Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
Every fake Russian accent you’ve ever heard in a movie eventually turns into a cartoon. The team behind HBO’s Chernobyl figured that out fast, and after about two auditions with Eastern European accents, they killed the idea entirely.
But they didn’t start by skipping accents. Writer Craig Mazin originally wanted a soft compromise, vaguely Eastern European, nothing over the top. Just enough to remind you these characters were Soviet. It fell apart after the first few reads. Mazin put it bluntly on the show’s official podcast: the actors were “acting accents” instead of acting. They were so focused on rolling their Rs correctly that the grief and the panic vanished from their performances.
Mazin got the fix from a 1995 HBO movie called Citizen X, set in the Soviet Union, where the cast had accents from all over. South African, English, American, Swedish, nothing matched. And somehow none of it mattered. You forgot anyone was supposed to sound Russian within minutes because nobody was performing an accent.
So the new rule for Chernobyl: talk like yourself, no Americans. Mazin said an American voice in a Soviet setting would shatter the illusion for a U.S. audience instantly. Stellan Skarsgard, the Swedish actor playing a senior Soviet politician, had the opposite problem: his English was so polished it sounded American, so Mazin told him to lean into his natural Swedish accent. The actual direction was to “pretend you are not good at speaking English.”
Director Johan Renck was even more direct at a British awards ceremony, calling the concept of performing accents in film “tremendously stupid.” The Soviet Union spanned 15 republics across 11 time zones. Georgian is a completely different language from Kazakh, which is a completely different language from Ukrainian. A single “Russian accent” would have flattened all of that into one stereotype. The mix of British, Irish, and Swedish voices on screen was arguably closer to a real Soviet meeting than any single accent could have been.
Russian speakers were the ones who loved the decision most. Mazin never heard a single complaint from one. Two years earlier, Armando Iannucci made the same call for his film The Death of Stalin, and Russian journalists told him they were grateful someone had finally stopped faking it.
Chernobyl swept 10 Emmys and hit 9.7 on IMDB (the internet’s biggest movie and TV database), the highest rating any show had ever received on the site at that point, ahead of Breaking Bad, Planet Earth II, and Game of Thrones. Those record-setting performances came from actors who were never thinking about their vowels.
