How Good Is Your British Accent?

Every now and then, a film is released that causes some controversy based on content involving sex, race, gender, politics, religion, and/or ethnicity. I'm sure that at least some of those films are made specifically to cause controversy, while others are made controversial because of the general public's reactions. The old cliche of "no press is bad press" applies in cases like this, since most times a controversial film has an instant boost at the box office from people talking about it.

One of the recurring forms of controversy surrounding movies is "whitewashing," where characters of foreign backgrounds are cast with Caucasian actors. Though it wasn't quite whitewashing, I had read a number of complaints online back when the role of Sulu was cast in the reboot of Star Trek a couple years ago. Sulu was a Japanese character, but the actor portraying him was of Korean descent. I didn't see any real offense committed here, though I can see why some would be upset at this casting.

One of the most recent examples of whitewashing was in the film Prince of Persia. The film takes place in the Middle East over 1000 years ago, and the characters were all natively Persian obviously. The controversy in the film came up when Jake Gyllenhaal was cast as the male lead and British actress Gemma Arterton was cast as the female lead. The filmmakers were accused of appealing to American audiences more than finding actors who matched the ethnic profiles of the characters - an accusation that, in my opinion, had some merit.

In fairness to Prince of Persia, the film was far from being the first film of its kind of controversy. However, there's another odd choice made in the film that I don't recall reading anywhere else previously: In addition to the whitewashing in the film, all the characters speak with British accents.

Prince of Persia was merely the latest example of this odd choice on the filmmakers' behalf as well. Films such as Gladiator, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, and 300 all had many of the lead actors speak with British accents even though none of them took place in England at all. Historically speaking, England had no influence on any of the areas where any of those films took place either, so anyone living in those areas wouldn't have spoken with British accents at all (even if they could speak English at all).

I'm not sure exactly when using British accents became common practice for films taking place over 1000 years ago. I'm not even necessarily saying it's a bad thing, or make the films automatically bad as a whole (Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven are two of my favorite films, in fact). It does manage to take me out of the film somewhat; that is to say, I start thinking about how out of place the accents are more than enjoying the film for itself. The trend is clearly a fairly new technique though, since older films taking place in the same general time period don't use phony British accents at all (see The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, The Robe, etc).

The irony here is that I personally love Hollywood epics that take place in time periods like the aforementioned films, so I come across films with these British accents frequently. It's nothing more than a minor peeve with movies, but it's got me wondering at what point during production do the filmmakers stop and say, "Boy, the movie sure is turning out great, but it's missing something....I know! British accents!"