Shimmy Marcus, artistic director of the renowned Dublin acting school Bow Street Academy, recently watched the latest “Knives Out” installment, “Wake Up Dead Man,” and was impressed by the number of British and Irish actors playing Americans in leading roles.

“There’s Andrew Craig, Josh O’Connor, Andrew Scott and Daryl McCormick… and I thought, ‘What are we doing that’s so interesting?'” he says. Variety.

But “Wake Up Dead Man” is far from the only example.

Spielberg’s return to science fiction with “Disclosure Day” was also full of names from across the Atlantic showing off their American accents, with O’Connor again, plus Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Henry Lloyd-Hughes. Indeed, any casual glance over the last decade-plus of Hollywood has seen what is regularly described as an “invasion” of British and Irish actors, something that has fueled an ongoing and sometimes heated debate (especially when it comes to prominent historical roles, such as Daniel Day-Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln and David Oyelowo playing Martin Luther-King).

It has even gotten to the point where many are simply presumed to be Americans. Marcus says his partner recently praised the Irish accent of someone he had seen regularly on American shows. As he had to point out: the actor in question, in fact, “was Irish.”

Whatever’s in the water in the Emerald Isles or Britain, Marcus now hopes to export some to the United States, and Bow Street Academy will open its first supervised campus in September in Los Angeles.

But he is not alone. While major Hollywood productions are leaving the studios in the United States and heading east to growing film and television centers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, British and Irish acting schools are slowly charting a course westward.

Bow Street Academy LA, which will be based at the historic The Lot in Formosa, where Charlie Chaplin first set up United Artists Studios, joins The Identity School of Acting, the London-based university that opened its first outpost in Los Angeles in 2018. Meanwhile, LAMDA, London’s oldest drama school (dating back to 1861), last year opened an office in New York from where it plans to begin offering short courses.

Bow Street Academy LA will be overseen on the ground by Oscar-nominated writer, director and producer Kirsten Sheridan (who recently wrote on the FX hit “Say Nothing”), part of a trio of directors who, along with Marcus, helped create The Factory in Dublin in 2010. The space began as a grassroots home for filmmakers to chat, exchange and develop ideas, and promising talents like Barry Keoghan, Niamh Algar and Jack would come to perform there. Reynor. his first skills. But it soon transformed into a dedicated acting school, relaunching in 2015 as Bow Street Academy (and recognized more formally as Ireland’s National Film Acting School).

The school has been growing since then, but the idea of ​​expanding abroad emerged around 2023, when Marcus says they noticed a “huge uptake of applications, particularly from people from the United States, even from Los Angeles.” When aspiring students are asked why they were willing to travel from the west coast of the United States to Dublin for acting lessons, he says a common response would be, “Because we just don’t have that here.”

But what exactly is “this”? What specific training is not available in the US?

In addition to its entirely screen-centric approach, Bow Street offers “an alternative approach to interpreting what [students] “What we’re doing as an actor between the action and the cut,” says Marcus. “I’m not interested in comparing ourselves to what others are doing in the US, but it seems like a lot of the performances there are displays of emotion, presenting the idea of ​​what the character is going through, whereas our focus is more conceptualized on giving the actor the power to have agency over their own interpretation of what’s happening in the scene.”

The end result is performances that “seem more authentic and human,” says Marcus, with more of a real actor in the character, which is built from the inside out. “So you feel like you’re being more of a voyeur when you watch the performance.”

The key to Bow Street and the secret ingredient behind its entire curriculum is Gerry Grennell, the Dubliner who helped set up its first course when it was still The Factory.

While he is often credited with simply being a “dialect coach,” Grennell is an in-demand behind-the-scenes collaborator for a truly surprising array of names, having worked with the likes of Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, and Anne Hathaway, to name just a few. He famously helped the late Heath Ledger develop his portrayal of the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” while coaching his regular client Oscar Isaac for more than a decade (including on “Dune” and “Frankenstein”). As the basis of their relationship, Isaac recently became a patron of the Academy.

