Emily Blunt explains bizarre Irish accents in new film Wild Mountain Thyme: ‘You just do your best’

Accents used by Blunt and Irish actor Jamie Dornan were jokingly compared to ‘a hate crime’

Emily Blunt has explained why the Irish accents in her new film Wild Mountain Thyme sound so bizarre.

The forthcoming romantic drama was ridiculed across social media, and specifically by Irish people, after the release of its first trailer in November. The accents used by Blunt and her co-stars (including Jamie Dornan and Christopher Walken) were even jokingly compared to a “hate crime”.

Blunt has now broken her silence on the accents used in the film, explaining that she and her fellow cast members “had to learn a very specific [and] quite thick accent”.

“I think there’s 50 to 100 different accents just in Ireland,” the British actor told The Hollywood Reporter. “Even in Dublin, there’s North and South Dublin, and they sound completely different. So we had to learn a very specific midland, rural, quite thick accent, and it sounds completely different from a metropolitan, sort of Dublin Irish accent. I don’t even know all the accents.”

She also explained why Dornan, who is himself Irish, appears to speak with a not-particulary-good Irish accent in the film.

“Even for Jamie, who’s from Belfast, he has a completely different accent from how he spoke,” she added. “So accents are tricky. You just do your best and that’s all you can hope for.”

Wild Mountain Thyme, which Blunt said was filmed quickly in just four weeks, revolves around a headstrong farmer embroiled in a land dispute with a man (Dornan) she has loved for decades.

The film’s trailer was met with mockery. “Jesus wept!” wrote one viewer. “How does Jamie Dornan, the only Irish person in the trailer manage to have the worst Irish accent of all of them?”

Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt in Wild Mountain Thyme (Lionsgate)

The official Twitter account of the Leprechaun Museum added: “Even we think this is a bit much.”

John Patrick Shanley, who directed the film, responded to the backlash by explaining that the accents used were made to be “more accessible to a global audience”.

Wild Mountain Thyme will be released in 2021.