The 21st Century Fake Accent Matrix

[itsme_eloise]

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The REAL reason for the onslaught of based-on-real-events media? Our Hollywood actors love nothing more than to take a big ol’ honking swing at the juicy dialect of a real-life villain.

Let's sift through all the noise and take a closer look at the noise (some) actors call a legitimate accent. Some choice excerpts:
[Spoiler (click to open)]
Winston Duke in Black Panther: ...his Igbo-inspired Nigerian accent for the Jabari tribe leader M’Baku-intentionally differentiated from the South African-inspired Wakandan accents-was lauded Twitter-wide as the perfect example of studied precision and instinctual embodiment of a character.

Jeremy Renner in The Town: Would I call Jeremy Renner a dynamic dialect actor? I would not! Does the signature Bostonian line “Whose cah we gonna take?” float to the surface of my mind on a weekly basis? Yes, it does!

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote: Philip Seymour Hoffman is doing a near-perfect Truman Capote, for which he won the Oscar in 2006... this is simply a nutty combination of vocal variants to have to meld together in one performance; the better job the actor does, the wilder it is for the audience to hear.

Julia Garner in Inventing Anna: “I duh naht hov time fuh dis! I duh naht haf time fuh YEW!”

Emma Watson in ... anything: There is one diphthong that especially ails her, and I’m confident you can conjure which one it is if you just imagine little Hermione Granger exclaiming, “No, you caaaaan’t” on a life-size chessboard.

Lady Gaga in House of Gucci: You will never forget that Lady Gaga is Lady Gaga. She does not melt into a role. But she will own a role, command a role; she will, at times, sound vaguely Russian while playing the hell out of an Italian role.

Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain: Heath Ledger isn’t so much giving a vocal performance in Brokeback Mountain as perhaps the vocal performance of the last 20 years ... It’s about the hard line that Ledger permanently holds in his mouth: the literal repression of Ennis’s own voice, even while he’s speaking.

Daniel Craig in Knives Out: Obviously, the Foghorn Leghorn dialect Daniel Craig has adopted isn’t accurate to any corner of the American South, but I dare call this performance camp. And Knives Out is just the kind of big, ensemble whodunit that can handle such a thing.

Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network: Maybe there’s someone out there who could’ve done a great Zuckerberg impression, but Eisenberg said, “It’s not me.” Instead, the quick-talking, deadpan, and, let’s face it, smug idiolect Eisenberg uses evokes the kind of tech-obsessed, human-avoidant Silicon Valley type the movie wants us to understand Zuckerberg to be-without actually impersonating his real sound.

Sienna Miller in the trailer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the National Theater: It can only be explained as the biggest possible swing-and the greatest possible miss by a professional actor this century. The artistic commitment to an accent is there; the only thing missing is any sound you’ve ever heard in the American South not coming directly out of a muffler.

Jesy Nelson attempting a Jamaican accent in a You Generation promotion: Tragically, Jesy departed Little Mix in 2020, but not before leaving her most lasting legacy upon the group six years earlier.

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