The 2001 movie Don Cheadle still gets harassed about on the street: “I’ve taken so much shit for that”
Accountability is an important trait for people to have because it means they’ve thought about and understood what they’ve done, and worked on themselves to inspire forgiveness. In that vein, it seems Don Cheadle is showing some accountability for his appalling accent in the three Ocean’s movies between 2001 and 2007, so now we have to decide whether to forgive him or not.
And it isn’t an easy decision to make, because Don Cheadle’s British accent in those heist films at the start of the century is so astonishingly, inconceivably, horrendously bad that by all accounts that he, firstly, shouldn’t have been allowed to make another film ever again, and secondly, probably should be banned from the UK for all eternity, that’s if he’s not too ashamed to try to come here in the first place.
The accent, which he performed as the explosives expert Basher Tarr, a name that sounds like someone just asked the first American they came across to suggest a couple of words that sounded vaguely English, is so appalling in fact that it regularly tops polls of the most egregious examples in history, alongside Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the quite flabbergasting cockney invective displayed by Al Pacino in 1990’s The Local Stigmatic.
But as I pointed out at the top of the piece, Cheadle is taking some responsibility for it, albeit in a kind of angry way, because he said he originally wanted to play the role as an American, in which case he wouldn’t have been called Basher Tarr for one, and also, raises the question of why he didn’t he just do it as an American.
Regardless, it seems that the British public did their part when it came to letting him know their thoughts, and it makes you a little misty-eyed with pride.
Cheadle told The Guardian about the feedback he got for the accent, saying, “I’ve taken so much shit for that. I went to the Baftas, never been to London before, I’m walking down the street from my hotel, trying to get a little lunch or something. And literally, every 40, 50ft…one guy almost literally cut across two lanes of traffic to cuss me out for that part. ‘Don’t fahking do that again’.
He backtracked a little, noting the slightly nicer feedback he also received, “Or sometimes, ‘Well, it wasn’t bad’. It literally seemed to depend on what street I was on: Covent Garden: ‘Fuck you!’ Oxford Street: ‘Not bad!’ But I got jumped a lot in interviews about it. I’d be trying to sell some movie, and someone jumps in mid-sentence with, ‘Oh, wait, we have to talk about your terrible accent!'”
Sorry, Don, but that is warranted entirely, mainly because not only did you get paid hundreds of thousands for doing it, you did it three times, and so a few shouted comments while you climb in and out of an Uber X is the least you can put up with, but here’s the bad news.
Ocean’s 14 is on the way, and George Clooney has confirmed that the original cast will be reunited in full, which means more Basher Tarr, which means Cheadle had better get to work with a dialect coach fast if he doesn’t want to completely ruin a multi-million dollar Hollywood franchise single-handed, again.
