We must never forget Keanu Reeves' British accent from Bram Stoker's Dracula

Originally published at: We must never forget Keanu Reeves' British accent from Bram Stoker's Dracula | Boing Boing

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It’s really not that bad? Julian Sands has spent his entire career speaking exactly like this. It’s an extremely stiff, fruity english accent and I always thought most of reaction is simply knowing that it’s Keanu, who is not really a surf dude but (Zap! Pow! Dams burst! Bombs go off! Wasps fry) a half-English Canadian.

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It’s objectively not good. Much of the dialogue is redone in post too.

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I thought the difference between Matthew McC and Keanau was that Matthew actually knows how to act.

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Brando did a great British upper-class accent in Mutiny on The Bounty 1962.
He even included an aristocratic speech impediment.

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If you think that’s bad may I present Exhibit B:

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… I don’t think it’s time to remember yet :grimacing:

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I wonder what someone with a lot of experience in BrE thinks about this. It sounds a little odd to me, but I’m not sure if I’m biased having prior experience how Keanu sounds, and I certainly don’t have much more than an “average” experience with BrE for an American. I know a bad American accent well enough (e.g., from various East Asian films with people playing “Americans”, who always manage to sound like that have marbles in their mouths).

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I’m a Brit. I don’t think it’s that bad an accent. Everyone knows he’s American, and that creates a cognitive dissidence.

Who knows how upper-middle-class Victorians in the 1890s sounded anyway?

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And that creates cognitive dissonance.

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… indeed, it’s his American accents that are “fake”

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His performance in Dracula isn’t half as bad as I remembered it being. I think that, like in “Much A Do About Nothing”, it is more that younger Keanu is rather out of his depth when swimming with the whales of British Thespianhood. He seems to be a genuine pleasure to work; hard-working and conscientious.

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It’s not that it’s a bad British accent, it’s just that it sounds like someone doing ‘posh’ in a school play. That might partly be down to the script though.

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I refuse to rewatch that, but only because in my head canon he delivers all his lines as Ted Logan.

I don’t ever want to be corrected.

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We have Jacob Rees Mogg.

I don’t think it is the accent that’s the problem in the movie (though I think it is a truely dreadful film), it’s that Keanu Reeve’s strangulated posture throughout. There are ways of playing a repressed Victorian gentleman that don’t look like you are being physically restrained.

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Honestly, I don’t even think it’s a dreadful film. Gary Oldman was magnificent, but he always seems to be. It was just odd is all, hewing far more closely to the novel than most adaptations, while still being a Francis Ford Coppola spectacle and including odd non-novel plot lines.

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I really enjoyed it; mostly because of the in-camera effects work. I love physical effects, and the stagey aesthetic. One of my favourite shots is the coachman reaching down to pick up Keanu Reeves; and the model shots of Castle Dracula. My love of the atmosphere is further enhanced by Mike Mignola’s comic book adaptation of the movie.

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Why don’t we ask Florence Nightingale?

https://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Early-spoken-word-recordings/024M-1CD0239287XX-0214V0

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Honestly, it sounds fine. A reasonably good representation of what an upper-crust, well-to-do chap of that period in history is supposed to have sounded like. I really do not get what all the fuss is about (Oh, wait, most USians had never heard anyone speak like that so it a) freaked their parochial brains out and thus b) must be a very bad accent.)

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