Opinion

A New York accent in ancient Rome? So what, it’s no less accurate than RP

Rebecca Rideal

Denzel Washington has been accused of inauthenticity in Gladiator II. But why is upper-class, southern English considered the norm?

Thu 18 Jul 2024 05.00 EDT

"Whose head could I give you that would satisfy this fury?” asks Denzel Washington’s crafty Macrinus in the long-awaited trailer [below]for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. With its medley of aquatic gladiatorial games and charging battle rhinos, a vengeful Paul Mescal, a wearied Pedro Pascal, imperial Rome’s answer to Tweedledum (Joseph Quinn) and Tweedledee (Fred Hechinger), and Connie Nielsen providing an enticing link to the previous film, the trailer looks and sounds epic. So of course some viewers have come out in a fury.

A chief complaint appears to be Washington’s use of his natural New York accent, with one observer asking: “How did Ridley Scott … allow Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington to do a NY accent in a movie set in Ancient Rome?” Conversely, there seems to be little furore over the English accent of Quinn or Mescal’s loose adoption of what appears to be (from the trailer at least) received pronunciation – despite them being equally anachronistic. As it has been pointed out in the Hollywood Reporter, when combined with criticism of the music choice (Jay-Z and Kanye West’s No Church in the Wild), it “starts to look rather dog whistle-y”.

But let’s focus on the question of accents in historical drama. A century of cinema bolstered by classism and the development of received pronunciation (RP) has conditioned us to expect Hollywood historical films and TV shows to sound a certain way. It’s why we have ancient emperors, medieval knights and Tudor kings and queens all erroneously speaking with roughly the same accent.

That’s not to say there haven’t been exceptions, such as Charlton Heston’s American accent in Ben-Hur and Katharine Hepburn’s mid-Atlantic Eleanor of Aquitaine. But the expectation that pre-modern historical accents should be generally British – and received pronunciation, more specifically – has had an undeniable hold on popular culture. It’s present in Wuthering Heights (1939), Cleopatra (1963), I, Claudius (1976), Hamlet (1990), A Knight’s Tale (2001), Agora (2009), The Great (2020) – and the list goes on.

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