HBO’s Chernobyl TV series has quickly become one of the highest-rated shows of all time; overtaking the likes of Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad.

The five-part series follows the tragic real-life story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which exploded in 1986 changing the lives of the residents of the Ukrainian town of Pripyat forever.

So we know the show is based in Ukraine and its neighbouring country of Russia, which begs the question: why aren’t the cast doing those accents?

In many people’s opinions, the show is much better for it, but is there a reason behind the decision to have the actors use their own accents?

Speaking on the show’s official podcast, the show's creator Craig Mazin was asked about this.

“The decision not to use Russian accents was a big one that we made early on. We had an initial thought that we didn't want to do the 'Boris and Natasha' cliched accent because the Russian accent can turn comic very easily. At first, we thought that maybe we would have people do these sort of vaguely Eastern European accents - not really strong but noticeable.

“What we found very quickly is that actors will act accents. They will not act, they will act accents and we were losing everything about these people that we loved. Honestly, I think after maybe one or two auditions we said 'Ok, new rule. We're not doing that anymore.”

HBO

Craig added that he took inspiration from another hugely popular HBO show when making this decision.

“For example, in Game Of Thrones, anyone from Manchester will be asked to push that a bit so they can clearly be defined as Northeners. We would say 'take the edge off of it' a bit here and there, we'd let someone be Irish or Scottish because they sounded great and their character was good. Also, we're hearing people as they would have heard themselves.

HBO

“There's no consciousness there. My hope is that the accent thing just fades away in seconds and you stop caring about it. Ultimately, a person's accent is completely irrelevant to what's going on because there are things happening that don't even need an accent to be communicated - panic, fear, excitement, worry, sadness. They're just emotions.”

The final episode of Chernobyl airs on NOW TV on 4th June.

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Anna Lewis News Editor Anna Lewis is the News Editor at Delish UK, which means she’s always either writing about food, cooking food or eating food.

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