Selena Gomez Responds to Eugenio Derbez's Criticism of her Spanish in Emilia Perez

[zodgory]

Selena Gomez Defends Herself After Eugenio Derbez Criticizes Her ‘Emilia Pérez’ Performance https://t.co/6bqQA8dg6n
- The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 8, 2024
Actor Eugenio Derbez made a guest appearance on the podcast Hablando de Cine, and the topic of the new film Emilia Perez came up of which both host Gaby Meza and Derbez were critical of

Comments

[phililen3]

I don't speak Spanish and haven't seen this movie either, but I get the gist of what he's saying. I hate it when a character is speaking a language they are supposed to be fluent in, but they sound terrible. It's torture. And it does make the overall performance suffer. If casting was going to get an actor who can't speak the language, then they need to make sure they have enough time to learn so that they are at least passable. I feel that production has to take responsibility here. And the thing is that some people do feel sensitive about hearing their language butchered.

[anachan87]

My pet peeve is when a character is supposed to be from a different country, so they have a foreign name, and they themselves mispronounce it like the italian name Giuseppe, that will end up with a "ee" sound at the end, and although I do not speak all of them, I'm pretty sure the big majority of slavic languages, if not actually all of them, will pronounce J as Y, and not as a G.

[evett]

people also choose J to spell their Ж russian name which is a zh sound (kinda sorta like the "su" in "measure/pleasure")

[smilla_sini]

Really? I've never seen anyone use anything but zh.

[ginainabottle]

isn’t Selena one of the producers? Not sure how many lines she has in Spanish/if she needs to carry conversations throughout the movie, but actors often get parts where there’s something they aren’t particularly good at. What separates the dedicated ones from the Selenas is that dedicated actors often work “off the clock” to improve. This year I did a casting for a character that needed to be a complete stoner and the actress had never even smoked cigarettes - you could absolutely tell by the way she smoked and it simply wasn’t realistic the good sis was a pothead. We had about two weeks before the shoot and she would come to my house to literally just watch me smoke and practice. By the time we shot the film, homegirl was rolling joints like an absolute pro lol my point is that if you’re dedicated enough, you can learn what you’ll actually need for a shoot

[nigelwitthebrie]

This is me with certain K-dramas…back in the early aughts some k-dramas would hire Gyopo actors and non-Korean kpop idols to play the lead or costar. After a bit; the networks noticed those type of k-dramas where the lead had a strong accent or mispronounced words had a backlash from the viewers. Like the gyopo actors and the idols were only going through the motions of phonetically pronouncing the words correctly, but not emotions attached to the said words.

It really takes away from the performance if the actor can’t emote through words.

[sillyskinny]

As a native German speaker... I cringe every time I hear someone (try to) speak German or pretend to have a German accent in movies or TV shows.

[phililen3]

As someone who is in Germany for a short stay, I deeply apologise for sounding like I'm farting out of my mouth when I'm trying to speak German.

[patenipat]

This sounds lovely and very entertaining, tbh. As a German/Pole, I applaud you.

[solookup]

this is me with trying with cdrama - they end up dubbing over the voice lines and they don't match the mouth shapes to the voice lines. or they have foreign actors coming into do a role but they don't speak the language and they dub over that too. what is up with the dubbing!!

[phililen3]

The Vietnamese dubbing!!! I don't know if it's changed since last I heard it in 2008, but it was so bad.

[pseudo_shigure]

yeah i never get china and HK love for dubbing. like idk how they film it with korean actors for example, knowing it'd be dubbed. and how weird it would be to watch. sometimes the chinese/hk actor also dub their own footage? like why? why don't they just record the sound when they're filming like everywhere else in this world.

[solookup]

Not sure if TVB is doing it - I tried to watch one series last year and I'm like this is boring af. (I know someone who's there as like fill ins with one liners here and there so I tried to watch it.)

But I know a reason cdrama does it because of all the accents they have they tried to unify it to only do standardized Mandarin in their dubs which is ridiculous. I know there's been a few popular series that blew up recently so I tried to watch and as someone whose Mandarin is not good but I only need like 50/50 subs, it's impossible to sit through it.

I don't know if they show the same thing in China or everyone had just gotten used to it. I might go ask my husband since he has coworkers in China.

[pseudo_shigure]

oh yeah i understand the accent argument in c-drama. but i think in hong kong movies (which i don't watch a lot) like wong kar wai's with tony leung, i think those are dubbed. so i just find it weird. i don't think tvb dubbed their series iirc.

[lysblack]

this is why i could never get into c-dramas and was a taiwanese dramas girlie in the early 2000s!

[walterwhiteh2o]

This. Spanish is my first language and it takes me out of the film/show when I hear an actor butchering Spanish when their character is supposedly a Spanish-speaking person. It also annoys me when they cast a Spanish-speaking actor from one country to play a character from a different country, since the accents are completely different and you can tell very easily