The following contains spoilers for Glass Onion.
The hero of Glass Onion may be Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit Blanc, but the real star of the show is probably Janelle Monae, who puts in double time in the new movie playing two different characters, or more accurately, one charcter who is also pretending to be somebody else. Monae needed two different voices in the movie for her two different characters. One has a strong American southern accent, and the other had that accent, before she covered it in what the movie calls the “rich bitch” voice.
Glass Onion has an incredible cast but none are quite as impressive as Monae. Monae says she had a lot of freedom in tackling the voices of twin sisters Helen and Cassandra. For Cassandra, who wanted to hide her origins in order to be taken more seriously, Monae tells EW that it was about creating a “corporate” voice that didn’t reveal where it came from. Monae said…
I was born and raised in Kansas City, by way of Atlanta, Georgia. I’ve spent time in South Carolina, a lot of time down South. [Director] Rian [Johnson] had some ideas. But he let me run free with creating the accent. He was like, ‘Just make sure that they’re distinct enough.’ I know that for Cassandra, she didn’t want you to know where she was from. She was used to playing in corporate spaces, so her voice was a bit more corporate. Still warm, still inviting, but more, you probably wouldn’t know where she was from.
When we first meet who we think is Cassandra in Glass Onion, she has basically no accent at all. This makes the reveal all the more surprising when we find out that who we’re actually seeing is sister Helen, impersonating Cassandra, using a voice they created as children that they called “rich bitch.” But since both sisters used to play with the voice, Helen is able to do her version of it when it is time to pretend to be her sister.
When we listen to Helen as herself we hear how artificial the “rich bitch” voice really is, as Helen has a very pronounced accent, she’s not trying to hide where she’s from in any way. As Monae explained…
With Helen, it was important that this character stayed grounded in where she was from. Making sure that people knew that she was proud of where she was from and that she wasn’t going to code switch. That was real beauty, too, to root it in something from the Deep South.
Janelle Monae’s two performances, and two accents, are some of the highlights of Glass Onion. The two characters seem like anything but sisters from their voices alone. They are very distinct characters, even though we only ever see the actual Cassandra in flashbacks. Glass Onion is available to watch with a Netflix subscription.
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