I mean, he came to the US at the start of the 80s, and I heard him in a video from 1986 where he sounds like I usually hear him sounding, virtually no accent, as far as my inexperienced ear can tell, I just find that pretty good, especially since I'd love to hear what say, Arnold or Jean Claude Van Damme would sound like without their accents.
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shareIt is in Van Damme and Arnolds acting persona that they have those accents.
What would Arnold movies be like if he spoke perfect California English? It would not be Arnold.
"Get tuo dah choppah! Oouaaawgh!"
They probably have some serious speech training to be able to keep their accents.
Dolph's breakthrough came with Rocky, where he spoke with a Russian accent. So he was never bound to a specific accent.
If Drago had instead been "Gunnar the invincible Swede" and spoken with a Swedish accent it might have stuck much more to his actor persona.
Born with it? That's no excuse, Peter Stormare was born in Sweden but play all kinds of characters with different accents.
shareHe attended Washington State U, Emerson U and then a Fulbright at MIT before he moved to New York and studied acting. Serious acting schools usually involve extensive voice training. He probably worked on it during that phase to try to perfect the sound of a native speaker. My brother also moved to New York to study acting and did hours of voice training even though he was a native speaker.
I remember one of my brother's girlfriends he met in acting school moved to Manhattan from Queens. The first thing they did with her was give her training to remove her Queens accent. When I met her she spoke with the smooth generic American accent you hear newscasters use. She told me that when she started out they made a tape of her speaking with her Queens accent and when they played it back to her a few weeks later she burst out crying because she never realized that was how she sounded. Not that I am saying anything against a Queens accent.
In the bio here it says Lundgren "caused a stir in Sweden" in the late 80s when he refused to be interviewed in Swedish, preferring English. Sounds like he was pretty dedicated to the change in language.