Why Can't Hollywood Get Texas Right?

Here's why it matters that Uma Thurman's "Texas" accent in Red, White, and Royal Blue is not actually a Texas accent

The President’s son has created a bit of a scandal — a transatlantic kerfuffle, if you will — and he’s been called on the carpet, literally sitting on a chair in the middle of the Oval Office. After ruining a royal wedding and endangering the trade deal that his mother, the President, has so much riding on, a butt chewing is in order.

“Darlin’, you done some pretty stupid things in your day, but…” begins President Ellen Claremont.

“Where the f*&k is Uma from?” asked S. We were streaming Red, White, and Royal Blue because we’d heard it was a rom-com about Texas politics, and Uma Thurman was playing a Texan, except that accent… and her phrasing…. “She sounds like she’s been taking quaaludes.”

I have spent the greater part of my adult life around Texans and heard the varieties of Texas accents from the Mexican border to the panhandle. I’ve been to places in Dallas where Owen Wilson’s spacey drawl sounds native. I’ve heard a version of a Texas accent in my own voice. I hear the nasally Plains when I talk with my friend Jimmie. When my friend Elyse smiles and says “yeah,” her voice opens up wide like the sky in your windshield on the state highway headed west. Matthew McConaughey’s “Alright, alright, alright” might sounds like an affectation to foreign ears, but he sounds right at home in Central Texas. Texans generally sound like they’re having fun when they’re talking.

Uma, however, sounds “like a cartoon sheriff,” texted my friend Charlie. “Like she’s about to say - well I do declareeee.”

She sounds like Foghorn Leghorn was her dialect coach.

The one thing that Red, White, and Royal Blue gets absolutely right is the loathing that campaign staff have for the candidate’s relatives who want to have input on strategy and tactics. Many’s the day’s work wasted when a candidate lays his or her head on the pillow next to a spouse who “just has some ideas,” and all the decisions that day come undone. So the fact that no one on the White House staff would read the President’s son’s 14-page memo on how to flip Texas is a niche joke that resonates with any of us who’ve done campaigns.

But the things the movie gets wrong about politics, and in particular the world imagined here, are aggressively unbelievable.

For starters, the President is supposed to be from Austin, but she considers winning Texas a longshot? A Texan didn’t win her home state but did win the Electoral College? I mean, cool? (Though, to be fair, being from Austin might explain the quaaludes.)

Also, the strategy to win over Ohio, et al, was to make a trade deal with Great Britain? The Rust Belt loves free trade, sure, sure. And there’s nothing a soccer mom in Columbus likes more than a tin of duty-free chocolate digestives. Beats the heck out of reproductive rights, that’s for sure.

There’s nothing a soccer mom in Columbus likes more than duty-free chocolate digestives.

And when that doesn’t work, the thing that does work is to send the President’s son to Texas where he intends to register a million voters, turn out young people, and — I swear this is part of the plan — eat fast food. Yes, all that is needed for Democrats to turn Texas blue is for a fancy, apparently unemployed playboy to parachute into Texas and rally the commoners. As the late Jo Carol Pierce once said of me after I’d said something rude, “It’s a good thing he’s cute.”

But even as badly as Red, White, and Royal Blue does politics, it does Texas, and particularly Uma’s attempt at portraying a Texan, worse. She’s a capable actress who can do a decent British accent. And it’s certainly possible for an outsider to nail a Texas accent. Kyle Chandler is from Buffalo, New York, and Connie Britton’s from Boston, but they sounded born and raised Friday Night Lights.

And even those two bask in the shadow of the GOAT, Holland Taylor, whose portrayal of the late Governor Ann Richards always made me worried that I wasn’t doing something right. Holland did this crazy thing to get the accent right: She watched a lot of Ann’s speeches and interviews and learned to sound like the colorful governor. As far as I can tell, Uma prepared for Red, White, and Royal Blue by watching Designing Women, which was set in Atlanta.

To convincingly portray a Texan, sounding like the words are having a good time in your mouth is only half the battle. The other half is the battle. This heat wave has been murder, literally. An average of two prisoners a day are dying in our prisons, two-thirds of which are not air-conditioned. Hundreds more outside prison walls are dying of heat-related causes, and half of them were non-residents who didn’t make it all the way across the border.

The Governor signed a bill banning cities from requiring water breaks when working outside. If you don’t think that makes sense, then your brain is working correctly. He’s also having all the king’s men put circular saw floating barriers on the Rio Grande. From afar, all you can see are the big, orange floating barrier. It’s only when you swim up to it and try to sneak between the floats do the blades cut you. They’re not a deterrent but something worse.

For those of us on the other side of the wall, the streams aren’t all flowing with milk and honey. A friend of a friend at work just found out that her pregnancy is non-viable, but the doctors are refusing to operate on her until her life is in danger. Women who want to start families are beginning to leave Texas in case their pregnancies run into trouble. Doctors are reconsidering whether they want to practice medicine in a state that outlaws the practicing of some kinds of medicine.

For Texans, the streams aren’t all flowing with milk and honey.

To convincingly portray a Texan, you have to sound like a human being amid legislatively mandated inhumanity and government-ordered cruelty. I have so many friends and even a wife who spend all day trying to turn Texas into a place that’s as great as it thinks it is. And most of them realize that to win this fight, they also have to hold onto their own humanity. They’re not just do-gooders. They are do-joy and do-dancing and do-goofing off on a Saturday afternoon, which I’m about to go do.

I don’t particularly mind Hollywood selling fantasies about Texas turning blue. Hell, I’d be fine with a rom-com about Texas becoming a swing state. But if you’re going to make movies about Texans, at least do us the respect of convincing us that you’ve bothered to find out who we are, starting with what we sound like when we talk. It’s a party. You’ll see.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.

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