New Bow Street tutors in the US are currently being trained in the “Gerry Glennell Method”, which Marcus says has been “tried and tested at the highest levels”. But the man himself will also be on the Los Angeles campus working on the Academy’s longer courses once the doors open.

Like Bow Street, London’s Identity School of Acting was already an innovative institution long before it planted a flag in the U.S. Created by actor-turned-teacher-agent Femi Oguns in 2003, the school, which offers part-time acting classes, has helped launch artists such as John Boyega, Letitia Wright and Damson Idris and has contributed greatly to the diversity of the UK’s performing arts scene. It opened its US branch at the Thymele Arts Center in East Hollywood in 2018 with around 300 students.

For Oguns, who also oversees Identity Agency Group, what makes his school different is that it is “built around the realities of the industry and not just tradition.” Identity’s tutors are working professionals and the training reflects the current casting landscape, he says. “We put a big emphasis on preparing actors for employment rather than just graduating.”

Earlier this month, Identity School had to move from its Los Angeles site due to a change in ownership at the property, and is now looking for a new location for when terms begin again in September. Fortunately, Oguns notes, his online school is “thriving.”

While not a campus, LAMDA’s office and studio facilities in Midtown Manhattan emerged from recognition of the growing American appeal of the historic London theater school, long considered a fertile training ground for the West End and Broadway. Nicholas Holden, LAMDA’s deputy director of academic, research and student affairs, suggests that around “one in three” of its students across its various majors and semesters come from the US.

Holden says it was a desire to stay connected with its alumni and support their professional careers once home that saw the school partner with the Association of Resident Theaters and rent space on Eighth Avenue in early 2025. It now holds auditions and networking events on site, as well as workshops and masterclasses. But it is also looking to offer its short course programme, which Holden says covers an “introduction to acting, playwriting and everything else”, and will offer a “really valuable catalyst to allow people to experience British acting training in New York”.

A central element of this British acting training, and something Holden says “establishes [LAMDA] apart from what people might experience in the US,” it focuses on the whole.

“From very early on, our students understand what it means to work together and how a project works, how their learning can be enhanced by being open to others, understanding others, and how the whole is stronger than the individual,” he says. He states that LAMDA graduates often identify themselves within the industry, “because of their ability to work together and create that joint spirit in rehearsal and ultimately in production.”

Then there’s another celebrated and long-established London acting institution, RADA. While it may not have its own exclusive base in the United States, it does offer a short course program, including a five-day intensive “actor training” in New York.

But not everything is one-way in terms of knowledge transfer. One of the things Marcus, of Bow Street, says he’s loved learning about American culture is that “they never stop training,” compared to Europe, where “traditionally it’s like I’ve finished my three years and I’m ready to work.” That’s why an open day at the school on July 26 ahead of its September launch will welcome anyone from the film industry, including non-actors who want to retrain.

Whether they want Bow Street’s “Gerry Glennell Method” or LAMDA’s joint approach, clearly a central goal for most American students applying to these schools is to improve their employability prospects, or potentially snatch a high-profile American role from under the nose of an “invading” British or Irish star.

Marcus highlights the success of Bow Street’s Irish alumni, led by Keoghan but including new stars such as Peter Claffey, the former professional rugby player who retired from the sport, enrolled at the Academy, soon joined the cast of “Bad Sisters” and is now best known for his leading role as Ser Duncan the Tall in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

“But we also have two Ringos and a John,” he says, noting that alongside Keoghan playing Beatles drummer Ringo Starr in the four Sam Mendes biopics, graduate Louis McCartney, a Tony winner last year for “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” has just been cast as the musician in the BBC drama “Hamburg Days,” which also stars fellow Rhys Mannion alumni as John Lennon.

“Suddenly, it really landed for us,” says Marcus. “And that’s our new motto: Our graduates work.”