RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” | Hacker News Reader

RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents”

thestage.co.uk

44 pointswhatami22 comments

"Hunt for Red October" does this. Everyone uses their own voice on the Russian sub.

I love the way that movie treats this...so much better than speaking English with a Russian accent which makes no sense at all.

Thirded. IMO movies/shows for English-speaking should either use the native language of their setting accompanied by subtitles, or just speak English in whatever disparate accent the actors normally have. So many productions are diminished by Americans doing poor British accents, British doing poor American accents, both of these poorly imitating their own country's other regional dialects, etc. Though sadly at this point I don't think we'll ever break free of the "everyone in generic fantasy settings must speak in a modern British accent" trope...

I just watched the first episode of "Norsemen" on Netflix.

One of the best parts of that show is the thick Norwegian accent of all the Vikings.

So on one hand it follows the argument that actors should use their own accent (since all actors are Norwegian) on the other hand, you can't put a German or British actor on the Viking cast and ask them to use their own accent without ruining the show.

My point is, the accent can make sense.

One of the under the radar movies I watched lately was Death of Stalin, and true beauty of this dark comedy was the simple fact that none of the actors tried to speak English in a Russian accent and on top of it, there is a mix of British and American accent depending on the actor. This made the movie truly enjoyable and free from pretense.

I enjoyed this movie too, but bear in mind many people hated it, because of how it portrayed what it portrayed: not the accents mind you, the lack of moral judgement about the (semi true) scenes.

Lots of literature talks about the range of accents in the russian empire and CCCP. So, at one level having a mix of accents for the different characters exposed a real underlying complexity of what it is, to be a modern (19th century) Russian/Georgian/Ukranian/...

I learned Russian briefly. Our teacher told us that if we went to Russia and spoke Russian with a typical English accent, most people would not be able to place it, but would assume we came from a remote area they hadn't encountered before. Iirc English accents can pass as something from one of the Baltic states.

Your teacher was either pulling your leg or you simply misunderstood the point they were trying to make. Russians can immediately identify a native English speaker – it is one of the most placeable accents for Russians thanks to decades of depictions of Americans and Brits in the context of Cold War-era entertainment. Furthermore, many Russian speakers can determine from a English speaker’s accent in Russian whether that English speaker is from the USA or the UK.

You may well be right. I'm not qualified to say.

Stalin having a cockney accent was just fantastic.

One thing that bugs me is that (guesstimate) 1/3 of Hollywood stars are Australian (or Kiwi), but they always (have to) do US accents in their movies. And about 90% of the time there's actually an Australian character in a US movie/series they get a US actor to play the Australian! And it sounds so very fake, though not to people in the US evidently. Both of these I find hard to watch.

It's no better with Brits. I never could watch House after loving Blackadder, and The Walking Dead is so weird after being a huge fan of This Life. (i.e. the lead character in both are English)

I am happy about this happening because the Australian and British accents are unintelligible sometimes.

American accents are often so unintelligible as to need subtitles - I can't watch many Hollywood films without them, especially if the dialogue is quiet or secondary to something happening on-screen.

The issue here of course being that "big film" is made in Hollywood and country-specific film industries are often much smaller and tend to stay far away from big-budget genres, rather than that we should try and find a globally understandable accent. Hollywood having taken over the globe is not really a good thing for anything except economies of scale.

They are unintelligible to you due to the fact you never hear them. And once they become intelligible you'll have a larger amount of material to consume and you'll be even happier.

British people can understand American variations, e.g. 'sidewalk', the pronunciation of the last letter in the alphabet and 'candy'. But there are a surprising amount of Americans that simply do not understand the original British English variants, e.g. 'pavement', 'zed', 'sweets'.

This even applies to those few Americans that have passports and travel to the UK. This lack of initiative when it comes to understanding language is possibly due to how American words have to be spelt out and explained. In original British English context is good enough. So a 'bin' will suffice for a receptacle to place your rubbish in, whereas, in America, you have to have a 'waste paper basket'.

This latter point is something that British people do laugh about, e.g.:

Americans Don't Understand English - The Jonathan Ross Show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wSw3IWRJa0&vl=en-GB

I feel the same about American accents. Sometimes they talk so fast, fail to annunciate and it sounds like they have something in their mouths.

I'm a Brit living in Australia.

I have the same problem with many American movie actors, and I'm an American. Watch a movie from the 1940s. There was a standard of enunciation that seems to have disappeared. But there are plenty of exceptions, actors who take that part of their craft seriously: James Spader for example. Every word of every whisper is easily understood.

> fail to annunciate

I think you mean "enunciate".

The BBC et al are pushing this regional accents trend also, and I could manage (e.g.) Stacey Dooley's grating estuary English but for the fact she is apparently incapable of coming up with a single thought that isn't utterly anodyne and predictable. Must the two go together? Contrast her with Maggie Aderin-Pocock from The Sky at Night which I'll be settling down to watch later; the latter happens to tick all the right virtue signalling boxes, but also importantly has a massive brain and is accomplished, deeply knowledgable and interesting to watch. More presenters like the latter please.

It's amazing that to replace Patrick Moore they found a black female version of Patrick Moore :)

Stacey Dooley is like Louis Theroux. You put a bumbling nonthreatening type in there and nobody really suspects them or pushes back against them; you see people in the situation with their guard down, you don't necessarily need insights from the presenter.

Not sure that comparison works very well at all!

> you don't necessarily need insights from the presenter

LT's measured style included subtle but incisive insights is key to his appeal as a broadcaster, whereas SD's style is virtually nonexistent, moronic, execrable..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com