco Kid has Italian-American actor Val Bisoglio as a Native American chief.
  • Operation Finale has the Indian-British Ben Kingsley as Adolf Eichmann, and the Guatemalan-American Oscar Isaac as an Israeli Mossad agent. American Nick Kroll also plays an Israeli, but he at least is Jewish.
  • India Sweets And Spices:
    • Sophia Ali, who's Pakistani-American, played Indian-American main character Alia Kapur.
    • Sheila Kapur, an Indian-American, is played by Nepali Manisha Koirala.
  • The Shoes Of The Fisherman:
  • Francophone Belgian actor Jérémie Renier is very sought after in French productions, and as such he's played many French characters, the most famous being the late singer Claude François.
  • Cannonball has German driver Wolf Messer played by American James Keach.
  • Unknown (2011) has Liam Neeson as a Fake American (and one of the backup passports implies Martin is really Canadian), Swiss Bruno Ganz as a former East German, and German Diane Kruger as a Bosnian (hence she sports a thick East European accent when speaking English, but her German is flawless).
  • The Comanches in Prey are played by Amber Midthunder (Fort Peck Sioux), Dakota Beavers (Ohkay Owingeh), Michelle Thrush (Cree), Julian Black Antelope (Blackfoot), and Stefany Mathias (Squamish).
  • The Retreat (2021): English actress Celina Sinden plays Layna, who's Canadian like the other characters.
  • Spring: Italian Louise is played by Nadia Hilker, who's German.
  • Besties: Concerns the ancestry and not the nationality per se. Actress Lina El Arabi is French of Moroccan descent while her character in the film, Nedjma, is French of Algerian descent.
  • Amsterdam (2022):
  • Emily the Criminal: Theo Rossi (mixed Italian, North African, Spanish and Syrian descent) plays Youcef, a Lebanese man. Jonathan Avigdori (Israeli-American) plays his cousin Khalil.
  • Not Like Everyone Else: Brandi is half white and half Cherokee. The actress playing her, Alia Shawkat, is half white and half Iraqi.
  • Crazy Rich Asians: None of the Singaporean main cast are played by Singaporean actors. Henry Golding (Nick) is British-Malaysian, Michelle Yeoh (Eleanor) and Ronny Chieng (Eddie) are Malaysians, Awkwafina (Peik Lin), Ken Jeong (Wye Mun), and Jimmy O. Yang (Bernard) are Americans, Gemma Chan (Astrid) and Jing Lusi (Amanda) are British, Chris Pang (Colin) is Australian, Sonoya Mizuno (Araminta) is British-Japanese, Remy Hii (Alistair) is Australian-Malaysian, and Nico Santos (Oliver) is Filipino-American. Ironically, the American protagonist Rachel Chu's mother is played by one of the few actual Singaporean actors to appear in the film, Tan Kheng Hua.
  • Farewell, My Queen: Diane Kruger, who's German (and now American), plays Austrian Marie Antoinette.
  • The Big Wedding: Englishman Ben Barnes plays Alejandro, a Colombian-born American.
  • Missing (2023) has the Portuguese Joaquim De Almeida as a Colombian.
  • Days of Betrayal: Czechoslovakian actors played some foreign parts such as Jaroslav Radimecký as the British Neville Chamberlain, Martin Gregor as the French Édouard Daladier, Rudolf Krátký as the German Dr. Paul Schmidt (Adolf Hitler's interpreter) and Rudolf Jurda as the German Hermann Göring.
  • Nighthawks:
    • The German Heymar "Wulfgar" Reinhardt is played by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer.
    • Shakka turns out to be a Moroccan, played by the Indian actress Persis Khambatta.
  • The Canadian-made film Blackberry is mostly a Canadian cast, but Jim Balsillie is played by american Glenn Howerton.
  • The Belgian Benoît Poelvoorde has played many French characters due to often working in the French movie industry. His accent is noticeable sometimes.
  • The Flash has the Spanish Maribel Verdú as the American Nora Allen. Downplayed in that, by the sound and look of it, this incarnation of Nora is of Spanish descent.
  • The Last Queen: The French-Algerian Dali Benssalah as Aruj "Barbarossa"/Oruç Reis, who was born on the isle of Lesbos and was of Greek and Ottoman Turkish descent.
  • Attachment:
    • A partial example. Ellie Kendrick plays a Jewish Englishwomen with Danish descent on her mom's side. Kendrick does not have either Jewish or Danish ancestry.
    • Leah's Jewish mother, Chana, is played by Danish actress Sofie Gråbøl, a gentile.
  • The Grey Zone: Most the characters are German or Hungarian. Most are played by Americans, with the rest Irish or British actors.
  • Colette: All of the French characters are played by British or Irish actors.
  • In The Night of the Generals, almost all of the Germans are played by British actors (Peter O'Toole, Donald Pleasence, Charles Gray etc), although the most egregious example of the Egyptian Omar Sharif as Grau. There's also the French Pierre Mondy as Sergeant Kopatski.
  • My Animal: Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Amandla Stenberg, both Americans, play Canadians.
  • Are You Being Served?: Andrew Sachs, Glyn Houston, and Karan David all play Spaniards.
  • Dad's Army (1971): Paul Dawkins, Sam Kydd, George Roubicek, Scott Fredericks, and Franz Van Norde are all Brits playing Nazis.
  • Caterina and her husband from the French Film Within a Film in Doctor in Clover are played by two Brits - Catherine Feller and Harold Kasket.
  • Please Turn Over has Joan Sims playing Madeline.
  • Henri Dupont from No Kidding is a Frenchman played by the British Michael Sarne.
  • Up Pompeii films:
  • The Emperor of Paris has the German August Diehl as the French (Alsatian) Nathanael de Wenger and the American Mark Schneider as the French Napoléon Bonaparte.
  • In a painfully obvious and insensitive example, the Hindi historical drama film Dear Friend Hitler has Indian actors portray all historical figures, even the German ones especially Hitler himself. Needless to say, the film was widely panned for its casting choices.
  • Girls Like Magic: Jamie is of Iranian and Indian parentage. Actress Shantell Yasmine Abeydeera is ethnically Sri Lankan though.
  • Carry On... Series:
  • Shock Treatment: The Viennese Bert Schnick was played by the Australian Barry Humphries.
  • House of Whipcord: Penny Irving is British playing the French Anne Marie.

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 
  • Babylon 5: The Russian Susan Ivanova was portrayed by the American actress Claudia Christian, whose parents were of German and Irish descent.
  • Achmed Abdul Uskudar from the Birds on the Wing episode, "Mr Uskudar's Con Nearly Goes Wrong", was played by the British John Nettleton.
  • A skit on The Colbert Report had Stephen Colbert playing Esteban Colberto, the Hispanic host of the Colberto Reporto Gigante.
  • The Cherry Queen: Two out of three of the German Goldfisch sisters aren't played by German actresses — French actress of Sicilian descent Delphine Sérina as the older sister, Gretchen, and another French actress, Clémence Boué, as Käthe, the younger sister.
  • Cinderella Chef: Xia Chun Yu (Chinese) is played by Bie Thassapak Hsu, AKA Xu Zhi Xuan (Thai-Taiwanese).
  • Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace:
    • Xin Zhi Lei (Chinese) as Kim Ok-yeon/Jin Yu Yan (Korean).
    • None of the Mongolian characters are played by Mongolian actresses.
    • Xiangjian is from a fictional kingdom in East Turkestan. Her actress Li Qin is Chinese.
  • Scarlet Heart: Most of the Mongolian characters are played by Chinese actors. Only the Mongolian king is played by an actor of Mongolian descent.
