The creator/writer/director has a podcast where this was discussed. He opted to have the actors speak in their natural accent so that the actors don't act to the accent but instead act to the situation. I may be doing a bad job explaining it but he said something along the lines of actors starting to take on stereotypical traits when doing an accent, and he wanted to focus more on the reactions to the situation at hand.
I believe you are referring to the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl.
The showrunners explained in a podcast that in auditions, characters used Slavic accents but ended up becoming distracting and could have ended up comical.
So Soviet characters that speak English with a slavic accent would be less distracting? Surely if you are bothered by this they should be speaking Russian with English subtitles.
I think we have seen this sort of approach succeed in a major US TV production in Netflix's Narcos. There are English-speaking characters, yes, but most of the drama happens entirely in Spanish.
I think this series would also have been better fully in Russian with English subtitles.
I hate it when movies try to portray foreign language speakers as speaking accented English. That’s not how any of this works!
If they want to go for accuracy, the actors should speak the actual language. Provide subtitles for outside audiences.
Otherwise, just have the actors speak normally. It’s no less authentic than speaking with an accent, and the actors can focus on acting.
Another prominent Soviet example of doing this well is The Death of Stalin. You actually get a sense of the people as real people instead of scary foreigners.
I wonder if that explains Amazon Prime's dubbed shows? I thought it was unusual (along with Netflix's 3%); in the UK I'm used to foreign programmes only being subtitled.
I feel the opposite. I always feel like having to read subtitles destroys the immersion, because I can't read the subtitles and also watch the environment and visual cues and facial expressions. If I'm reading subtitles, I might as well be reading a book because I'm not watching the show anymore.
If you grew up watching subtitled cinema, it becomes second nature. You manage to hear the original audio, watch the actors' faces, and read the subtitles, all without missing a beat. Believe me, it trumps the alternative, which is dubbing. Where I come from, dubbing is for kids' movies ;)
Somebody, please explain me, why out of blue it became fashionable to put that native-sounding flavour of an accent in games and movies even when its story assumes almost every character in it is a native speaker?
I always find it disturbing. As every native Russian speaker, I tend to feel it perceive as beautiful and melodic. Just as any other Russian, Ukranian, Greek or whoever else. Sounds like a joke and not a good one. Makes me skip the whole title.
Why are they doing it? Does it really help anybody with immersion?
Being from around those parts, and remembering the time when the accident happened (watching the evening news with my father when they admitted publicly to the disaster and my father shaking his head and saying "hell, if they admitted to this much, the reality must be 10x as worse"). Anyway, I'd have to say the lack of accents were not even noticeable because the acting, the scenery, even down to small details like the clothes, haircuts, paint color schemes were are just incredibly well done.
Yeah they took some liberty with condensing multiple characters into the Khomyuk character, but even she was believable.
It's actually very distracting that most of them speak a perfect british accents. I was quite confused at the beginning whether british engineers or scientists were actually working for Russia or Ukrainian at the time.
I remember seeing a couple of WWII movies, one where the German's had english accents vs Americans. The other with English accents as the 'good guys'. I asked my dad if WWII was a war within England.
