Worse than in Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil? The American Southern accent is one of the most daunting. Since I am native, I can barely stand to hear any actor get it so completely wrong, unless it is intentional in a comedy.
shareJeez, what about Colin Firth's accent? It's atrocious. As for Nicole Kidman, American one minute, English the next. Why the same actors time and time again? It's not like any of them are box office draw. Have they all sold their souls to Harvey Weinstein?
shareI don't think an American actor would've had any advantage over Jude Law in capturing Thomas Wolfe's Asheville, North Carolina accent, unless the actor in question grew up in that part of the country himself (or, of course, just happened to be one of those rare people with an exceptional talent for accent imitation).
My impression, based on the trailer, of the type of speech Jude Law adopts for this performance is that it's an accurate rendering of a certain kind of Southern accent, just not the kind that Thomas Wolfe likely had. Wolfe's mother did a radio interview in 1945 that's been preserved in a recording, and in it she can be heard to have a type of soft, refined accent and manner of speaking that I've often heard from individuals of the more genteel kind hailing from southern Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Presumably Thomas Wolfe also spoke like that. (There's also documentary footage from the 1970's of Thomas's brother Fred speaking, but in that footage Fred's speech is distorted by stuttering and old age, making it hard to form a firm impression of how he might've sounded in his younger years.) The only way I can imagine Thomas sounding the way Jude Law does in the Genius trailer is if, at a certain point in his young adulthood, he'd perversely decided to try to disconcert his Northern friends and colleagues in the literary and intellectual worlds by affecting a rural, unrefined-sounding kind of speech.
I don't think an American actor would've had any advantage over Jude Law in capturing Thomas Wolfe's Asheville, North Carolina accent, unless the actor in question grew up in that part of the country himself (or, of course, just happened to be one of those rare people with an exceptional talent for accent imitation).
I'm not from the South, but I've heard that soft Carolina/Virginia accent you speak of. It was exactly my thought watching this film. Jude Law could have done a better job. Instead, he sounds like the sheriff in Smokey and the Bandit.
shareI thought the accents were fine, but that's just me.
share1. There are many different types of southern accents, not just one.
2. Practically nobody remembers anymore the way that Wolfe and Perkins spoke.
Ergo it doesn't matter.
1. There are many different types of southern accents, not just one.
2. Practically nobody remembers anymore the way that Wolfe and Perkins spoke.
Ergo it doesn't matter.
British actors are actually better at accents than American ones (except Meryl Streep).
shareThe accent for Thomas Wolfe was incorrect. Michael Grandage should have known that. The Wolfe family had a genteel Southern accent. The one used in the film was a Southern accent, but definately the wrong Southern accent.
shareMy god they were bad... Normally, these are actors I enjoy, but the accents are just ridiculous, they ruin the trailer anyway. I don't care where an actor comes from per se, but if they can't do the accent properly, so it doesn't sound like an SNL parody, then the casting director should have tried a little harder.
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