Putting on a good Irish accent is an art. In the same way that pouring Guinness is an art, actually. And as with all artistic feats, people think, “Well, anyone could do that!” before swiftly finding out that anyone could not, in fact, do that. An accurate Irish accent, for a non-Irish actor, takes dedication, research, talent. And as is the case with all art, failure invites utter brutality from the critics.
In the canon of Irish TV and film, there are sadly more misses than hits when it comes to nailing the gift from God that is a true Irish accent. Bad accents become famous for being bad, remembered for reducing all Irish speech to a monolith. Brad Pitt as an IRA gunman in The Devil’s Own, for instance, was so bad that the year after it came out, the Troubles finally ended. Then there’s Gerard Butler’s bizarre broguish twang in PS I Love You. Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio were both absolutely woeful in Gangs of New York. For every good modern example (Maxine Peake pretty much nails the notoriously tricky west Belfast accent in Disney+’s Say Nothing), there’s a terrible accent fail (Helen Mirren in Mobland is so comical it went viral earlier this year). Is it any wonder that Marian Keyes – whose novel Grown Ups is now being adapted for Netflix – recently told an audience at the Hay festival: “It would be so, so nice if they use people who can do Irish accents. I mean, the accents are just … I weep. I am corroded with pain.”
Sometimes a bad accent is the result of a megastar being shoehorned in to an independent Irish production, in a vain attempt to boost cultural relevancy (see Julia Roberts in Michael Collins, the true tragedy of the movie). Even being Irish yourself doesn’t excuse poor Irish accent acting. Jamie Dornan, for instance, is from Belfast, but that didn’t save him from slipping into leprechaun-speak in the dire Wild Mountain Thyme. Without proper research on dialect, intonation and tempo, Irish accents all fall into lazy stereotypes: “Oirish” pronunciation, ending every sentence with “to be sure”, and pronouncing “three” invariably as “tree”.
It’s enough to put an actor off trying. Particularly English actors, who would perhaps be justified in running a mile when presented with a script requiring a Dublin brogue. James Norton was not one of them. In Netflix’s new series House of Guinness, the London-born Norton channels his inner Northsider to play Guinness foreman – and hardman – Sean Rafferty. As Rafferty, Norton shags, drinks, fights, walks in slow motion away from explosions, and even speaks some of his lines as Gaeilge. But it was the accent he was worried about. He told RTÉ last week that the difficulty came partly from the fact it was an 1860s Dublin accent, not a modern one. And partly because Norton was one of the few English men on set.
“I was very aware that I had to get it right, because in Ireland everyone can name an actor who’s messed up the Irish accent,” he says now. “If you masquerade as an Irishman and don’t get the accent right, it is sacrilegious.” Norton doesn’t think the Irish accent itself is the challenge, mind you: “It’s more that the terror and high standards that come with it is a job within itself.”
House of Guinness lingers again and again on authenticity when it comes to Irish language and speech patterns. In one scene, brothers Arthur and Edward Guinness tease each other over the former’s English pronunciation after his time at Eton – the irony being that in real life Anthony Boyle, who plays Arthur, has a thick Irish accent, while Louis Partridge, who plays Edward, has a southern English one. And last week, it was announced that the show is the first original Netflix production to come with Irish subtitles available. “The Irish language is such a vital part of the country’s culture and identity, and making the series accessible in this way allows us to celebrate that heritage and reach those viewers who prefer to watch as Gaeilge,” creator Steven Knight said in a statement.
“I don’t think Irish is a particularly difficult accent,” Norton says, touching on that same accessibility. “But because of the Irish identity being so widely celebrated, there’s an added pressure. They punch way above their weight culturally, so maybe we’re just more attuned to the Irish accent – we hear it more, so people are scrutinising it more. Everyone in the world has an opinion about an Irish accent.”
It’s true that Irish soft power has never been more lucrative, or wide-reaching. House of Guinness, an eight-episode romp through 19th-century Dublin (you get the impression the target audience is, if not American, then nominally “Irish-American”), tells the story of one source of that soft power: the Guinness family. After Papa Guinness dies, the family business passes to Arthur and Edward, who, along with their siblings Anne and Benjamin, flounder or flourish under the pressure of fantastic wealth and power. Imagine if Succession was set in south Dublin, with a smattering of Peaky Blinders-esque debauchery (another of Knight’s creations), and you’re basically there.
In other words, this is a show about green power, communicated – appropriately – through the black stuff. It’s about money, rebellion and Irishness. Although it’s set in the 1800s, the soundtrack features Fontaines DC, the Scratch, the Mary Wallopers and Kneecap. Ireland’s output today, as in the days of the Guinness family, is one of actual capital but, more importantly, of cultural capital too. As Norton points out, Ireland has a loud voice for a small country. A voice we now hear a lot of.
“I think historically people found it hard to do Irish accents because maybe they didn’t have access to them in the same way they do now,” says Fionn O’Shea, a native Dubliner himself, who plays disinherited drunkard Benjamin Guinness. “There was a time where people were doing a general Irish accent in the same way that there’s an unaccepted general American and RP [received pronunciation]. The general Irish accent ended up being a hybrid of every county in Ireland. Now I see people do it phenomenally well.”
To nail Ben’s slurred, mangled accent, which lands somewhere between RP and Victorian Dublin, O’Shea (and Norton) worked with dialect coach Poll Moussoulides, who also voice-coached on The Banshees of Inisherin, Normal People and Wednesday. For House of Guinness, Moussoulides dug into the BBC archives to find recordings of working-class and affluent Dubliners from the 19th century, and sent recordings of himself reading the script on a line-by-line basis.
This kind of work is becoming more common as actors desperately try to avoid veering into Pitt in The Devil’s Own territory. “Every production should have an accent department with enough personnel to support every actor,” says the New York-based dialect coach Erik Singer. “Accents require the same type of training as any other complex physical task, such as horseback riding or playing the guitar. They need to know someone else has got their ear on [their accent] so they can be free to act.”
It’s these kinds of jobs that give you well-researched, artful Irish accents, which are so convincing you could suspend your disbelief enough to imagine that Cate Blanchett really is a hardened investigative journalist in Veronica Guerin, or that Daniel Day-Lewis really is a wrongfully imprisoned innocent man in In the Name of the Father. There aren’t necessarily tricks to getting it right, but there are quirks of the accent you have to pay attention to: “I’ve had actors struggle with things like the aspirate [breathy] ‘T’, and also the very light ‘L’ you would use in southern Irish accents”, says the London-based dialect coach Helen Simmons. “With a Northern Irish accent, one sound that can prove tricky is the vowel sound in ‘mouth’, ‘now’ and ‘round’, and in ‘you’, ‘goose’ and ‘new’. Those sounds are super unique to this accent. There can be some really specific familiar tune patterns, which, when not observed closely enough, can make the entire accent sound completely unauthentic and quite like a caricature – and probably offensive to native people.”
Ireland on screen is never going to be a perfect representation of Ireland – and the Irish way of speaking – in real life. House of Guinness is a bigger, more bombastic imagination of Dublin that toys with rather than adheres to historical accuracy. But let’s be honest: as O’Shea and Norton point out, that’s not what Irish audiences care about. We don’t care how many explosions or anachronistic backing tracks or sordid political affairs you add into the plot. What we care about is straightforward: Can. You. Get. The. Accent. Right?