Here’s something you can bet your house on. The whole world is going to be utterly insufferable about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey.
Forget that. No bookie will offer you odds. The film doesn’t open for another two months, and pedants are already getting their underwear in knots.
The trailer that emerged this week drew criticism for its contemporary vernacular, its anachronistic costuming and its insufficiently Hellenic cast. Would Telemachus, here played by Tom Holland, really have referred to Odysseus as his “dad”? Well, no. He’d have used a word in ancient Greek that I can’t be bothered to look up. So shut up and stop whinging.
The use of American accents had already been much chewed over when a teaser trailer revealed Matt Damon speaking in mild Bostonese. It may astonish you to learn there are still people out there, a surprising number of them American, who believe the default accent for actors in such situations should be English “received pronunciation”.
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Obviously, it would be no more logical for Agamemnon to speak in a Home Counties accent than in one from Scotland, Australia, Barcelona or, in this case, Benny Safdie’s native Queens. But a perception remains that RP is a sort of base neutral. It is not an accent at all. Right?
Baloney. This attitude is residue of a forelock-tugging inferiority complex that has survived long after “regional voices” bossed the English stage in the 1960s.
It was not hard to damp down the absurd suggestion that Safdie or Damon should adopt a posh English accent for The Odyssey. The new trailer has, however, announced a more peculiar variation. A key exchange between Holland’s Telemachus and Robert Pattinson as Antinous reveals both Londoners speaking in unmistakable North American timbres.
“Everybody Using American Accents Is Definitely a Choice,” The Hollywood Reporter blared. It’s all they’re talking about now on Sunset Boulevard.
The Reporter is right to call it a choice. Nobody much noticed when Ridley Scott had Joaquin Phoenix – and, to an extent, Russell Crowe – speak in strangled Hertfordshire for Gladiator.
The convention that everyone in the ancient world had been to Rada was then still strongly in place. Charlton Heston does not, to be fair, do much to his own accent in Ben Hur, but virtually everyone else in that epic sounds British: the English Jack Hawkins, the Welsh Hugh Griffith, Belfast’s Stephen Boyd.
When Hollywood wasn’t encouraging actors in ancient epics to go RP, it was often asking them to try on a weird inside-out accent for films set somewhere foreign.
You got a lot of this with German characters in war films. It made sense for the commandant in The Great Escape to speak in broken English when haranguing Richard Attenborough, but why is Robert Duvall, as Oberst Max Radl in The Eagle Has Landed, speaking in a German accent when addressing characters in his own tongue (translated for us, obviously).
You got a nice acknowledgment of the dilemma at the start of The Hunt for Red October when Sean Connery, as a rugged Soviet submarine captain, begins by speaking in Russian, only for the voice to magically transform into the actor’s familiar Edinburgh rumble.
Yet as late as Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, from 2021, Adam Driver and Lady Gaga were still adopting Super Mario Brothers accents when at home in Milan. “Theesa film notta gonna ween any Oscars,” Gaga didn’t exactly say.
In recent years we have seen a move away from this requirement to nod at the artificiality. In Armando Iannucci’s Death of Stalin, the actors spoke largely in their own accents. Steve Buscemi’s Nikita Khrushchev was American. Jason Isaacs’s Field Marshal Zhukov was unforgettably bluff and Yorkshire.
The folk behind the devastating series Chernobyl, also set in the USSR, took a similar approach. “Accents in film is tremendously stupid,” its director, Johan Renck, said. “Are we supposed to feel they are more Russian because they are speaking bad English?”
No such pressure was put on the likes of Jessie Buckley, Barry Keoghan and Michael McElhatton in that production. “We have people who sound like they’re Danish and Swedish and all varying kinds of British and Irish,” Craig Mazin, writer and creator of the series, added. “It is multicultural, as the Soviet Union was.”
And there this conversation should have ended.
It remains to be seen what Nolan is up to with The Odyssey. Maybe Charlize Theron as Calypso will give it a full South African bellow. Or is Nolan, a man of British and American heritage, exacting revenge for the slights cinema has inflicted on his New World predecessors: all those Broadway greats required to ape clipped English to play Julius Caesar or Timon of Athens?
Nolan is in charge now, and the ancient Greeks will be leaving the “h” silent in “herb”. Probably.
The Odyssey is in cinemas from Friday, July 17th
