Sydney Sweeney likely to be the next Bond Girl

Same here. I don't care if the accent isn't perfect, as long as the performance and film is entertaining.

One of my close friends is an accent coach who works with the Royal Shakespeare Company and other bodies (I don’t know nearly enough about this), so I do hear about accents an awful lot. Ironically, she herself is very laissez-faire and thinks it’s just got to have ‘the right vibe’ (whatever that means).

It’s good to be accurate, I think. But then, it’s like anything: if you notice something is off, it’s obviously off enough to be noticed. We probably don’t notice plenty of other inaccuracies. I do not have a particularly consistent position here, but it does annoy me immensely when ‘Russian’ spies speak a God-awful melange of Nordic-sounding gibberish. Which, alas, sadly happens a lot. (Looking at you, ‘Mission Impossible’).

I grew up watching Mary Poppins and not even caring if Dick VanDyke was a real Brit or not

You would be able to notice bad Russian accents that I wouldn't be aware of. Just last night I watched an old 1950s movie, The World In His Arms with Gregory Peck as a sea captain in love with a Russian noble woman played by Ann Blyth. She didn't even attempt an accent which probably was the best decision if she couldn't do it decently. Other actors did accents and I can't tell you honestly if they were good or bad. Same with Peck he was suppose to be a New England captain from Salem but he didn't do an accent. But it wasn't a great movie, so none of that really mattered to me.

I could learn from this.

That’s a fair point. I can’t think of an example, but I would imagine if an accent was off in an otherwise spectacular film, I wouldn’t be thinking about it, either. I suppose having everyone speak English is, in the very least, a consistent option… as long as they speak the way they naturally do, or at least all speak in the same accent as an ensemble cast. Another Mission Impossible film (one of the recent ones, with the AI overlord villain — oh, the irony) actually had ‘Russians’ speaking English but with an even more God-awful-and-not-at-all-Russian accent. Just… why?

I work with broadcast media often and the relatively famous Bloomberg Surveillance anchor and editor Francine Lacqua has a very weird accent indeed. It’s all over the place. Yet there she is, running the show. So it’s not a key thing, sure. I don’t know. I feel like accuracy does enhance a good fictional narrative.