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

Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by yesenadam on Sunday October 14, 2018 @05:27AM (#18212095)

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)

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Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by iuwhagtr on Sunday October 14, 2018 @06:51AM (#18212310)

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

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Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by vertex-four on Sunday October 14, 2018 @07:51AM (#18212464)

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.

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Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by anothername on Sunday October 14, 2018 @08:44AM (#18212622)

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.

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Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by Theodores on Sunday October 14, 2018 @01:15PM (#18213919)

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

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Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by notzuck on Sunday October 14, 2018 @07:23AM (#18212398)

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.

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Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by leephillips on Sunday October 14, 2018 @10:25AM (#18213008)

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.

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Re:RSC head of voice: “I want actors to use their own accents” by jfk13 on Sunday October 14, 2018 @09:08AM (#18212691)

> fail to annunciate

I think you mean "enunciate".

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