Spasiba bolshoi to glossy new BBC One thriller McMafia, which stars James Norton as Alex Godman, the English-raised scion of a family of Russian mafia exiles and which has spared us the all-too-familiar distress of actors with dodgy accents.
“I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent – it feels fake,” says James Watkins, McMafia’s director and co-writer. “It was incredibly important to us to cast globally, for the authenticity … we wanted the language to be Russian, so we needed to cast Russian actors.”
And not just any old Russian actors, either. Norton’s co-stars include Mariya Shukshina, AKA “the Russian Meryl Streep”, and Aleksey Serebryakov, star of the Cannes-feted, Oscar-nominated, proper Russian film Leviathan. The only non-Russian actor among this older generation is the Swedish-Danish David Dencik as Uncle Boris, but Dencik has been so assiduously developing his line in nonspecific slippery foreigners of late (see Puss in Top of the Lake: China Girl), that we must make an exception.
Streaming means that internationally made and set dramas are increasingly common and actors’ accents ever more dicey. McMafia, which also includes plenty of subtitled Russian, is a rare sterling effort, but screen history is littered with accents so bad they either ruin it (Dominic Cooper’s Texan accent in Preacher, and, for Spanish speakers, the Brazilian Wagner Moura’s accent on Narcos) or transcend it, becoming comedy classics in their own right (Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, Daphne’s supposedly Manc family on Frasier and Aidan Gillen in everything).
More traditional and more irritating is actors (including Americans) delivering the dialogue of non-British characters in RP English accents, as in the much-derided TV series Versailles and 2015’s BBC adaption of War & Peace. But this approach at least allows actors to emerge with some semblance of dignity. The same can’t be said of the worst possible solution: speaking English with cod foreign accents, a practice that should have died out with ’Allo ’Allo!, or certainly with Tom Hardy’s Sesame Street-influenced Soviet in Child 44. Vodka jelly shots are more authentic.
