He even scored a minor acting role on Child Star , playing the director of one of Shirley Temple's films. Currently he's working as dialect coach on the Disney telemovie A Ring of Endless Light , being shot on location around southeast Queensland. And you can't learn an American dialect just by listening to it. You have to learn it by speaking it. And not just the lines in the script.
Actors have to be able to improvise in an American accent.
If you can't, you're behind the ball. The intonations are a big thing as well. If you are speaking American but with an Australian intonation, it's a giveaway. Born in Iowa in America's mid-west and raised in southern California, he started drama classes aged eight, following in the footsteps of his mother, Arlene. She was a theatre actress who scored some walk-on roles in a number of Hollywood flicks in the '50s and '60s.