While Kevin Spacey gets some of the accent right, he sounds less like people actually do in the south these days. Here’s Vox on that:
There are a couple of distinct features that make Underwood “sound” Southern to some people. One of these traits is his “R-lessness,” which an expert would call his “non-rhoticity.” “This is when r at the ends of syllables is pronounced like a vowel or deleted, so that car and cars sound like cah and cahs,” Becker explained to me. You can hear it in the way Underwood says words like “uninformed” and “careless.”
This is one of the features that Thomas considers a stereotypical Southern feature. It sounds the way people think Southerners sound, but it’s actually a feature that is disappearing in Southern speech. “R-lessness was a traditional Southern feature — although not everywhere in the South — it was most prevalent in areas where the plantation culture had pre-dominated at one time before the Civil War,” Thomas told me, explaining that non-rhoticity had once been considered prestigious.
