Chad Stahelski defends Bill Skarsgård’s accent in ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’
The director of John Wick, Chad Stahelski, has offered a defensive statement against criticism of Bill Skarsgård’s character’s accent in the most recent iteration of the action movie series, which was released earlier this year.
Skarsgård plays the Marquis in Chapter 4, a powerful and wealthy aristocratic member of the High Table, and delivers a French accent that seems to have confused some audience members. Stahelski wants to clear up the origins of the voice.
According to the director, the Marquis’ voice was always intentional. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz, Stahelski noted, “[Skarsgård] came to me, he goes, ‘I want to do a little bit like fucked up French, like Cajun accent. And I’m like, ‘I have no idea what that sounds like.’”
He continued, “Some people gave us shit a little bit because it’s not a good French accent. I’m like, ‘Guys, it’s not supposed to be French.’ Like, he wasn’t trying to be French; he’s a guy that speaks French, that’s all.”
Stahelski also opened up on the reboot of Highlander, starring Henry Cavill in the lead role. “I think we have some very good elements now,” Stahelski said of the film. “The trick is when you have the tagline, ‘There can only be one,’ you can’t just kill everybody the first time.”
He added: “I’ll say it for you first: Our story engages a lot of the same characters and stuff like that, but we’ve also brought in elements of all the TV shows, and we’re trying to do a bit of a prequel, a setup to The Gathering, so we have room to grow the property.”
Check out the Chad Stahelski Happy Sad Confused episode below.