  • Star Trek has a lot of these:
    • The character of Khan Noonien Singh, a Punjabi Sikh played by Mexican Ricardo Montalbán.
    • In Star Trek Into Darkness, Khan is played by the white British Benedict Cumberbatch.
    • Chicago-born Walter Koenig, son of two Russian Jews, as Russian Pavel Chekov.
    • Star Trek: The Original Series has a Canadian (William Shatner) playing an American (James T. Kirk), another Canadian (James Doohan) playing a Scotsman (Scotty), an American (Nichelle Nichols) playing an African (Uhura), and a Japanese-American (George Takei) playing a non-Japanese Asian-American (Sulu). The only regular character portrayed by an actor of the same nationality was McCoy, a U.S. Southerner played by a Georgia-born actor with a slight-but-legit Southern accent (DeForest Kelley).
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation has an Englishman (Patrick Stewart) playing a Frenchman (Picard), an American (LeVar Burton) playing an African (Geordi LaForge), and another American (Denise Crosby) playing someone of Ukrainian descent (Yar). Admittedly, Yar was not Earth-born; she was born and raised on a human colony on a completely different planet. LaForge's actual origins are deliberately vague—he's a Military Brat whose parents moved wherever Starfleet sent them. All we know for sure is that his mother was in Africa when he was born.
    • Enterprise has a Korean-American (Linda Park) playing a Japanese woman (Hoshi). But in general, the later series were more accurate, with human characters either played by actors of appropriate nationality, or being from worlds other than Earth.
  • Lost has Briton (of Indian descent) Naveen Andrews as Iraqi Sayid Jarrah, New Zealander Alan Dale as the British Charles Widmore, and the Australians in flashbacks are overwhelmingly played by non-Australians faking the accent. Additionally, Frenchwoman Danielle Rousseau is played by Croatian actress Mira Furlan, while Russian Mikhail Bakunin is played by Venezuelan-born Andrew Divoff, but at least he's half-Russian and speaks the language. Nigerian Eko is played by British actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, but this is justified since his parents are Nigerian and he does the accent right for once. Similarly, Korean-born American Daniel Dae Kim plays a Korean...who can't speak English at first (ironically, he had to be re-taught Korean by his on-screen wife Yunjin Kin, similar to how in-character Sun teaches English to Jin).
  • The third episode of Sherlock has British actress Haydn Gwynne playing a Czech women. Gwynne is fluent in French and Italian, so she often plays different nationalities.
  • Carlo Rota, a British-born actor of Italian ancestry, plays the Lebanese Yasir Hamoudi in Little Mosque on the Prairie (note that on 24 Rota plays Morris O'Brian, whose ethnicity has not been specified but is likely Irish, and on an episode of This is Wonderland he played an Italian hotdog vendor).
  • NCIS
  • Hispanic Michael Trevino plays the white Tyler Lockwood who is descended from Native Americans on The Vampire Diaries. Also, neither Paul Wesley or Ian Somerhalder who play the Italian-American Salvatores have any Italian in them and none of the actors who play the Originals have any Scandinavian ancestry, except for Riley Voelkel
  • Betty's father in Ugly Betty is Mexican, but the actor who played him, Tony Plana, is Cuban. Her extended family from the episode "A Tree Grows in Guadalajara" was composed of Justina Machado (Puerto Rican-American), Rita Moreno (Puerto Rican) and Lillian Hurst (Puerto Rican). The episode also had Lilyan Chauvin (French!) playing a Mexican native.
  • The Australian animal hunter in Eureka was played by Canadian-American Matt Frewer.
  • Briton Hugh Laurie as American Gregory House on House. In a season one episode House calls a doctor in the middle of the night and fakes a British accent, claiming he's from London and forgot what time it would be in America. For that scene, Laurie did not speak with his real accent, but with the accent he used when he played Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster.
  • Kato in various adaptations of The Green Hornet has always been Filipino but has never been played by one. The first radio actor to voice the role was apparently Japanese (Raymond Hayashi), American Roland Parker voiced him for most of the series run, while American Mickey Tolan played the role towards the end. In the film serials, Kato's nationality was specified as Korean, but the role was played by Chinese actor Keye Luke. And in the TV series Kato was played by Chinese-American actor Bruce Lee.
  • Mixed with the Fake American concept on the short-lived series New Amsterdam (2008). Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a Dane, plays John Amsterdam, a NYC cop who is actually an immortal Dutchman doomed to walk the earth until he found his soul mate and went through an interesting string of relationships and Americanized aliases. His American accent was good enough to fool most viewers.
  • German actor Horst Buchholz played a Polish man very convincingly in Tiger Bay - his accent only slipped in a single scene.
  • David Carradine, who was an American of Cherokee, English, Irish, Italian, Scottish, German, Spanish, Ukrainian and Welsh descent, played the half-Chinese Shaolin Master Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu (1972). Carradine's half-brother Keith portrayed a teenage Caine, while an equally non-Asian Radames Perá played young Caine.
    • Carradine played another Kwai Chang Caine, this one the American-born grandson of the original, in Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. This character's son Peter Caine was played by Chris Potter, a white Canadian. (It is, therefore, entirely possible that this Caine and his son could be as little as 1/8 and 1/16 Chinese, respectively.)
  • In the 1987 British made-for-television film Scoopl, Norwegian actor Sverre Anker Ousdal plays insane Swede Erik Olafsen. Funny thing is, Olafsen is a rather Norwegian spelling, the most common Swedish equivalent would be Olofsson. Not to mention that there is nothing in the plot that requires the character to be a Swede - making him Norwegian would at least be more accurate.
  • In Heroes, we have the Indian-American actor Sendhil Ramamurthy playing the Indian character Mohinder Suresh; at the beginning of the show he attempted to do some kind of Indian accent (possibly Tamil?), but after a few episodes he settled on a (relatively good) straight British accent. We also have the Korean-American actor James Kyson Lee playing the Japanese (and Japanese-speaking) character Ando Masahashi, presumably under the tutelage of his authentically Japanese colleague Masi Oka.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel used this:
    • Americans David Boreanaz, James Marsters, Juliet Landau and Alexis Denisof playing the Irish Angel and British Spike, Drusilla, and Wesley respectively.
    • The California-born Marsters took this to an extreme in the Buffy episode "Doomed" (4x11). Playing the British vampire Spike, he replicates a Brit's very poor imitation of an American accent when Spike tries to change his speech to avoid detection by the vampire-capturing Initiative. This rather remarkable feat can be considered the linguistic equivalent of "chicken-fried chicken": chicken pretending to be cube steak pretending to be chicken.
    • In Boreanaz's case his character's nationality wasn't revealed until two seasons in, and he has some Irish ancestry. His Irish accent in flashbacks was rather poor, so he didn't bother using the accent when Angel was temporarily reverted to his teenage personality in one episode.
  • Englishman Charlie Cox plays the Irish-American Daredevil in the 2015 series of the same name.
  • On M*A*S*H, Asians of every nationality and descent were used to play the native Koreans. In the later part of that series, Korea itself was cast as Vietnam.
  • The Play of the Week adaptation of Rashomon (not to be confused with the Akira Kurosawa film) had actors of several nationalities playing Japanese characters. None of the actors were Asian, let alone Japanese. Among them: Ricardo Montalban (Mexican), Carol Lawrence (Italian-American), James Mitchell (Anglo-Portuguese), and Oskar Homolka (Austrian with a Czech surname).
  • Seinfeld featured a Finnish character... using a Russian accent (which sounds nothing like Finnish). The Israeli-British Brian George also plays the Pakistani restaurant owner Babu Bhatt.
