The Wire was known for its naturalistic depiction of Baltimore's mean streets and meaner corners, and much of that realism came courtesy of the characters' pitch-perfect dialogue delivered in B'more vernacular and cadence.

So fans of HBO's cop opus may have been gobsmacked to hear the show's drug kingpin Stringer Bell with an English accent on the Showcase/BBC detective drama Luther. But star Idris Elba is indeed a Brit, and a Cockney at that, having grown up in East London's Canning Town. He's also not the only actor to hide a telltale accent when they get work o'er the pond. Did you know these folks were secret Brits?

Hugh Laurie
Before Laurie was the award-winning star of House, M.D., he was best known as Rowan Atkinson's doofus aristocratic boss Prince George and later Lieutenant George in the time-skipping cult comedy Blackadder. The Oxford-born, Eton-educated former rower spent many years working on various television shows, including Blackadder, with comedy partner Stephen Fry before heading stateside to play grouchy American medical genius Dr. Gregory House.

Jamie Bamber
Despite the fact that his Battlestar Galactica colleague James Callis was able to use his natural London accent as Gaius Baltar, Bamber had to sound American when playing Lee Adama so that it would make at least some sense that he was the prodigal son of Edward James Olmos' Admiral Adama -- though the likelihood that a swarthy Latino like Olmos could have such a white-bread son was perhaps the show's least realistic plotline, even for a show about robot genocide. But Bamber is now able to speak freely as the detective star of Law & Order: UK. Chung-chung!

Ian McShane
Though hired as the star of frontier epic Deadwood because he best represented America's old west at its wildest, especially in contrast to those poncy Brits, McShane nonetheless hails from the Queen's land. Hell, he's so British that his dad was a famous footballer and his first breakout role was a sketchy antiques dealer in Lovejoy. Yes, antiques dealer. But even with an American accent as Al Swearengen on Deadwood, he still maintained traces of his homeland -- how else to explain that his dialogue was so often referred to as Shakespearean despite his favourite word being cocksucker? 

Dominic West
Idris Elba actually wasn't the only Briton in Baltimore. His Wire co-star West, who played Detective Jimmy McNulty, was born in Sheffield, England and went to school at Eton (albeit not at the same time as the older Hugh Laurie). Though West returned home after the show's end to focus his career in the theatre, he's done a few Brit pics, including the Celtic war epic Centurion and the aptly-named Johnny English Reborn, alongside Laurie's old castmate Rowan Atkinson. Guess it is a small island, after all.