This may be more apropos for GQ or IMHO, but since it’s at least tangentially related to movies and TVs I’ll put it here. I started to put it in the “All things Irish” thread but decided it would be a hijack.
This question is for those who are Irish or who have spent enough time in Ireland to be familiar with Irish accents and dialects.
In the U.S. most southerners, myself included, wince with pain when they hear many of the southern characters in movies because the accents/dialects are usually all wrong. The same is true with New Yorkers and Bostonians and other areas where there are strong regional accents and dialects: Hollywood tends to use a cookie-cutter that sounds like something you would never really overhear in an average neighborhood of the south or Boston or Brooklyn.
The obvious follow-up: how accurate are most movies with Irish characters/settings that aren’t actually filmed with Irish actors speaking in their real voices? Do Irish people get annoyed at the way their accents are portrayed in movies and on television? Are there any particularly bad or particularly great Irish accents you can recall from movies in which Irish characters were portrayed by non-Irish actors?
What’s the secret to a good Irish brogue and what do most ‘Hollywood’ (which is to say studio films in general) get wrong most often?
I would also be interested in reports of incidences of Brogues in movies that are accurate, and of those which are nonetheless bad (in the sense of an embarrassingly accurate stereotype). I know for southern accents, an accurate one is often as cringe-worthy for different reasons as a fake one.
Then again, real Australian accents from actual Australians often sound badly faked to me. I don’t know where the line is.
You know if it’s a real Irish accent if you can’t understand a thing they’re saying.
My boyfriend (hails from Belfast) and I watched Sons of Anarchy together and he said all the Irish people sounded ridiculous. I think the Irish accents on TV are a bad imitation of something you might hear in Cork - I’ve never heard any actor trying to do a Belfast or otherwise Northern Ireland accent.
As an aside, I watched the movie 50 Dead Men Walking, which is set in Belfast and I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying. The guys in that movie weren’t Irish but most of them were British. My boyfriend said their accents were a bit thick but fairly accurate. I suppose it might be easier for British actors to imitate an Irish accent?
I’d watch a Colin Farrell movie or show where he gets to use his normal accent - so, that episode of **Scrubs **or In Bruges or even **Daredevil **(tho’ it’s not very good). Avoid **Swat **or Miami Vice or Alexander, though.
Not Irish, but I’ve been to Ireland a few times, and I spent over a decade doing Irish dance, so I’ve known a few Irish people and have had a decent exposure to the culture.
From films I’ve seen, hands-down the worst attempt at an Irish accent I’ve ever heard was from Julia Roberts in Michael Collins. On the TV front, David Boreanaz was always horrendous in flashback scenes on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Here he is in the opening scene from the Irish movie Intermission. Be warned though there are violent acts and swearing in the clip. Appart from the girl in the shop who is from Navan IIRC and trying to do a Dublin accent the accents are real and accurate.
This has always bugged me about movies and accents. I’m always thinking, why the fuck wouldn’t they just get an actor from Ireland? I suppose name recognition is one thing, but I’d rather see a no-name get it right than a big-name screw it up.
What’s REALLY annoying is the old Irish Spring soap commercials. They had no-name actors anyway, so why not hire a real Irish person to come on and say “And we like it tooooo.” Bizarre.
Mike Myers was hired to do a movie in Ireland that was disaster laden from the start and was ultimately never completed, but he had (understandable) prima donna fits about accent. He said they had a resident dialect coach for the actors who EVERYBODY noticed sounded absolutely nothing like the extras and other locals on the set and who seemed to think the Irish were the ones getting the accent wrong.
This is as good a thread as any to ask the question I’ve been thinking of for the past few days.
Is the actor who plays Roy on The IT Crowd truly Irish? I’m too lazy to re-look up his name, but I did once and ISTR that it sounded Irish. If he is, then his accent’s a real one. And it’s lovely, too.
I’m Irish. There is a lot of variation in Irish accents, but here are a few I thought sounded authentic:
Daniel Day-Lewis x 2 - both as a Dubliner with cerebral palsy in My Left Foot and with Belfast accent in In the Name of the Father
Kate Hudson - as a south County Dublin ‘princess’ in About Adam but that’s probably because the real south Co. Dublin girls these days sound like Irish people pretending to be Californian
Cate Blanchett’s Dublin accent (there is quite a bit of variation in Dublin accents too) in Veronica Guerin
Anjelica Huston’s Galway accent in The Dead. She went to school in Kylemore Abbey in Connemara though which, I presume, is how she was able to do it so well.
Bad Irish accents in film - almost everyone else. In fact as someone pointed out earlier, even Irish actors can mess up Irish accents if they’re trying to do an accent from a different region than the place they come from.
I think the cookie-cutter effect might be a big part of the problem, in that most Americans think of there being one Irish accent, one English accent, and one Scottish accent, and might even get those mixed up. So an American faking an accent will come up with some elements of an accent from Cork, and some elements from Dublin, and some from Belfast, and probably even some elements from Glasgow, and it won’t matter to the typical American audience, because “they’re all the same anyway”.
Of course, in reality, there are probably about as many different accents in any single major city of the British Isles as there are in all of North America, so the net effect is that someone using a kludged-together accent like that doesn’t actually sound like anyone, but most Americans don’t realize that.
