I just watched a preview of a film called Foe, starring Irish actress Saoirse Ronan and Irish actor Paul Mescal, with English actor Aaron Pierre as the third wheel. The reviewer mentions that we have “another case in which we have a set of American characters played by English and Irish actors continuing to put our transatlantic actors out of work.”
Now he says it in passing, but he’s right. It’s kind of a bugbear with me too, and not because an Irish or English actor can’t do a dodgy accent with the best of them. It just makes me wonder why this happens. Ronan and Mescal are both Oscar nominated scores so it’s not that they’re cheap. I also don’t think it’s because they’re necessarily better than American actors. We even saw this - strangely - in Selma, where MLK was played by a Brit.
Hollywood is notoriously touchy about correct representation in movies, but they showed there that though ID politics is a thing with them, they don’t really understand it - or else they don’t mind to apply it loosely when it doesn’t involve giving Whitey a kicking. But, the UK experience of race is very different to MLK’s experience, and very different to American race relations and racial politics.
Samuel Jackson
rightly raised this issue 6 years ago and some British nobody actor John Boyega, who benefits a lot from this anomaly in the Hollywood ID politics casting, said “Black brits vs African American. A stupid ass conflict we don’t have time for,” then vanished without trace.
It’s an interesting topic for me because I about complain about it, not from a political perspective, but from a creative one, because the accents and presence of the famous actors crossing the Atlantic can be anachronistic in a way that distracts. I can easy enough suspend belief and imagine Colin Farrell as - say - an alien, or a robot, but I find it harder to accept him as an American…