  • Hogan's Heroes is actually a surprisingly complete aversion. Of the main cast, which included French, British, American and German characters, only Sgt. Shultz was representing a different country-he was Austrian.
    • In the time the series is set, Austria wasn't exactly "a different country"-it had been annexed by Germany.
  • Fawlty Towers:
    • Manuel, who's from Barcelona, is played by the German-born Jewish British actor Andrew Sachs.
    • The "American" in the "Waldorf Salad" episode was played by Bruce Boa, a Canadian actor who made a career of being the token North American on British shows.
  • Swedish actress Helena Mattsson was cast as a Russian gold-digger on Desperate Housewives.
  • Daniel Davis of Arkansas has made a career playing proper Brits, most notably on The Nanny. According to his IMDb profile, during the run of that series viewers would write in saying that his castmate Charles Shaughnessy (who actually is British) should take lessons from Davis on how to do a proper British accent!
  • 24 has produced several examples:
    • South African Arnold Vosloo as Habib Marwan, a terrorist Big Bad of Turkish origin.
    • British-Sudanese actor Alexander Siddig played Hamri al-Assad, a presumably Lebanese terrorist mastermind turned Atoner.
    • Sean Majumder played an Arab terrorist on the show, despite being half East Indian and half Newfie.
    • In a particularly jarring example, American Dennis Hopper played Big Bad Victor Drazen, a Serbian warlord.
    • Indian-American actor Kal Penn playing an Arab of indeterminate origin.
    • Aki Avni, an Israeli (of Turkish-Jewish descent), plays an Arab terrorist. For about twelve seconds.
    • And Jack Bauer is played by a Canadian actor of British ancestry. Damn it!!!
    • Anil Kapoor, a Bollywood (Indian) superstar, is playing a character of presumably Iranian origin, though not a terrorist, but a foreign President.
    • Australian John Noble played a minor antagonist on the series who was Russian.
    • Australian actor Nick Jameson also played a Russian character: Yuri Suvarov, the president of the country.
    • Peter Wingfield played David Emerson, a bad guy from the African nation of "Sangala", without his native-born Welsh accent. (He has also used, with varying degrees of success, an Irish accent on "NCIS:LA" and Russian on an episode of "Endgame".)
  • American Richard Basehart portrayed a British stage actor on an episode of Columbo. To balance it out, British Nicol Williamson portrayed an American doctor on a later episode.
  • New Yorker Bernie Kopell was over-the-top German villain Siegfried on Get Smart.
  • The Man in the High Castle features Americans Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Trade Minister Tagomi), Joel de la Fuente (Inspector Kido), and Louis Ozawa Changchien (Kasoura) as Japanese characters. Danish Carsten Norgaard plays the German Rudolph Wegener. Of all the German characters in the film, only one (Adolf Hitler) is actually played by a German actor, while the rest are played by an assortment of Australian, Danish, French, Canadian and Irish actors.
  • Khigh Dhiegh made a career out of playing "yellow peril" Asian villains, like Yen Lo in The Manchurian Candidate and Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-O. In real life, he founded the Taoist Institute in Hollywood. But he was born Kenneth Dickerson in New Jersey, of mixed Anglo and North African/Arab heritage, with no trace of East Asian-ness.
  • The True Jackson, VP movie has an actor sloppily juggling an American and Scottish accent...while playing a Frenchman.
  • Power Rangers RPM has a New Zealander playing the extremely Scottish Flynn McAlisteir. He made a game effort on the accent, at least. Not to mention the full cast of Fake Americans in nearly every season from 2003-2009 (SPD being the only exception)''.
    • When Saban got the series back, they began casting Americans as the core Rangers again, though filming's still taking place in New Zealand and therefore there are plenty of extras, mentors, and side characters who fall into this.
    • Power Rangers Samurai has the sort-of Mexican Antonio played by a Thai-German-American actor.
    • Power Rangers Dino Charge had the Brazilian-born American actor Davi Santos and the white New Zealand actor Jarred Blakiston both playing rangers from Zandar, a fictional European country.
    • Power Rangers Ninja Steel had Will Shewfelt (American, Arab, Desi heritage) and Jordi Webber (New Zealand, Maori heritage) playing American Latino brothers.
    • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had Thuy Trang, a Vietnamese-American actress, playing a character of mixed Taiwanese and Korean ancestry (if you count the comics as canon). In the show, her ancestry is straight-up ambiguous, as the actor playing her father is Japanese, while the actors playing her Uncle Howard, her mom, and her cousin Sylvia are all of obvious, but different, Asian nationalities. It's entirely possible that if she'd not left the show, her heritage might have been revealed at some point beyond just being Asian-American.
  • Subverted in an episode of the Ellery Queen TV series, in which an Indian man is obviously played by a white guy with makeup. It turns out that, in-universe, he is a white guy in makeup playing an Indian.
  • In Season 1 of The Closer, Marina Sirtis, of Deanna Troi fame, plays an Iranian woman. Though Greek, she plays a sleuth of Middle Eastern and Levant characters.
    • Marina Sirtis is British but born of Greek parents.
  • Margaret Cho's All-American Girl (1994) did this in spades: Margaret Cho was the only Korean-American in the main cast of the show. The actress playing the grandmother (Amy Hill) was Japanese-American, as was father Clyde Kusatsu; mother Jodi Long and brother B.D. Wong were Chinese-American.
  • In Rescue Me, African-American Daniel Sunjata plays the Puerto Rican Franco Rivera.
  • The cast of 'Allo 'Allo! is made up of dozens of Englishmen playing Frenchmen, Germans, Austrians, Italians and Swedes. Only three characters in the show are British. Despite that, everyone talks English, but they pretend they can't understand each other and speak with different accents.
  • In a very early episode of The Saint, Simon Templar has to rescue a kidnapped American girl in Rome. Said girl is played by English actress Sally Bazely.
  • Community:
    • Abed and his dad are Arab-Americans: Danny Pudi (Abed) is half-Indian and half-Polish (and grew up speaking Polish), while Iqbal Theba (Abed's dad) is Pakistani. The Arabic they speak, however, is real.
    • Señor Chang, a.k.a. El Tigre Chino ("The Chinese Tiger"), is played by Korean-American actor Ken Jeong.
  • In Mission: Impossible, Leonard Nimoy, as the Master of Disguise, went undercover as a Japanese person and did kabuki.
    • And as The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier pointed out, when he disguised himself as the villain (played by Wo Fat himself, Khigh Dheigh) he somehow became several inches shorter...
  • On Ringer Henry's American wife Gemma is - well, was - played by British actress Tara Summers. Averted on the same show by Ioan Gruffudd and Jaime Murray, however, who do indeed play Brits.
  • Adelai Niska on Firefly, a crime boss of indeterminate Eastern European ethnicity (though he tells his henchman to cut off Mal's ear in Czech), is played by New Yorker Michael Fairman.
  • In 30 Rock, Fred Armisen guest-stars as Liz's Middle Eastern neighbor whom she immediately suspects is a terrorist. He just wants to participate in The Amazing Race.
  • Done with each of the leads on Strike Back. American Philip Winchester plays British Sgt. Michael Stonebridge, while Aussie Sullivan Stapleton plays Ex-Delta Force soldier Damien Scott.
  • Ahmad Kahn on NYC 22 is an Afghan refugee-turned-NYPD rookie. His actor is British of Arab or Persian descent.
  • On Dollhouse, the white Mark Sheppard plays Graham Tanaka, a white FBI agent with an Asian last name.
  • The Japanese Suki from Tower Prep is played by a Taiwanese-American.
