Boston accents in movies, ranked
For every Hollywood actor that portrays a good Boston accent, there are about 95 others who deliver a bad one.
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For every Hollywood actor who portrays a good Boston accent, there are about 95 others who deliver a bad one. It’s a shame, considering Boston has been a popular setting for movies for a long time—and with Massachusetts’s film tax credit incentive, the number of movies coming to town is reaching its peak.
It’s not easy, but it’s very much something locals pay attention to. “You really don’t want to screw that up,’’ Kyle Chandler told The Hollywood Reporterwhen he was shooting Manchester-by-the-Sea in the South Shore earlier this year. His concern is fairly valid, considering track records for actors not from Massachusetts show that, well, the accent is hard to master. And no, we’re not nice about it either.
Above, we did our own ranking of Tinseltown’s Boston accents, from worst to best, but note: The ones that missed the mark—Blake Lively in The Town, Diane Lane in The Perfect Storm—have the same common problem. Bill Simmons once told Mark Wahlberg in a B.S. Report sit-down, that the Boston accent is about attitude. “There’s an edge,’’ he said, which is so true. If you think about the best versions—Jeremy Renner in The Town, Christian Bale in The Fighter—their approach doesn’t involve exaggerating the “cahs’’ and the “pahks,’’ but instead involves a hasty and quick way of speaking. Alec Baldwin’s accent in The Departed wasn’t great, but he was really good at being hurried with the hihowahya?’s and the gofuckyaself’s.
Or maybe it really is just about the excessive amount of f-bombs. That’s authentic, right?
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