10 International Stars You Never Realised Weren’t American

8. Brian Cox - Scottish

Among Brian Cox's best-known roles are William Stryker in X-Men 2, Ward Abbott in Bournes Identity and Supremacy and the acerbic, bellowing Robert McKee in Adaptation - all American, all with that inimitable Brian Cox voice. The role that really propelled him into the spotlight, though, giving him a lifetime membership to the Hollywood Character Actor's Club, was Manhunter's Hannibal Lektor, making the cannibalistic psychopath his own before Anthony Hopkins got his hammy hands on him years later. Cox's was a more believable interpretation than Hopkins's; sly, unsettlingly charming, but with an almost everyman quality, this American-accented devil remains perhaps the definitive Hannibal. Good work for a man that's so Scottish he's currently battling for his home country's independence from those evil Brits. The reason many are unaware of Cox's roots is because he hardly ever uses his real accent on-screen. He more often plays English, American or even Irish before he'll come to utilise that natural Scottish burr in a role.