"I think he got a deal on visas," joked "Sarah Conner" star Lena Headey, who turned to her executive producer to explain why she'd been cast.

"Because you're good," said Josh Friedman.

"Or cheap," Headey interjected.

(But that's not necessarily true. Hugh Laurie is one of the highest-paid actors on TV, pulling down $300,000 per "House" episode.)

Just a coincidence?

The fact that there are so many foreign actors in so many American TV series this fall has to be more than a coincidence — or does it?

"There isn't a pattern. We have to go and knock on the door like everybody," said "Journeyman" star Kevin McKidd. "There's not suddenly this season some fast-track portal that all these British actors are flying through to LAX. You know what? I think it was purely a coincidental thing."

His executive producer/director agreed.

"You're just trying to find the best people for the role," said Alex Graves. "And it's really coincidence that it's ended up being a lot of Europeans this year.

"They're well-trained and they're great actors. There are well-trained, great actors in New York and L.A. too. It just has sort of gone down this way."

"Flash Gordon" executive producer Peter Hume said that before casting so many Canadians, "We looked at everyone in town, and a lot of Americans. It turned out that it just happened the people we picked were Canadians, but there was no design."

Fresh faces

Producers insist there's not some sort of anti-American actor bias — that the influx of foreign actors is just part of a search for new stars.

"It has become kind of all of the rage in the last couple of years," said "Bionic Woman" executive producer David Eick. "Everyone is looking for new faces. Everyone is looking for people they haven't seen."

"We are casting a wider net," said "Bionic Woman" executive producer Jason Smilovic. In addition to New York and Los Angeles, it's become standard practice to have casting directors working at various sites around the world — the U.K., Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, etc.

And they found their star on a piece of tape sent from England.

"It was like that old Hollywood story where you're finding someone who no one knows," Eick said. "You're making a discovery, and it really felt like that from the very beginning. And even though Michelle's well-known in the U.K., we didn't know her here."

American accents

All the non-American actors are playing Americans — affecting accents so well that, unless you know they're not American, you'd never be able to tell.