  • Ricardo Montalbán was a frequent victim of this trope. He often complained that he was cast as just about every nationality but Mexican in productions not made in his native country. In Hawaii Five-O, he played as European race car driver Alex Pareno in "Death Wish on Tantalus Mountain" and Japanese man Tokura in "Samurai". In The Wild Wild West episode "The Night of the Lord of Limbo", he played a Confederate soldier called Noel Bartley Vautrain.
  • Among the many roles played by Mark Lenard on Hawaii Five-O was an amnesiac Japanese ninja.
  • The Honduran comedian Carlos Mencia (real name Ned Holness) made a career out of exploiting Mexican and Mexican-American stereotypes. He did this in both his stand-up routine and on the show Mind of Mencia. In his early stand-up career he tried to avert this by telling jokes about how he was always mistaken for Mexican. However he eventually decided to embrace the confusion, and identify himself as Mexican.
  • Ross Martin, a Polish-American Jew, was so convincing as the Hispanic Andamo in Mr. Lucky that he became typecast for a time in such roles.
  • In Code Lyoko: Evolution, Yumi, a Japanese girl, is played by Mélanie Tran, an actress of Vietnamese descent.
  • The second season of Once Upon a Time added the character of Mulan, based on the Chinese Ballad of Hua Mulan, played by a Korean-American.
  • Once Upon a Time in Wonderland: Peter Gadiot is Ambiguously Brown enough to play a character descended from Zuleikha Robinson, an actress of South Asian ancestry. He is part Dutch and part Mexican.
  • Both played straight and subverted in "The Night Of The Inferno", the pilot of The Wild Wild West: Nehemiah Persoff, born in Jerusalem, plays a Mexican; Victor Buono plays a Chinaman... who turns out to be another Mexican in disguise, making this a case of Fake Nationality in-universe (but still being a Fake Nationality). (While the nationality of Buono's villain Count Manzeppi was never made clear, he definitely plays an American in one of the two reunion movies; Persoff, on the other hand, plays a Chinaman in "The Night of the Deadly Blossom" and an American in "The Night of the Underground Terror".)
  • The US-UK Made-for-TV Movie Murder by Moonlight (or Murder on the Moon, depending on which country you watch it in) is a Fake Nationality fiesta - set on a joint American-Russian lunar colony, the cast has Danish Brigitte Nielsen as an American investigator with other Americans played by Brits (and some actual Americans, like Gerald McRaney), and British Julian Sands as a Russian investigator with other Russians played by Brits, Poles and even the odd American.
  • In The George Lopez Show, Carmen, who is of Mexican and Cuban ancestry, is played by Masiela Lusha, who was born in Albania. Her Cuban-American mother Angie is played by Constance Marie, who is Mexican. Angie's niece Veronica is played by half-Mexican, half-Puerto Rican Aimee Garcia.
  • In The Bridge German actress Diane Kruger plays American Sonya Cross, while Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno plays Mexican Alma Ruiz.
  • House of Cards (US):
    • The Cuban-American Linda Vazquez is played by Indian-American Sakina Jaffrey.
    • Russian president (and Putin Expy) Viktor Petrov is played by the Danish Lars Mikkelsen.
  • The 100 has among others Australian Eliza Taylor as Clarke, Greek-Canadian Marie Avgeropoulos as Octavia, English Ricky Whittle as Lincoln, and Scottish-Peruvian Henry Ian Cusick as Kane.
  • The very English Katrina, Ichabod's wife on Sleepy Hollow, is played by Swedish Katia Winter; Ichabod's dad is played by Canadian Victor Garber, and Lyndie Greenwood (Jennifer Mills) is also Canadian in real life.
  • Some Girls has Anna Hitchcock, who is from New Zealand and is Viva's stepmother. Her actress, Dolly Wells, is actually English.
  • Homeland has Pakistani characters played by Suraj Sharma, who is Indian, and Shavani Seth, who is a Brit of Indo- and Afro-Caribbean descent.
  • Revenge has a number of Canadians playing Americans (Emily VanCamp, Henry Czerny, James Tupper) plus at least one Brit (Josh Bowman). There's also Karine Vanasse as Margaux, who's another Canadian. French-Canadian, but Canadian.
  • Orphan Black: Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany plays characters of British, American, German, Ukrainian, French, Italian and Austrian origin. This is due to the fact they're clones whose creators performed in-vitro fertilization on women from various counties.
  • The Royals, despite being about the British Royal Family and filmed in England, has Australian Alexandra Park as Princess Eleanor. Meanwhile, the show's only American regular Ophelia is played by Canadian Merritt Patterson.
  • Outsourced is a very egregious example. A lot of actors are from different backgrounds than the characters they play. For example, Rizwan Manji who is an Ismaili Muslim plays Rajeev Gidwani who is a Sindhi Hindu. Rebecca Hazelwood who plays Asha in Outsourced is part Indian, part English has played a lot of Indian characters of various backgrounds (although she is a decent enough of an actress to pull it off). All of the other Indian characters are played by American and British actors with Indian ancestry.
  • The Thorn Birds miniseries, set in Australia, is rife with this. The only Australian in a major role is Bryan Brown, who played Luke. Meanwhile, Americans and Brits play people from New Zealand (Fee and most of the Cleary children), Ireland (Ralph, Paddy, and Mary), Australia (Justine and Dane), and Germany (Rainier), while Canadian actor Christopher Plummer plays an Italian cardinal. Adding insult to injury, only three of them make any effort at at sounding the way they should.
  • Due to the limited access of actors with immigrant background in The '60s, Norwegian actors playing for the Broadcasting Company had to get away with almost anything. Because of the black-and-white production, this was rather easy, and the same actors went all over, playing Algerians, black people from the Deep South, Romani, Jews, and even Chinese, if they had to. This went remarkably well, all considering (the American plays featuring blacks were mostly anti-racist, by the way). Good makeup skills, Dyeing for Your Art and decent use of light effects did the trick.
  • In the miniseries adaptation of Jeffrey Archer's Kane And Abel, American banker William Kane is played by New Zealand's Sam Neill; Polish hotelier Abel Rosnofski, on the other hand, is played by the USA's Peter Strauss.
  • The reality show Mystery Diners caught a group of people doing this to convince a business investor they were Russians so they could fool him into helping fund their scam.
  • 21 Jump Street both subverted this in Real Life, and played it straight In Universe. Vietnamese Dustin Nguyen played Japanese character Ioki. Then it turns out Ioki is Vietnamese, and just pretending to be Japanese (including having taken on the name of "Ioki").
  • The Indian Detective: English actress Christina Cole plays Canadian Robyn Gerner.
  • A few members of the Kim's Convenience cast, while still Canadian, are not Koreans:
    • Andrew Phung (Kimchee) is of Vietnamese descent.
    • Simu Liu (Jung) is Chinese.
    • Hiro Kanagawa (Pastor Choi) is Japanese.
  • The Haunting of Hill House (2018): The Dutch Michael Huisman plays the American Steven Crain, matching the accent of his character's American family pretty flawlessly.
  • On The Last Kingdom, the German Alexander Dreymon plays Uhtred, a Saxon born in what is now England. Interestingly, Uhtred does not have an English accent as he was raised by Danes.
  • Crossing Lines: Englishwoman Lara Rossi plays Dutchwoman Arabela Seeger. Goran Višnjić, who's Croatian-American, plays Italian Marco Constante.
  • The Spanish Princess: Englishwoman Charlotte Hope plays the titular Catherine of Aragon.
  • Garth Marenghis Darkplace:
    • An In-Universe example in which British actor Todd Rivers plays Hispanic doctor Lucien Sanchez. You can even see the eye makeup used to make him look Hispanic.
