Director Taika Waititi ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ had a creative clash with Russell Crowe, who plays Zeus, because of the character’s Greek accent, which ended with Waititi having the ‘Gladiator’ star do all of his takes twice: once with a British accent and once with a Greek accent.
An argument results in more work
Apparently, the two stars debated over the accent because Waititi wasn’t sure about the Greek accent proposal from Australian and wanted a traditional British accent. In a chat with Insider, Waititi admitted:
“In fact, we talked long and hard about the accent. We wonder if someone did a Greek accent of a Greek god, is it a hoax? Is it too dumb? Because I felt like people would think Zeus would sound British like Laurence Olivier in Clash of the Titans.”
The ‘Exorcist of the Pope’ star himself told Vanity Fair that he felt it would be better to do his scenes with a Greek accent; However, Waititi wasn’t so sure..
“I told Taika, you can’t make me do this with an English accent. I want to do this as a Greek. Zeus is a Greek god, he’s not a god from any other civilization. Everything would be decided in the test passes, where the accent The Greek absolutely crushed the Englishman, outscoring him by 10 or 15 points. And true to their word, the production team kept their promise.”
The comments helped Waititi to make what most fans believe was the right decision.
“We ended up doing two versions of each take with Russell. One with a Greek accent and then another with a British accent. It’s actually more offensive to Greeks that Zeus sounds like he’s British and test audiences loved the Greek accent. I am very happy with this. But yeah, he had to do each take once with a Greek accent and once with a British accent because I couldn’t make up my mind. But Russell was right all along.”
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