I know what you mean. I'd the same thought. Imagining what these actors would sound like if they were speaking Russian, or at least an English Russian accent. But as you say, a blanket accent would come across as being trite, or even in bad taste. This is a story not for the actors to portray how good they are at accents. It's to focus on just telling the story, without being detracted by silly stereotypical accents if they all couldn't master a dialect. Enemy at the Gates does the same thing. The only one in that film that decided to have a go at it was Bob Hoskins. He got away with it only because that film is a bit on the "Hollywood" side of things anyway, so you could excuse him. Bob's ace, though, so fair play to him.
Aye dude, thing is, it doesn't
really detract from the programme at all, but I'd be interested to hear what locals think of it. Not a massive thing by any stretch, the acting is superb, but as you say, I guess it comes down to the actor himself.
I've seen Dutch plays where some of the actors tried to employ British RP (Shakesy), and some others just did it in their normal accent. The guys and girls who did it in their own accents came across farrrrrr better actors as they weren't focussing all their efforts on getting the sound right.
This is different, of course, and you know, there are certain actors who can just cheat it and get away with it because they are either so well-known (which does make a difference), or you just forget about it. Daniel Craig in TGWDT I get, he had the most lines - and Jarrod Harris may be in a similar position. Most of these guys employ vocal coaches to work with them, and that usually takes time.
There was a pretty well-known vocal coach at LIPA called Terry something or other - he was very well known and you never actually knew where he was from. He was amazing and he had a lot of soap actors on his books and if anyone needed help, he was always there. But even he used to say that accents take time. Maybe it is just that, time... maybe Harris was cast quite late or replaced or something.
But IMDB has this:
The actors talk to each other in their natural English. But all speech heard through artificial means - through the radio, emergency telephone call recordings, Soviet television news and even announcements made through public address systems - is in Russian.
I'm not sure that's true?
Anyhow, it's on tonight on HBO at 2 am I think, I'll be staying up to watch it. Fantastic viewing. I'm sure it was you who told me to stick with it in an earlier thread (or the TV one), nice one!
I've got a feeling this week's ep is going off big time.
