Thug: director Tarantino at Cannes 2023 Photo: Valery HASH/AFP
Quentin Tarantino in his 10th and, perhaps in the last film, The Film Critic ruled out casting a British actor in the lead role of a thirty-year-old porn magazine journalist. “I have nothing against the British,” he admitted in an interview with Deadline. “I think when people look back on that era of cinema and all these British actors are pretending to be American and all these Australian actors are pretending to be American, it's like ghosts. No one acts on their own behalf.”
It's strange that he's raising Australians. In the latest (and much worse) installment of Django Unchained (2012), let's not forget that Tarantino imagined a rambling cameo as a brutal Australian miner. His accent is notoriously terrible. If the average quality threshold for Brits playing Americans was anywhere near that low, he might be right.
What seems to have escaped his notice is that British actors are an asset that Hollywood couldn't do without. Take, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis's last two Oscars for Best Actor – Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson's Oil (2007) or Honest Abe in Spielberg's Lincoln (2012). The weight of these performances goes far beyond Day-Lewis' accent work, though he was utterly convincing on both occasions. There is not a single performance in Tarantino's film that would be a patch for any of them.
Aside from Michael Fassbender in Inglourious Basterds, the only Brit Tarantino has ever been willing to play is his perennial favorite Tim Roth. It is known that if you repeat “Reservoir Dogs” again, you could hear that Roth tends to struggle with the American accent, so he began to play the British in Pulp Fiction, his squeaky messenger in “Four Rooms” and so on.
< p>This deficiency is hardly typical. Hugh Laurie wouldn't have made it through eight seasons of House if he hadn't worked really, really hard to make it a success. It can also be a learning process: before landing his iconic role as Stringer Bell in The Wire, Idris Elba admits he was dubbed for the 1994 television series because he hadn't settled into the role of an American yet. He went to hairdressers to figure it out. Kate Winslet happens to think her titanic accent is terrible, but coming to Mara from Easttown, she didn't just make a reasonable approximation of a Philadelphia dialect, but a subcategory of Delaware County diction that convinced all but the most fussy Delco locals.
Emphasis is just the beginning: Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be a Blood Credit: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo
There is a certain amount of resentment at the heart of British actors' ability to take on this challenge, as opposed to the proverbial Dick Van Dyke isms known to occur when the shoe is on the other foot. Despite the nit-picky talk of the British (and Irish) “invasion” of Hollywood, our helpfulness is hardly a new phenomenon—in fact, one could seriously argue that it's been an industry constant since the days of Charlie Chaplin. Take a look at legendary acting careers that began with a ride across the Pond: the likes of Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, Greer Garson or Deborah Kerr, all molded into patterns of sophisticated speech, with a warhorse accent that distorted the difference. between the Mid-Atlantic and the chic Brit.
There has never been a phase in US filmmaking without British stars to play a big role. James Mason. Julie Christie. Michael Caine. Sean Connery. Anthony Hopkins. Ken-i-M. Hugh grant. With Christian Bale cast as Batman, Andrew Garfield (then Tom Holland) as Spider-Man, and Henry Cavill as Superman, we really hit a new generation plateau – the peak of the British superhero.
Neither of them were big names until the moment they were cast, which is classic studio stinginess – they would certainly cost a lot less than major American stars or even rudimentary stars. Not only are the British saving you money, the theory goes, but as Samuel L. Jackson lamented in 2017 when questioning the roles of Daniel Kaluuy in Get Out and David Oyelowo in Selma, “they think they're better trained, than us, because for some reason, because they are trained in classical methods.”
Sad Grape: Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out Credit: Movie Stills The fact that Jackson didn't even see Get Out when he talked about it made it difficult to separate the deeply rooted principle from the mere sour grape. Few actors (Pace Jackson) would actively limit their options, playing only those roles that are ideally suited to the place of their upbringing, not to mention the era in which they were born, their socio-economic circumstances, and so on.
Besides, there have never been so many American castings. An incredible amount of footage is currently being produced on a staggering array of platforms, and the US media industrial complex continues to produce a disproportionate share globally. The vast majority of characters in American films and TV series are still Americans.
Acting is a known brutal profession, and no one should pretend it isn't. No one should use “they come here” xenophobia to protect their territory. No one is forcing Tarantino to give up casting habits for life. But he seems to have forgotten that the game is actually faking it – unless Kurt Russell really is a psychopathic stuntman, or Brad Pitt has a habit of scalping Nazis in his spare time. Hiring Gary Oldman, Imogen Poots or Brian Cox only to deprive them of their gifts of extremely versatile voice acting? It's like asking a football player to move on only one leg.
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