    • The Temp is played by an American (and Dagless mistakes him for one), but a poorly written speech given as he was dying reveals the Temp to be from Bermuda.
  • Chinese sitcom I Love My Family (Wo Ai Fan Mi Li) cast Simone Giertz, a 16-year-old Swedish girl on vacation, as a character's American girlfriend. Not only did she have to memorize all of her Mandarin lines phonetically, but she spoke English with a noticeable Swedish accent. Giertz would later gain internet fame as the builder of "shitty robots" and banish her Swedish accent almost completely.
  • Party of Five (2020):
    • Brandon Larracuente is a Puerto Rican American, playing Mexican-born Emilio Acosta, who was raised in the US.
    • Emily Tosta, who's playing Lucia Acosta, is Dominican.
    • Elle Paris Legaspi, who plays Valentina Acosta, is of Filipino and Italian descent.
    • Garcia is also American, although playing Matthew, who's Mexican.
    • Chilean Fernanda Urrejola plays Mexican Gloria Acosta. Argentine Sol Rodríguez plays Natalia, who is also Mexican.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): Canadian Page Fletcher as the Frenchman Guillaume de Marchaux in "Cat and Mouse".
  • Vida: The American-born Lyn is played by Mexican actress Melissa Barrera. Likewise, Elle Paris Legaspi, who played Lyn as child, is of Filipino and Italian descent.
  • Control Z: Zión Moreno is a Mexican-American from Texas who plays Isabela, who's supposed to be Mexican. However, on a couple occasions she speaks a bit of English with an American accent.
  • Never Have I Ever: Devi's uncle Aravind, an Indian immigrant, is played by Pakistani actor Iqbal Theba.
  • Hightown: Osito is Dominican, played by African-American Atkins Estimond. On a minor note, the Cote Verdeans are also played by African-Americans.
  • Dark Desire: Mexican Brenda Castillo is played by María Fernanda Yepes, who's Colombian.
  • Penny Dreadful: City of Angels:
    • Brits Natalie Dormer and Rory Kinnear as Germans Elsa Branson and Dr. Kraft. Dormer also plays Mexican-American Rio and American Alex Malone.
    • Elsa, Alex and Rio being all different manifestations of Humanoid Abomination Magda, their nationalities are also fake In-Universe.
  • A French Village: Belgian actors Patrick Descamps, Nade Dieu, Nicolas Gob, Marie Kramer and Fabrizio Rongione all play French characters. The Danish actor Peter Bonke plays German character Kollwitz.
  • Trotsky:
    • Russians play all the characters of other ethnicities or nationalities.
    • Downplayed with Konstantin Khabensky, who is half-Jewish.
  • Next (2020): Shea is a Honduran-American, having been born in Honduras. Her father Nacio also later arrives from Honduras. Brazilian-American actress Fernanda Andrade plays her, while Nacio's played by Puerto Rican actor David Zayas.
  • Bones:
    • Arastoo is played by Paj Vehdat, an American actor of Persian descent.
    • Cuban Rudolfo Fuentes is played by Argentinian actor Ignacio Serrichio.
  • Highlander: Besides Fake Scot Adrian Paul as MacLeod, there’s Belgian Alexandra Vandernoot as the French Tessa and Methos, who somehow has Peter Wingfield’s British accent despite being of unknown descent and having lived all over the world. It is possible for him to be fair skinned if he was from someplace in Europe as we might infer from his Bronze Age pillaging of Europe, but we don’t know.
  • The Wilds: All of the Ojibwe characters are played by actors of different ancestry. Jenna Clause is Cayuga. Kimberly Guerrero is from a mix of three other Indigenous peoples. Michael Teh is a mixed race man from Australia. Erana James meanwhile is Maori.
  • The Boys (2019):
    • Frenchie's actor, Tomer Capon, is Israeli, not French.
    • Karen Fukuhara, who plays The Female, is American, not Japanese (although she is Japanese-American).
    • Aya Cash, an American, plays Stormfront, who was born in Germany in 1919.
  • Deadly Class:
    • Marcus is half-Nicaraguan, half-American. Benjamin Wadsworth's half-Mexican, half-American.
    • Maria Salazar, who's Mexican, is played by Venezuelan Maria Gabriela de Faria.
    • Vietnamese-American Lana Condor plays Japanese Saya Kuroki.
    • El Alma del Diablo, a Mexican, is played by Puetro Rican actor David Zayas.
  • Feel Good: American actress Lisa Kudrow is playing Canadian Linda, Mae's mom.
  • BOB ❤️ ABISHOLA: Most of the actors playing the Nigerian characters are this. Only Folake Olowofoyeku (Abishola), Bayo Akinfemi (Goodwin), Tony Tambi (Chukwuemeka) and Dayo Ade (Tayo) are actually Nigeriannote . Shola Adewusi (Olu), Gina Yashere (Kemi) and Anthony Okungbowa (Kofo) are of Nigerian descent, but are British-born and raised. Barry Shabaka Henley (Tunde) Travis Wolfe, Jr. (Dele) and Kimberly Scott (Ogechi) are American.
  • Roswell, New Mexico: Rosa is a Mexican-American Latina played by Native American (Sioux) Amber Midthunder.
  • The L Word:
  • In From the Cold: Invoked when Russian-American Jenny pretends she's Spanish-American as part of getting close with terrorists in Spain.
  • Big Sky: Americans Janina Gavankar, Vinny Chhibber and Bernard White play a Canadian crime family.
  • The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has two of the Jewish main characters played by non-Jews Rachel Brosnahan and Tony Shalhoub. Ironically, the Jewish actress Alex Borstein plays the Ambiguously Goyish Susie.
  • Impulse (2018): Nikolai, a Romanian (who may be a naturalized Canadian), was played by British-born Canadian actor Callum Keith Rennie.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022):
    • Australian Sam Reid plays the Frenchman Lestat de Lioncourt.
    • Armand is hinted to be a Crimean Tatar, and he's portrayed by British Bangladeshi Assad Zaman.
  • Strange Empire: American Melissa Farman played Rebecca Blithely, a Canadian.
  • Marie-Antoinette (2022): Almost nobody who played a French character is actually French, including the English James Purefoy as King Louis XV. The only exception is the French Gaia Weiss as Madame du Barry. Emilia Schüle was born in Russia from an ethnic German family, so it kind of fits with the Holy Roman Empire, though if one goes into details with the empire's subdivisions, Marie Antoinette was technically Austrian. Similarly, the Swiss Marthe Keller as the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa (Marie Antoinette's mother).
  • Baghdad Central: The Iraqi characters were mostly played by Israeli Arab and Palestinian actors.
  • United States of Al: The titular character Awalmir "Al" Karimi, who is Afghani, is played by Indian South African actor Adhir Kalyan.
  • Dracula (2013): Irishman Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a Romanian (playing an American) who also has an English accent in private.
  • Deutschland 83: Ugandan-German actress Florence Kasumba plays Rose Seithathi, who's South African.
  • Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul: Gus Fring, a Chilean immigrant, is played by Giancarlo Esposito, born in Denmark to an Italian father and African-American mother and raised in Manhattan, New York City.
  • Sleeper Cell: The Saudi Muslim Farik is played by the Jewish Israeli Oded Fehr. The Bosnian Illija is played by the half-French, half-Italian American Henri Lubatti. The Frenchman Christian is played by the Franco-American Alex Nesic (he holds dual US and French citizenship). The Iraqi British Salim is played by the Iranian-American Omid Abtahi. It's lampshaded by Farik, who says he's passed for an Iranian, Sephardic Jew and also other ethnic backgrounds in the past.
