7 WWE Fake Accents That Are Miserably Poor
6. Santino Marella
WWE went to great lengths to make sure that its audience knew that Santino Marella came from Milan, Italy and is absolutely not at all a mild-mannered Canadian from Southern Ontario. Why would you even think that? Listen to the man, that’s no Canadian accent I’ve ever heard.
The saga that was the evolution of Santino’s Italian(ish) accent started with his his debut match where he was picked out out of the crowd by Mr. McMahon to face Umaga for the Intercontinental Championship. He instantly won the crowd over with a present, but much tamer version, of his Italian accent. What started out as a dialect that was close enough to pop the hometown crowd eventually evolved into the over-the-top, Italianesque accent that was Santino’s alone.
His impressive run with the voice included: using it to mispronounce words for our delight and amusement, adapting it to a falsetto to play his own sister to win the ‘coveted’ Miss. Wrestlemania sash, and, as all accented wrestlers do, having to adopt it whenever he was around anyone who might recognize him as a WWE Superstar. He kept this up from the day of this debut in 2007 until he retired in 2014. That’s seven years. Seven. Years. There are potential sleeper agents who haven’t kept up a fake accent that long. That, friends, is how to take what you’re given and make a career out of it.