Confusion reigns re: Pettigrew and Lupin casting (Fwd from OTChatter)

[Amy Z <lupinesque@yahoo.com>]

Thanks for the links, Richard!

> I'm afraid he's nowhere close to my mental image of Pettigrew. 
Mainly 
> because he's *huge* (largely as in err... "fat"...). 

Maybe he's going to go on a crash diet for the role, thus fulfilling 
the description of Pettigrew as a man who's recently and rapidly lost 
a lot of weight.  The ultimate diet:  if you can't manage to lose 
weight for the sake of your health, you give yourself the even bigger 
motivation of a plum role in multiple HP movies.

>Another is that he speaks in an exceptionally 
> broad Midlands accent (strange, IMDb lists him as born in London - 
he must 
> have moved to this area when he was quite young). It is generally 
accepted 
> that the Midlands accent is the stupidest-sounding of all British 
speech 
> patterns (something I recently saw on a website about this area 
sums it up 
> best: "even the most intelligent or well-educated Brummie sounds 
thick as 
> sh*t"). One of the joys of his role in "Topsy Turvy" (an opera 
singer) was 
> the sub-text that his middle-class accent was utterly phoney (Spall 
can do 
> excellent "proper" English; 

In that case maybe he'll give Pettigrew a more intelligent voice than 
his native accent suggests.  Or maybe he was chosen partly for that 
role, since Peter isn't supposed to be the sharpest knife in the 
drawer.

It's crazy, isn't it, the way we assign intelligence or lack thereof 
to an entire region?  In the US, we (=non-Southerners <g>) think 
Southern accents sound dumb, even when they emerge from patently 
intelligent people.  And we think upper-class English accents sound 
intelligent, even when they emerge from evident idiots.

Amy
still ISO of a head shot of Thewlis