  • A League of Their Own (2022): Esti is Cuban, played by Priscilla Delgado, who's a Puerto Rican.
  • Welcome to Sweden: Invoked. Pepe/Gary, Amy Poehler’s assistant, uses his vague ethnicity to his advantage, pretending to be Latino and unable to speak English when he’s really Cherokee and doesn't speak Spanish.
  • The Spencer Sisters: American Lea Thompson plays Canadian Victoria Spencer.
  • Les Misérables (2000) gave us the American John Malkovich as the French Javert as well as the Italians Asia Argento and Enrico Lo Verso as the French Eponine Thénardier and Marius Pontmercy, respectively.
  • Trigonometry: Ray is half French and half English. Actress Ariane Labed is fully French and has acquired Greek citizenship as well.
  • Special Ops: Lioness: Stephanie Nur is Syrian-Austrian, playing Saudi woman Aaliyah Amrohi.
  • Foreign Affairs (1966): Monsieur Dubois from "The Foreign Body" was played by the British Bryan Kendrick.
  • The Gnomes of Dulwich: The Chinese Empire Gnomes - Plastic, Dolly, and Rita - were played by Leon Thau (Palestinian), Anne de Vigier, and Lynn Dalby (both British).
  • In for a Penny: Ali, a Pakistani man, was played by Kevork Malikyan, who was Greco-Armenian.

    Music 
  • Swedish-Danish singer Jonny Jakobsen is one of the reigning champions of this trope, both played straight and Played for Laughs. He started his career as the Fake American country-bluesman "Johnny Moonshine" with his band The Troubled Waters, but without any kind of success. In those years the bubblegum dance genre (e.g. Aqua, Toy-Box etc.) was at the peak of its popularity, so Jakobsen decided to turn into a comedic singer and release some comedic Eurodance albums, playing a variety of personas. Thus, the faux-Hindi guru Dr. Bombay, the Fake Scot trickster Dr. MacDoo and the faux-Mexican bandito Carlito were born. He even managed to invoke Germans Love David Hasselhoff in several different countries, for example "Carlito" became quite popular in Japan, where one of his singles was even used in the soundtrack of their adaptation of the film Nacho Libre!
  • Discussed in the Das Racist song "Fake Patois" that lists musicians and actors who have put on a fake Jamaican accent for their work.
  • Latin pop singer Lou Bega (of "Mambo No. 5" fame) uses a stage name and stage persona that vaguely suggest that he's Cuban-American. In reality, however, he is of Italian and Ugandan descent and spent his childhood in West Germany before moving to Miami (where he got his inspiration as an artist) as a teenager. "Lou Bega" is itself based on his real Ugandan surname, "Lubega."

    Pro Wrestling 
  • This is fairly common in pro wrestling, and it goes back to the earliest days of the sport. One of the first such angles involved "Cowboys vs. Indians", with well-tanned wrestlers playing the heel Indians and some well-crafted publicity stunts used to draw the desired media attention. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Foreign Wrestling Heels became common, first with American wrestlers portraying Germans sympathetic to the Nazi cause (when in fact, several "pro-Nazi" wrestlers were Jewish or fought for the Allied forces), and later faux-Russians. Asian heels also became common, with most of them actually being Native American, Hawaiian or Samoan (although a few were legitimately Asian); for instance, Mr. Fuji was a Hawaii-born Japanese-American. During the 1970s and 1980s, such as Ivan Koloff and the original Sheik were two of the biggest stars; they were actually North Americans posing as foreigners. In addition, a number of white wrestlers, such as Paul Diamond and Jamie Noble, have posed as Asians wearing masks.
  • Subverted when The Iron Sheik, an Iranian, had a brief run in the early 90s as Col. Mustafa, an Iraqi. He was still identified as being the Iranian born Sheik but had changed his allegiance to the nation that was now America’s main enemy.
  • Although billed as being from the Soviet Union (specifically Lithuania), Nikolai Volkoff (born Josip Nikolai Peruzović) was actually from Yugoslavia (Croatia, to be exact). Boris Zhukov (born James Harell), his ostensibly Soviet tag team partner and later rival, was in fact born and raised in Virginia.
  • Burqua-clad Syrian valet Raisha Saeed is portrayed by American Melissa Anderson, AKA "Future Legend" Cheerleader Melissa and Alissa Flash.
  • Canadian (though of Italian descent) Anthony Carelli playing Italian Santino Marella. Before that, in OVW, he was Russian wrestler Boris Alexiev.
  • Parodied with the WWF/E's The Machines, a supposedly Japanese tag team whose membership included "Giant Machine" (obviously André the Giant in a mask), and "Hulk Machine" (Guess Who?) The group was actually part of a Charlie Brown from Outta Town angle when Andre was suspended for no-showing an event. note 
  • Sabu, in reality an American-born wrestler of Lebanese descent, has been billed as hailing from Saudi Arabia, and from Bombay, India. Sabu attempts to maintain the illusion by not speaking in public, though he has been overheard speaking to his opponents during matches in a perfectly American accent. At one point, ECW were billing him as from "Bombay, Michigan" as an in-joke. At the same time, his tag-team partner, Rob Van Dam, was billed as being from "Battle Creek, India".
  • Pablo Marquez was from Ecuador but billed as a Puerto Rican in ECW due to having spent most of his wrestling career on the island.
  • Yokozuna, depicted by Samoan-American Rodney Anoa'i. Somewhat subverted in that while he represented Japan and had the Japanese Mr. Fuji in his corner, he actually was billed as being from Polynesia. This lead to a funny moment of irony during his match against Bret Hart at WrestleMania IX when the fans chanted "USA" to taunt Yokozuna (as Bret isn't American and Yoko was).
    • Incidentally, Mr. Fuji himself qualifies for this, as he's actually American born in Hawaii (though of Japanese descent).
    • Bret Hart is a dual citizen as his mom was from New York State, though Bret was reared in Calgary.
  • Kofi Kingston was originally billed as being from Jamaica, an artifact from NECW that probably got him hired since WWE apparently wanted Jamaican wrestlers at the time. He was actually born in Ghana (and raised in America), which WWE finally admitted.
  • New York Bodyguard Ezekiel Jackson, played by a Guyanese Wrestler, but eventually WWE decided to drop the charade.
  • Mexican wrestler Hunico's bodyguard/running buddy Camacho was billed from Juárez, Mexico, but was played by the Tongan Tevita Fifita.
  • Shantelle Taylor (real name: Shantelle Larissa Malawski), a Canadian of Polish descent, was originally meant to debut in WWE's Cruiserweight division under a mask and body suit as a supposed Japanese competitor and would eventually be unmasked to be revealed as a woman. Taylor was released before she made it to TV. (She did spend time in TNA as Taylor Wilde but was billed from her hometown of Toronto.)
  • In TNA the stable Mexican America had no Mexican members. On top of that only one of them was even ethnically Mexican, Anarquia, who was an American from California. Both Hernandez and Rosita are Americans of Puerto Rican decent, but were from Texas and New York. Hernandez was even still wearing tights with the Puerto Rican flag on them when the angle began. Finally Sarita is Canadian and not even Hispanic. However her inclusion can be justified because she was the only one that could fluently speak Spanish.
  • Killer Khan, a Japanese wrestler playing a Mongolian.
  • The One Man Gang, a white guy from South Carolina was portrayed as Akeem the African dream.
