Emily Blunt's Mary Poppins accent...

I also sort of noticed this. At times she seemed to be doing an Andrews impersonation and at other points........not. It drifted into caricature at points and felt stilted.

This is what I've heard from all of my British friends in real life! Haha. It wouldn't matter if it were an American actress, but it's Emily Blunt, so...

Do you think she may miss a BAFTA nomination because of it? 

When Zoë Kravitz and Emma Stone do better English accents than you, and you're actually English...

As has been stated above, the type of accent Blunt is using in the film is only used to parody the upper-class in the UK. Mary Poppins isn't that type of character, so it's simply an odd choice to make for an actress who is actually English and would know this. (Say an American actress made the same choice when playing Mary Poppins - I really doubt it would be commented on.) No one is saying that Blunt isn't good otherwise or that accent work solely defines a performance.

Haven't seen it (and honestly, I probably won't) but we on movie boards care far, far, far (3 fars) more about accents than anyone seeing this would. She's not playing an American - she sounds like someone non-American, that's as far as it goes isn't it?

I understand why as movie fans we debate this but accents just never matter much do they?.....I know I'm in the minority on this board and love to talk about acting but I just can never get worked up about accents, I don't know......it seems a strictly academic discussion.

Not trying to be a smart-ass just can't see why we should ever care about accents - it seems a diversion to me always.

Well I'd say that's being too precise - and yet missing the fact that it doesn't matter much or not here at least as far as I can see.

Pacino's accent in Revolution sounds a lot like DDL's accent in GONY - now I won't argue that Pacino's accent was good (they aren't his forte) or that DDL's was bad but I am quite sure no one knows what a Scottish fur trapper in the US in the 1700's knew "what he should have sounded like".

What they knew rather was it was a bad film, and a voice that didn't match an actor they had known for over a decade - if the film was better, the accent is meaningless.

I do concur on Connery and get your point but never see it mattering much really.....it's fake news to use the language of the day.

All British accents sound the same.

Eh... I get that being so overly precise is a bit precious, but as I've said in this thread I guess multiple times now, Emily Blunt is an actual English person using this accent. She knows better. I don't think that calling her out for this is being overly precise. If Anne Hathaway were playing Mary Poppins (just to use a quick American example), it probably wouldn't matter.

And the British press is currently going wild over Emma Stone's accent work in The Favourite. Every interviewer she encounters can't wait to tell her how perfect her it was. This is just one example (of probably dozens):


People are really appreciative when you take the time to make something as best as it possibly can be. 

pacinoyes - I'm really not sure where robots come into it, and I'm convinced that no British person ever, anywhere has said that Americans can't or shouldn't perform Shakespeare. 

As for my comment that it wouldn't matter for Hathaway, you saw one American user's comment above "that all British accents sound the same." I'm going to give that user the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant to say "English accents," because I can't imagine he thinks Scottish people sound the same as Northern Irish people, but even then, someone from Manchester hardly sounds like someone from Liverpool, and someone from Liverpool hardly sounds like someone from London... but I digress... Brits wouldn't expect an American actress to know the nuances that a British actress would.

Let me just give you two examples of the inverse:

Two British actresses played 60s American housewives in buzzy American films this year - Claire Foy in First Man and Carey Mulligan in Wildlife. I think these are both excellent performances, but in no way do I think that Foy sounded authentically American, whereas Mulligan nailed her accent work. Mulligan's performance is certainly enhanced by her perfect accent (as was Stone's in The Favourite), but I don't necessarily count Foy's accent against her, because she is British. 

This is an illuminating example I see what you mean, and I guess for people who care about this there is a level of nuance. I guess, that for me since it ranks so far down on actor-performance attributes (it ranks last) I tend to dismiss it.

I have always seen discussion/articles/essays on accents and almost never on so many other far more interesting things about say how actors handle subtext, backstory, voice inflection, speech pattern, use of body (in drama), how actors listen, the use of pauses and hesitation........and on and on there are so many things that could be discussed in the totality that too often get reduced to things like "That accent was wrong! We don't say "pudding" in Birmingham we say "puddin"  - and people taking that as "meaningful" like "it matters" - I don't think when you really look at accent it matters very much at all (I do agree an awful accent can matter but I don't think I see many that I would label as awful ones).

But I think at some point there was a thread on this in general a while back and I think that's what I was referring to more than this specific Blunt example.