How Authentic Accents in Movies Became Key in a Global Era, Amid AI

In today’s Hollywood, the wrong vowel can cost you the role.

Florence Pugh slips from Derby to Brooklyn and back again between projects. Paul Mescal makes Maynooth sound Malibu. Benedict Cumberbatch sheds his Oxbridge vowels whenever he slips on the Doctor Strange cape, flattening his cadence into a Midtown monotone. None of that is coincidence. It’s market logic. Global audiences expect voices to match maps.

It wasn’t always this way. In the studio era, accents weren’t necessarily tied to actual places — they were shorthand for character type. Hollywood ran on an unspoken “accent code”: English signaled authority or villainy — think of all those Bond nemeses purring with Eton vowels. American meant authenticity; John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Sally Field earned trust by sounding ord