  • CMLL's Legión de Puerto Rico and Los Boricuas power stables were almost entirely made up of non Puerto Ricans. Even after they returned as El Comando Caribeño, a good deal of the members still weren't from the Caribbean (although Veneno was from Panama and El Hijo del Pierroth from The Dominican Republic). In the case of Comandante Pierroth, it could be considered a case of Boomerang Bigot and Les Collaborateurs since he was known as a Mexican before joining but all the same, Julio Estrada was the only Puerto Rican in of these groups initially and wasn't even the main focus. With the return of Camando Caribeño Estrada wasn't even around any longer, Zeuxis taking his place as the only Puerto Rican. Veteran Puerto Rican wrestler Rico Suave also associated with them when passing through Mexico, bringing the real Puerto Ricans to 16% of the group's alumni, Caribs 25%.
  • Bizarrely enough, in the Russian wrestling promotion Northern Storm Wrestling (NSW), there's a Russian wrestler named "Antonio, El Campeon del Pueblo" (Real name: Anton Deryabin), playing a Puerto Rican, and looking like a Russian Expy of Mexico's Blue Demon with a few extra pounds, and speaking Spanish with a odd mix of Russian and Mexican accent.
  • Nikita Koloff, the most famous "Russian" wrestler of the NWA and WCW, was played by a Minneapolis native. His "uncle" Ivan was Canadian.
  • CHIKARA:
  • Vladimir Kozlov, an Ukrainian playing a Russian
  • Rusev and Lana are Bulgarian and American, respectively, but were both billed in the WWE from Russia.
  • Jinder Mahal, a Indian-Canadian, is billed from Punjab, India.
  • Apollo Crews' gimmick is that he's a member of Nigerian royalty, being billed from Benue State, Nigeria, but he's actually an American — he was born in Sacramento, California and raised in the Atlanta area. His bodyguard Commander Azeez/Dabba-Kato was born in Poland, though his father was Nigerian.
  • Muhammad Hassan was actually from New York and of Italian descent, despite playing a terrorist gimmick.

    Radio 

    Theater 
  • Elisabeth:
    • All over the place. The most notable case: All three of the principal Elisabeths in the German/Austrian productions (the Bavarian princess who became empress of Austria) are Dutch - Pia Douwes, Maya Hakvoort, and Annemieke van Dam. Actual Austrians are rare in the cast.
    • The real Luigi Lucheni was Italian. In the musical he's almost always played by a German actor (or a Turkish actor, in the case of Serkan Kaya).
    • Inevitable in the international productions. The Japanese versions (both Takarazuka and Toho) have Japanese actors playing Austrians/Italians/Germans. Ditto with the South Korean versions.
  • Inevitable in productions in Japan, Korea, or anywhere else where you don't have a great deal of foreigners from every possible nation who are fluent enough in the local language to fill any role. At times, this has caused Western fans to jump on a production where an all-Japanese cast play characters of a variety of ethnicities, in some cases saying it's okay for Japanese actors to play white, Middle-Eastern, or Chinese characters, but if they play black characters, it's "whitewashing". However, local audiences have no problem with it.
  • The Moorish title character in Othello is often played by a white man (with or without blackface) in settings without many African actors. The first actor of African descent to be recorded playing Othello was in 1825, more than 200 years after the play was written. One thing to note is that "Moor" in Shakespeare's time usually referred to North-African Berbers, while most people of African decent in the Anglosphere derive from sub-Saharan Africa, so even modern actors commonly look very different from how the role was probably envisioned.
  • Similarly, Monostatos in The Magic Flute is referred to as a moor in the libretto, but is not always portrayed as black. It helps that (in North America, at least) operas rely on subtitles, so phrases like "the wicked moor" can be given as "the wicked Monostatos".
  • Controversy surrounded Miss Saigon when it was being transported to Broadway after a successful run in London. The Actor's Equity Association would not allow Jonathan Pryce, who had created the role of The Engineer in London, to play the role on Broadway. According to them, allowing Pryce, a white man, made up to look like an Asian in the show, would be an affront to Asian actors. A counterargument was that the Engineer is of mixed descent (French-Vietnamese), and Pryce was being discriminated against for being white. After pressure from Cameron Mackintosh, the producer, the general public, and its own members, the AEA relented and Jonathan Pryce was allowed to recreate his role on Broadway.
  • Lea Salonga, who is Filipina, has been cast as Vietnamese (Miss Saigon), French (Les Misérables), Chinese (Mulan, Flower Drum Song), and Arab (Aladdin).
  • The character of Christmas Eve in Avenue Q is an immigrant who sings about how her life sucks, in part, because she worked in a Korean deli (or, in some versions, a Chinese restaurant) upon coming to America, despite being Japanese. In the Australia/New Zealand tour, she is played by Filipina Christina O'Neill.
  • In Sunday in the Park with George, this is guaranteed to happen, because the first act is set entirely in France with French characters (with two Americans and two Germans in the company), and the second act is set in America, with American characters.
  • In the premiere of Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World, Musa, an Egyptian, was played by an East Indian actor, and Gamila, also Egyptian, was played by a white American actress.
  • Sound Horizon usually does this for their live shows out of necessity. The band is Japanese, but almost all of the Rock Opera albums are set outside of East Asia (Ancient Greece, 14th century Germany, France, etc). Obviously, it's rather difficult to find German or French performers that can sing live in fluent Japanese, so Japanese people playing Westerners it is.
  • In Harold Pinter's Celebration, Suki, who is of Japanese descent, is usually played by a white actress.
  • In Book-It Repertory Theatre's adaptation of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, the Chinese Henry Lee was played by a Filipino actor, while Keiko Okabe, who is obviously Japanese, was played by a Korean.
  • In the 2015 US tour of Matilda, one of the three girls in rotation for the eponymous role was a Filipina, Gabby Gutierrez.

    Video Games 
  • In Team Fortress 2, there is not a single character who is of the same nationality as their voice actor. The Australian Sniper is actually American, the German Medic is actually a Brit, and so on. This was done on purpose, to make the characters' accents sound stereotypically exaggerated. This even goes for the American accents in the game!
    • The Scout and Engineer are both Americans voiced by Americans, but both actors are from different parts of the US than their characters. The Californian Nathan Vetterlein voices the Scout, a Bostonian trying to pretend to be a New Yorker, for example. Grant Goodeve, the voice actor for the Texan Engineer, isn't even Texan himself; he was born in Connecticut.
    • Who knows where the Pyro is from, anyways?
  • Speaking of the British Robin Atkin Downes, he also voiced the Russian Nikolai in Modern Warfare 3.
  • Metal Gear Solid has Sniper Wolf, a Kurdish sniper voiced by Tasia Valenza, a New Yorker. She sounds like an American trying to sound like a Russian trying to do an Iraqi accent.
    Sniper Wolf: Doz damn Amerikanz!
  • It's probably not surprising that something as Camp as Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 has this as well. It features the English Tim Curry as Russian, the Welsh Jonathan Pryce as English, the Swedish Peter Stormare also as a Russian, and the Native Hawaiian-Chinese-English Kelly Hu as Japanese. Averted by Japanese-American George Takei playing the Japanese Emperor. This is just fine, however, since the setting is non-stop Ham-to-Ham Combat, and Tim Curry's Russian accent is hilarious.
  • Sheila from Spyro: Year of the Dragon is voiced by British actress Edita Brychta speaking with an Australian accent.
  • Super Mario Bros.: Even the most famous video game character of all, Mario, is an example of this. He, Luigi, Wario and Waluigi are all given their unmistakable Italian accents by French-American voice actor Charles Martinet.
  • In Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain and Dark Mirror, Canadian-American actress Jennifer Hale voices both Mara Aramov (Russian) and Maggie Powers (British).
