I’m curious about the phenomenon, mostly in Hollywood but also in British productions, that characters from countries outside the US and UK speak with British accents. This applies to:
France (Les Miserables, Tintin, Hugo)
Rome (Spartacus [1960], HBO’s Rome)
Greece (Clash of the Titans)
Italy (The Merchant of Venice, Showtime’s The Borgias)
Germany (All Quiet on the Western Front [1930], Valkyrie [I think])
Russia (Enemy at the Gates [I think])
Scandinavia (The History Channel’s Vikings)
Complicating things is the fact that Sasha Baron Cohen spoke with a French accent in Hugo, even though the rest of the French characters spoke with British accents. I can’t believe Scorsese allowed that, to be honest.
Why do you think British is the go-to accent? What do Britons think of hearing their own accents in foreign characters – does it sound “right” or “wrong”? Has there been a film or TV show that takes place in a foreign land but the American actors just used their own accents?
It’s connected to where they went to learn English, which would mostly be England/London because of its proximity to continental Europe, traditional links with the Anglosphere and theatre/school/training culture.
Half the world comes here, lives/works in a bar and learns something somewhere.
I was joking about that after the wife and I saw Les Miz last weekend–why the hell do all the Frenchmen have English accents? (The most pronounced example, that little kid with the Cockney accent at the barricade. It’s Paris, for Pete’s sake!)
I think it’s just the bias that concludes that English is the proper actor’s accent, that it is almost a non-accent in theater. It’s silly really. Tony Curtis was a go-to joke for bad accents because of his role in Spartacus, since a Bronx accent was so out of place in 1st century Rome. Um, but an English accent isn’t? Why wasn’t a Cockney accent in Les Miz for a native Parisian not jarring? Because anything English sounds proper, as if Shakespeare might have written it.
I wonder about this too. I really started noticing when American Drew Barrymore was playing a medieval French girl with a British accent in Ever After.
I think perhaps we all just find an American accent irretrievably modern, and it places a character very squarely in time and space. While British actually is more sprinkled around the globe, plus has existed for much longer. Like, sure, a medieval French princess wouldn’t be speaking English at all, but somehow we can suspend disbelief for that as long as the accent is one that existed at the time, or something.
The other thing is that high, dramatic, or old fashioned speech sounds goofy with an American accent. Like hearing Hamlet’s soliloquy in a broad Brooklyn accent (though I’m sure someone has done it), or Antigone’s speech in a flat Midwestern twang. It’s hard to pull off the word “thither” without a British accent.
I found the unadorned American accents in Once Upon a Time very jarring at first, but once you get used to it, it flows better. Still, you can sometimes almost hear the actors straying into a bit of Brit on their more dramatic dialog, just like Princess Leia confronting Tarkin in Star Wars.
1988’s The Beast had American accents for all the English-speaking characters/actors*…especially unusual, at least for Hollywood, in that they’re all Soviet troops, and essentially the bad guys (sort of…it’s a bit complicated).
*With one exception, an allied Afghan officer played by Erick Avari.
Be careful what you wish for - you really want to see movies where every English-speaking man, woman and child does a Guido Sarducci accent? Even if it’s “accurate”?
In Les Miserables, the cast and crew are from all around the world:
Hugh Jackman - Australia
Russell Crowe - New Zealand
Anne Hathaway - U.S.
Amanda Seyfried - U.S.
Sacha Baron Cohen - U.K.
Helena Bonham Carter - U.K.
Eddie Redmayne - U.K.
Aaron Tveit - U.S.
Samantha Barks - Isle of Man
Daniel Huttlestone - U.K.
Josef Altin - U.K.
And there’s a whole slew of actors below those in the cast list who are so obscure that they don’t even have a biography on the IMDb but who are probably mostly British. The director (Tom Hooper) and the screenwriter for the movie adaptation (William Nicholson) are British. It’s listed as being a U.S./U.K. co-production, which usually means that the money for the budget came from both countries. It’s based on a novel written by a Frenchman. The original musical in French was written by a Tunisian and a Frenchman and then completely rewritten in its English-language adaptation by a South African. Perhaps they simply decided that to avoid having audiences try to figure out what the weird variety of accents meant, it was best to just have everyone sound British.
I blame Shakespeare. For 400 years, the English-speaking world’s prime exposure to theatrical Romans, Italians and Danes had them speaking in British accents. After a while, it just started to seem normal.
I’m trying to think of any possible exceptions (allowing the “translation convention”)—I think I may have heard German accents a couple of times (the dub of Das Boot?), and maybe Russian once or twice.
I saw a performance of a Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Globe. It ws supposed to be with original accents and pronunciations, or at least their best guesses. It sounded like a Southerner trying to do an Australian accent while having a heart attack.
It’s probably worth it for any Shakespeare fan to once in their life hear a Shakespeare play done in reconstructed original accents. It doesn’t sound like any modern accent. All modern dialects have changed a great deal in the past four hundred years. The tradition of doing Shakespeare in contemporary Standard British English is ultimately arbitrary. There is simply no completely satisfactory way to do a movie where everyone is supposedly speaking languages or dialects that aren’t their own, whether it’s because they are all speakers of language X in a movie in which they are supposed to be speakers of language Y or where they speak modern dialects of language X in a movie when they are supposed to be speakers of a dialect of that language from centuries ago. Having everyone pick some modern dialect which they can all do is one way of making the problems a little less, but it’s not truly satisfactory.
