The opening frames of the new Gladiator II (2024) trailer introduce us to Macrinus (played by Denzel Washington), the wealthy owner of a gladiatorial troupe and an arms dealer. The plutocrat offers Lucius (Paul Mescal) insight into the Roman imperial psyche: “The greatest temple Rome ever built: the Colosseum. Because this is what they believe in: power.” While delivering his lines, Washington uses his instantly recognizable New York accent. The Irish actor Paul Mescal, however, speaks in Received Pronunciation English, a form of speech associated with middle- and upper-class London.
Reactions to the trailer have been mixed. Comments on YouTube, Instagram, and X dispense familiar complaints about “authentic” historical accents and the “anachronistic” use of Jay-Z’s and Kanye West’s 2012 song “No Church in the Wild,” featuring The-Dream and Frank Ocean. The majority of these objections are packaged in thinly veiled racism and written by men who think far too much about the Roman Empire. But these opinions are interesting insofar as they make up the latest chapter in a long history of the tethering of accents to ideology and identity in movies focused on the ancient world.
As director Ridley Scott has previously stated, although elements and people known in Roman history are incorporated into his plots, historical accuracy is not the goal of his films. Gladiator (2000) reimagined the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE and the early reign of Commodus, who took power afterward. The protagonist, Maximus, was invented by screenwriters David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson. The new film examines the fractious reign of Geta and Caracalla, who were meant to rule Rome together after the death of their father, Septimius Severus, in 211 CE. But Caracalla had Geta killed less than a year after their father’s death, and ruled on his own until 217 CE. Washington’s Macrinus is loosely based on the Praetorian Prefect from the province of Mauretania in North Africa who served under Caracalla and would go on to plot the assassination of Caracalla many years later.
The films are historical fictions, which should render all critiques about accents moot. But let’s indulge the ignorance for a moment. What did Romans sound like? What we do know is that the Roman Empire was a melting pot of people, dialects, and accents in the late second to early third centuries CE. The official language of the empire was Latin, but many of the 50-60 million inhabitants across the Mediterranean were bilingual. Many also spoke Greek, and others knew Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Punic, Gaulish, or any number of other languages spoken within the empire. Why, then, do Americans so often expect a British voice for Romans?
Many would blame Shakespeare for the ties between British accents and Romans. The bard wrote extensively about ancient Romans like Caesar, Antony, and Cleopatra. But as scholars have reconstructed, the English accent in the 16th and early 17th centuries was “a little more Edinburgh — and sometimes even more Appalachia — than you might expect.” The false expectations for today’s audiences likely stem not from early modern or contemporary Shakespeare productions, but from 20th-century films. In comments to Hyperallergic, ancient historian and film expert Gregory Aldrete, author of Ancient Rome on the Silver Screen: Myth versus Reality (2023), discussed the shift in accents in movies from the 1930s to the ‘50s. He noted that in the 1932 film The Sign of the Cross, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, British accents were used for villains, particularly the emperor Nero (Charles Laughton), who goes on to persecute the Christians. DeMille was later criticized for the colloquial (i.e., American) accents used in his film Cleopatra (1934). The paradigm of the British Roman would only grow into the 1940s and 1950s.
During the middle of the 20th century, Biblical epics became an important way to signal American identity and faith to audiences. In comments to Hyperallergic, Andrew Jacobs, a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and author of Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (2024), remarked on how movies focused on the Bible or Christian persecution entwined faith and nationalism during the earlier years of the Cold War. “The Bible, of course, has been central to Christian identity in the United States since its founding,” Jacobs said. “But it took on a new kind of resonance during the Cold War: as the symbol of a ‘God-fearing’ West facing off against a ‘godless’ Communist East.”
The role of accents in emphasizing this West versus East dichotomy is exemplified in DeMille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments. For Jacobs, DeMille invoked “the original United States struggle for freedom against tyranny by having the Hebrews speak in US accents.” Furthermore, “while the Egyptians speak in British accents (with the exception of Yul Brynner, the Soviet-born actor who suitably enough spoke with a tinge of his Russian accent),” Moses’ “Americanness” is clear in his speech. As Jacobs sees it, this type of “linguistic coding” continues in Charlton Heston’s early Christian Roman charioteer epic, Ben-Hur (1959). “The Jews were played by and spoke like Americans, while the Romans were played by and spoke like upper-class Britons,” Jacobs says. At the time, American accents tended to signal liberty and piety in what film historian Monica Silveira Cyrino calls the “linguistic paradigm.”
In the 1960s and ‘70s, some films followed this pattern, while other films deviated. In Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), the enslaved gladiators are Americans while the Roman masters are Britons. Movies like Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) largely maintained British accents (with the exception of James Earl Jones as Darth Vader) to signal the fascism of the Empire through their speech. But these decades also introduced loveable British Romans in the form of the BBC series I, Claudius (1976) and through many a Monty Python parody, including Life of Brian (1979). As Aldrete remarked, “the Romans [began] shifting to the sympathetic figures” in the 1980s. This mirrored the growing diplomatic closeness of the US and the United Kingdom, including their alliance in the Gulf War (1990–91) and Americans’ fascination with English monarchical figures like Princess Diana.
Accents were pivotal to the revival of the sword-and-sandal film genre. In Gladiator, American actor Joaquin Phoenix, playing the emperor Commodus, adopted a British accent to signal his elite birth, whereas Russell Crowe, playing Maximus, used an Australian and British intonation. He would later describe this dialect as “Royal Shakespeare Company two pints after lunch.” Director Ridley Scott worked with Crowe on the accent to gesture to the fact that Maximus was meant to be from the province of Spain, far from Rome. But why not have Maximus use a Spanish accent, or hire Javier Bardem?
This brings us all the way back to the accents in Gladiator II. In comments to Hyperallergic, Jermaine Bryant, a Roman historian and PhD candidate in Classics at Princeton, saw two possibilities for the filmmakers’ choice to give Washington’s character a New York accent. The optimistic view would be that “[Hollywood] is ready to start chipping away at some of the other assumptions we have about Rome and the British coding we have of the Romans,” Bryant says. “The pessimistic reading is that Denzel, by being Black, is already ‘other.’” But Bryant brings up an important precedent for his hopes that Washington will not be coded as “other” in this new movie: Scott included a non-British accent in the original Gladiator in the form of Djimon Hounsou’s character of Juba, Maximus’ companion in the barracks.
In the last three decades in particular, British accents have consistently stood in for American constructions of “Western Civilization.” In his films, Scott continues to tie accents to race and class: Though Caracalla and Geta were themselves from an Afro-Syrian family, the actors use British accents, and are played by two White men, one British and the other American. We will have to wait until the November 22 release of Gladiator II to find out whether the new film further subverts or complies with the ahistorical “linguistic paradigm” of using modern British accents for ancient Romans. A change might be afoot: For most Americans living in the 20th century, “Empire was once evil,” Aldrete remarks, “but now, suddenly, America is the empire.”