  • Happens in the North American versions of Atlus's Persona games, which occur in Japan but are voiced by American actors.
  • Whereas some of Overwatch's voice actors share heritage with their characters, most don't. Some standout examples include Mercy (a Swiss medic voiced by German-American actress Lucie Pohl), Sombra (a Mexican hacker voiced by Colombian-American actress Carolina Ravassa) and Zarya (a Russian weightlifter voiced by British-Bulgarian actress Dolya Gavanski).

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • On BoJack Horseman, the Vietnamese-American Diane Nguyen is voiced by white American Alison Brie. The creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg has stated that if he was creating the show now he would cast an Asian actress.
  • In the original DuckTales (1987), the Scottish Scrooge McDuck was played by Alan Young, a Canadian-American who was born in England. Averted in the 2017 series, where he's played by an actual Scot. On the other hand, in the 2017 series Flintheart Glomgold (who was retconned from Boer to Scottish in the 80s series) is returned to his South African Roots... while in-universe pretending to be Scottish as a way of one-upping Scrooge.
    Glomgold: "He thinks he's so rich, and so Scottish! Well I'm wearing a kilt, McDuck! A kilt!"
  • Used a lot in G.I. Joe: Resolute. The entire production used four voice actors: Charlie Adler (Cobra Commander for the first time, Flint, Gung-Ho, Stalker, and Hard Master) Eric Bauza (Storm Shadow, Destro, and Tunnel Rat), Steve Blum (Duke, Ripcord, Roadblock, Zartan, Wild Bill, and Doc), and Grey DeLisle (Scarlett, Baroness, Dail Tone, and Cover Girl). Both Adler and Blum are Jewish-American, Bauza is Filipino-Canadian, and DeLisle is an American of mixed Dutch/French/Irish/Mexican/Norwegian descent and outside of Gender Flipping Dial Tone and Resolute following G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra's lead of Race Lifting Ripcord into an African-American, the characters still retain the nationalities and races of most other incarnations (Destro being Scottish; Baroness being Russian; Doc, Roadblock, and Stalker being African-American; Tunnel Rat being Chinese-American; Zartan being Australiannote ; and Storm Shadow and Hard Master being Japanese).
  • White American actor Toby Huss voices the Laotian Kahn in King of the Hill. Similarly, series co-creator Mike Judge impersonates George Takei when voicing Kahn's Laotian friend Ted Wassanasong.
  • Done in-universe in The Legend of Korra, where Bolin (half-Fire Nation, half-Earth Kingdom) plays "Nuktuk, Hero of the South(ern Water Tribe)". A important note here is that both Water Tribes are by far the darkest skinned of the peoples in the Avaverse and Bolin and his co-star Ginger are both fair skinned.
  • The Magic School Bus: Lisa Yamanaka is Japanese-Canadian, but she voices Wanda, who is Chinese-American.
  • Due to time constraints the crew of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic were unable to get a Swahili voice actress for Zecora, so they asked Brenda Crichlownote  to "ad-lib some African sounding gibberish." Then-producer Lauren Faust justified it by imagining Zecora's not speaking Swahili, but "Zebra".◊
  • Nick Jr.:
    • In Blue's Clues, French-accented Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper are voiced by Nick Balaban (the former) and Penelope Jewkes and Spencer Kayden (the latter), who are American.
    • Bubble Guppies: The Ambiguously Brown Molly is voiced by white voice actresses Brianna Gentiella, Bailey Gambertoglio, and Taylor Kaplan. Oona, who is implied to be Asian, is voiced by white voice actresses Reyna Shaskan, Tori Feinstein, and Colby Kipnes.
    • PAW Patrol: African American Mayor Goodway is voiced by the white Deann Degruijter. From Season 7 onward, she's voiced by the black actress Kim Roberts.
    • Rusty Rivets: the Latina Ruby Ramirez is voiced by Ava Preston, who is white
    • Abby Hatcher: The Chinese-American title character is voiced by white voice actress Macy Drouin.
    • Blue's Clues & You!: French-accented Mr. Salt is voiced by Canadian voice actor Brad Adamson. Averted with Mrs. Pepper, who is voiced by French-Canadian voice actress Gisele Rosseau.
  • Common with PBS Kids shows as of the 2010s:
    • The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!: the Ambiguously Brown Nick was voiced by the White Jacob Ewanuik in the first two seasons. Luckily, in the third and final season, he's voiced by Deandray Hamilton, who is Black.
    • Wild Kratts: the Hispanic Aviva is voiced by Athena Karkanis, who is of Greek and Egyptian descent. Koki, who's Black, is voiced by the White Heather Bambrick until Season 7, when they took note of this and replaced her with Sabryn Rock, who herself is Black.
    • Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood: The black Miss Elaina was voiced by Addison Holley, who's white, for the first four seasons. In season 5, they replaced her with an actual black girl, Markeda McKay.
    • Ready Jet Go!: In season 1, Sydney (who is black) was voiced by Dalila Bela (who starred in fellow PBS series Odd Squad), who is of English, French, Brazilian, Panamanian and Spanish ancestry. In season 2, they replaced her with an actual black girl, Vienna Leacock. However, the Hispanic Mindy and the Asian Lillian were voiced by white girls (Jaeda Lily Miller and Amelia Shoichet-Stoll) for the entirety of the series.
    • Let's Go Luna! - Can apply to the whole show, because all of the voice actors are from Canada, and the characters on the show span the whole globe except for Canada. In particular, Carmen is Mexican but is voiced by Saara Chaudry, who is of Indian and Pakistani descent.
    • Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: The Ambiguously Brown Xavier and Yadina are voiced by Aidan Vissers and Zoe Hatz, who are both white. However, the historical figures are almost always played by people of their respective heritage — for example, the indigenous Isabella Beaver as Sacagawea.
  • All the Road Rovers, except for Hunter, are voiced by American actors instead of their nationalities, including black actor Kevin Michael Richardson as Exile and Jeff Bennett as German Blitz.
  • The only major character in Samurai Jack voiced by a Japanese actor was Big Bad Aku, who was voiced by the late Mako. The title character is voiced by African-American Phil LaMarr; when the series was revived, Aku was voiced by his FusionFall voice actor, Greg Baldwin, who's white and Ashi, introduced in the final season, is voiced by Canadian-American Tara Strong.
  • Cree Summer is an African American voice actress, but she has played several characters who aren't of that race, like Penny from Inspector Gadget and Elmyra from Tiny Toon Adventures.
  • Transformers: Animated: Indian-Americans Isaac and Sari Sumdac are played by Tom Kenny and Tara Strong, who are white-Americans.
  • On Voltron: Legendary Defender, Cuban American Lance and Afro-Samoan American Hunk are voiced by Caucasians Jeremy Shada and Tyler Labine, while Japanese American Shiro is voiced by Josh Keaton, who is of mixed Peruvian/Ashkenazi Jewish descent and Italian American Pidge is voiced by Bex Taylor-Klaus, who is of German Jewish descent, respectively.
  • Winx Club: For the Atlas Oceanic dub, black voice actress Kimberly Brooks voices the white Stormy.

    Real Life 
  • In the Ibiza affair, Austrian politician Heinz-Christian Strache met with a woman he was told was a Russian oligarch's niece and offered her political favors in return for money. The meeting was actually a sting operation, and the Russian woman was purportedly played by a Bosnian agricultural student.
  • Happens occasionally in the Olympic Games, when a country will recruit star athletes from other countries and grant them citizenship so they meet the IOC's requirements to represent their new country. For example, in the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Chinese men's hockey team had four players with no Chinese ethnicity or ties to the country.

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