Accents, along with wigs, prosthetics and other embellishments, are an element of an actor’s performance that can so easily be pounced on, especially when the knives are out for a film in general. I do feel for the performers who routinely get singled out in this hall of shame.
Kate Winslet, for example, has been working with the same dialect coach, Susan Hegarty, for most of her career and trained with Hegarty before filming her acclaimed role as Pennsylvanian detective Mare Sheehan in this year’s Mare of Easttown.Īctors still tip into parodic stereotype on a regular basis, though – a criticism you could level at the entire ensemble in last year’s “Oirish” romcom Wild Mountain Thyme, starring Emily Blunt and Jon Hamm, and Don Cheadle’s “cor blimey, guv’nor!” munitions guy in the Ocean’s films. Of course, as you’d expect, stars take lessons before they step on to the set. (Dennis Lim of the Village Voice said Ford was “acting without a nyet”.) In both cases these international megastars, rarely feted for what you might call their chameleonic gifts, suggested an acquaintance with Mother Russia that sounded remote at best. You could definitely level this at, shall we say, the broad Irish twangs both Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones attempted while playing IRA bombers: Pitt in the ill-fated The Devil’s Own (1997), and Jones, notching up career-worst honours, as the insane baddie in Blown Away (1994).įor another ignominious pairing, try the two Russian submarine captains Sean Connery and Harrison Ford played, in The Hunt for Red October (1990) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). Their woeful attempts at “posh British” have gone down in film-making lore, with director Francis Ford Coppola admitting, in an interview with US magazine Entertainment Weekly in 2015, that he knew at the time of filming that Reeves was off-the-mark but didn’t criticise him because the actor was trying so hard and because he liked him so much “personally”.Īnd it’s true that accents in movies gain particular notoriety when it feels like a Hollywood star’s inflated ego is to blame for their miscasting. Gary Oldman’s Transylvanian count, with his gooey outbursts, sonorous cackles and silky drawl, gets top marks by far Anthony Hopkins barks “Ja!” a lot as Van Helsing and at least winds up at the fun end of overripe.īut, heavens above, Winona and Keanu.
If it’s Gucci-esque inconsistency you’re after, look no further than the stars of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), trotting out their individual stylings as if no one else mattered. There’s nothing like a few strangled vowel sounds to throw us out of a film’s whole finale (hello, Quentin Tarantino’s “Australian” miner in Django Unchained) or make declarations of puppy love fall embarrassingly flat (Natalie Portman’s squawking, English-adjacent Padmé in the Star Wars prequels). But many films before it have been, if not scuppered, then at least scarred by actors whose voice work isn’t up to scratch.
Their wayward variety only adds to it as a camp artefact. No one in this wildly uneven all-star boondoggle is heard to literally say the words, “When’sa your Dolmio day?”, but Jared Leto, whose falsetto caricature is, at points in the film, almost beyond human hearing, comes the closest.ĭo these accents ruin House of Gucci? Absolutely not. For dessert, there’s Salma Hayek scheming with husky verve in a mud bath. Or go for something lighter – a Caprese salad? – in the manner of Jeremy Irons’s purring approximation. You can opt for the all-out, wildly indulgent pasta dish (Lady Gaga, letting rip with regular “Brrrava”s and weird hints of Russian). This week, the cast of Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci prove that picking an Italian accent is like ordering off a menu.