While the year saw Irish audiences praise British actors Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People (Element Pictures, 2020), Cosmo Jarvis in Calm With Horses (Nick Rowland, 2019), and Tom Glynn-Carney in Rialto (Peter Mackie Burns, 2019), the latter months of the year saw widespread dismay at accent performances in the trailers to Wild Mountain Thyme (John Patrick Shanley, 2020), and to a lesser extent, Pixie (Barnaby Thompson, 2020). While criticised performances are increasingly a thing of the past, responses to 2020’s film and television has reignited the moral panic surrounding Irish accents in film. In response to the proliferation of bad accent lists, many commentators have noted that “overseas actors have got steadily better at proper Irish accents”, with several lists published recently commending “great” recent Irish accent performances. Patrick’s Day, the performances referenced are invariably pre-2011, with a majority from the 1990s. While lists such as these appear online and in print media every march around St. A Google search of the words “Irish”, “Accent”, and “Film” generates pages upon pages of recent critiques of performances of Irish accents in film such as The Worst Irish Accents in Hollywood Movies, 1 Top 10 worst Irish Accents in Movies (Wickham), and The 12 Absolute Worst Irish Accents in Movies Ever (Demolder), while television, radio and national print media often create content criticising accent performances in Irish film. I Love You, are commonly known to Irish viewers as “Oirish” films, with phonetic spelling marking the perceived stereotyping of accents often heard in such texts. In fact, American films set in or about Ireland, such as The Quiet Man, Leap Year and P.S. This perceived mis-representation of Irish accents has become particularly synonymous with American representations of Ireland. While many aspects of the filmic representation of Ireland and the Irish have been criticised including images of violence, the recurrence of the “stage-Irishman”, and the romanticisation of the Irish landscape, no aspect of Irish film has been subject to more sustained and common popular criticism than the representations of Ireland’s accents. Wild Mountain Thyme and the Moral Panic around the Irish Accent on FilmĬinematic representations of Ireland have predominantly been the output of foreign filmmakers, undoubtedly influencing the approach to representation in many films.
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