There's No Way 'Eleven' Got Her American Accent From 'Hannah Montana'
Celebrities are going on little talk shows and podcasts with each other at unprecedented rates right now -- which is good for us, as we're running out of Tik-Tok challenges we can pretend to enjoy. Miley Cyrus has very recently kicked off a new talk show on her Instagram called Bright Minded, that's pretty standard famous person-interviews-famous person fare. Her most recent guest list included Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven on Netflix's Stranger Things, and she had a big reveal for Cyrus.
Nobody's expecting you to watch all 52 minutes of that, so we'll cut right to the Millie bit. After bonding over their similar-ish names, and a few other things, Brown admits that the only thing that helped her to develop an American accent was watching Cyrus' Hannah Montana as a teenager:
For our non-American audience, we have to just beg you to please understand that Billy Ray Cyrus' drawl and Teenager Miley's accents, coupled with what sounds like made-up idioms, do not represent the overwhelming majority of Americans and what we sound like. America is just too big to have one singular accent. Learning your American accent from a bunch of lovable Malibu-based Southern transplants is like learning to cook a 5-course meal from The Great British Baking Show.
It just doesn't make sense, particularly when you look at what Stranger Things is. It's set in Indiana, which, despite basically being the Alabama of the north, is one of the more accent-neutral states in the country (at least, it was 35 years ago, when the show is set). Taking the Cyrus family's thick Tennessee accent and putting that into a group of Hoosiers doesn't make a ton of sense. And Brown doesn't do that! She sounds like exactly what her character is meant to sound like -- a kid who was shown very little speech growing up and is still learning things. (Brown does that very well, and the show is better for it.)
Cyrus, for her part in this interview, caught onto Brown's claim immediately, saying, "I'm surprised you don't have a country accent!" Because as any Southerner who has moved elsewhere will tell you, it doesn't take much -- be it a rise in stress, or maybe a couple of beers down the hatch, before the "y'alls" start falling out of your mouth.
We can kind of excuse Brown on this one because she's British, but also not entirely? People can sound very different even in different areas surrounding London, so a Tennessee accent is hardly an indication of what the whole South sounds like. Even famed impersonator Kate McKinnon botches this, and hard, with her play on Jeff Sessions from Alabama. The South is not all of America (as much as it might like to think so), and Tennessee is far from being the whole South. If the Stranger Things gang takes a trip to Nashville to fight Upside Down monsters with Dolly Parton or something, we'll talk. Actually, Netflix, ring us up anyway, as that is for sure better than whatever you got mapped out for next season.
Top Image: Netflix
