Troy

Accent Rationale

When creating the accents for Troy, we knew from the outset that all modern or urban sounds had to be avoided, similarly, any sounds that had an identifiable, modern location should be avoided.

In the late Bronze Age (the time of our film), cities were isolated and developed their own styles which influenced everything, from crafts to speech. Many of the characters from the City of Troy are part of the same family: the character of Priam is played by Peter O'Toole whose own accent is Received Pronunciation.

Received Pronunciation or RP is immediately intelligible to a worldwide English-speaking audience: it is well-known for its clarity and ease of comprehension. The actors playing younger characters from the city of Troy also speak RP, but in a slightly different way, as is usual for a younger generation. Many of the actors cast as Trojans are British: Orlando Bloom (Paris) and Saffron Burrows (Andromache) are English. James Cosmo (Glaucus) is a Scottish actor. Owain Yeoman (Lysander) and Mark Lewis Jones (Tecton) are both Welsh actors. The two Australian actors - Eric Bana (Hector) and Rose Byrne (Briseis) - have mastered their RP accents so well as to be completely convincing.

The Greeks were from many different islands: some of them were conquered peoples but all spoke Greek, even if only as a lingua franca by those who had been vanquished by Agamemnon and then brought under the aegis of the powerful Greeks. From this it is clear that the Greeks would speak with different accents but that none of them would sound like the Trojans. We felt that it was important to differentiate between the Greeks and the Trojans.

On a Trojan warship off the coast of Malta, for Troy: Andrew Jack,  Wolfgang Petersen, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom
Photo by Alex Bailey

The thread that pulls the speech of these actors and their particular characters together, is the 'OH' vowel sound. All these actors are using their native 'OH' sound which is placed further back in the mouth and is more rounded than in RP. We have softened their individual accents by excluding the 'R' sound that we hear in Scots, Irish and American speech and by making their immediately identifiable, individual speech rhythms less noticeable.

As to individual characters - Achilles and Patroclus were cousins and we would expect them to sound alike. Similarly, Agamemnon and Menelaus were brothers and would sound like each other. The actors' (Brian Cox and Brendan Gleeson) vocal qualities and Celtic undertones reinforce this similarity.

Homer wrote that Helen was taken to Sparta as a girl of sixteen: her previous origin is unknown. We can take it for granted that she would sound like the other Spartans but with subtle differences. Diane Kruger, who plays Helen, is German and she speaks English with some American sounds. As with the other actors we have avoided these American sounds, making her speech more like RP, but have kept some German vowel and consonant sounds as an influence from her unknown past.

When creating a pronunciation guide of the names of people and places in our production of Troy', we realised that one of the main considerations was to create a uniform world away from any modern or conventional usage. We based our guide on phonetic pronunciation, using pure vowels wherever possible and using a logical stress theory. This is simply to take the audience into "our" world of Troy and to avoid flashbacks to Greek studies in the classroom. Of course, as with any living language, there are occasional exceptions to the rule.

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

Vowel Identification

AH  = 'pasta'   -  Italian pronunciation
AW = 'aught'   - RP pronunciation ('coffee' - New York pronunciation)
O    = 'of'      - RP pronunciation
EH  = 'then'
EE = 'ease'
OO = 'who'
I      = 'his'
UH  = 'the' (not 'thee')

Vowel Sounds

A final 'e' spelling in a word is pronounced 'EE' as in 'ease.'
A final 'es' spelling in a word is pronounced 'EES' as in 'fleece.'
An 'i' spelling before a vowel is pronounced 'EE' as in 'ease.'
An 'i' spelling before a consonant is pronounced 'I' as in 'his.'
A *y' spelling is a vowel sound and is pronounced 'I' as in 'his.'
An 'ae' spelling is one sound and pronounced 'EE' as in 'ease.'
An 'au' spelling is two sounds and is pronounced 'OU' as in 'south.'

Consonants

'ch' spellings are pronounced 'K'
's' spellings are pronounced 'S' as in 'hiss' (not 'his')

Stress

In words of 2 syllables always stress the first syllable:

Ajax            EH-JAHKS
Glaucus      GLOU-KOOS
Priam          PREE-AHM

In words of 3 or more syllables, stress the penultimate syllable if it ends in a consonant.

otherwise, stress is on the third syllable from the end:

GREEKS

TROJANS

THESSALONIANS

 PEOPLE PLACES THINGS

Dialogue/Dialect Department

Andrew Jack, Róisín Carty, Paula Jack