Last week Slate.com asked Strømmen to watch a press screening of the new film “House of Gucci” to see who had the best and worst accents, and our results may surprise you.
Strømmen has years of experience helping actors to execute perfect foreign language dialogue and accented English. Strømmen has worked on hundreds of TV shows, Films and video games – and world class actors like Christophe Waltz, Sasha Baron Cohen, Sir Patrick Stewart and more.
We wanted to be as objective as possible, especially in light of all the harsh criticism the film has received. We took our task of analyzing and reviewing the accents in house of Gucci very seriously.
The results may surprise you – see a quote from the slate article below:
Overall, who would you say was best and worst?
Let me start with the worst. Is that OK? I would say that definitely the worst is Jeremy Irons. After him, Adam Driver. Then, maybe this isn’t what you want to hear, but I would say it’s almost like a tie between Al Pacino, Lady Gaga, and, God—I can’t believe I’m saying this—Jared Leto. I feel like he won, but he really messed it up with that tonic accent. It’s hard to get past that. And that’s why it was so frustrating for me, because of how intense he was about that, kind of playing it up. But that could be part of the character choice, just somebody who it’s a little bit of a funny guy.
Read the full detailed review on Slate. Our favorite part of the interview may be when the reporter told us that she cannot roll (or trill) her “R”s. We did what any respectable dialect coach would do and taught her a trick mid-interview.
You’re bringing me back to my high school Spanish classes. I loved to read and write, but I hated speaking because I could not roll my Rs.
I can teach you to roll your Rs right now.
I don’t think you can.
I’ll trick you. It’s a trick. Let me think of an Italian word. Largo. Try saying it real quick.
Largo.
Now replace the R with a D. If you say it soft enough, that’s where your tongue should be. Try lad-go.
Lad-go.
Yeah. Now say it five times fast.
Lad-go, lad-go, lad-go, lad-go, lad-go.
You just did it. You didn’t even realize it.
Wow! That’s amazing.
You’ll listen to this over again, and you’ll hear that you in fact rolled your R.
If only they’d had you on set.