I interviewed Michelle Yeoh a few years ago about #StarTrekDiscovery and I mentioned offhand that I'd written an article about what seeing her use her accent on the bridge of a starship meant to me.
She stopped and said "Wait, that was YOU?"
And then proceeded to talk about how much that article had meant to HER and how it contributed to the success of the show.
@skrishna Was only chatting today about how amazing she is and cough cough I was telling you all this as far back as Police Story 3 Super Cop when she was Jackie Chan’s equal and then Pierce Brosnan’s equal in Bond and… Anyway, well done you for capturing her heart. Stay proud of it!
@skrishna It's amazing how quintessentially white, upper class, North American Startrek is despite its supposed diversity. The few Brits speak in that upper class, public school voice. The few Black people it has speak in the North Atlantic, educated accents. No vernacular, no Southern accents. Things have started to change a little recently.
"(The site I wrote the article for took down all their pre-2019 content, so that's a personal copy of it.)"
Sci-Fi.com (Ok, ok, SyFy) shouldn't have done that. That wipes out literal decades of previous articles. Articles about Stargate, FarScape, Mystery Science Theater 3000, etc. How INCREDIBLY myopic.
@kegill@atatassault Totally agree. The inside story is they hadn't been vigilant about their image usage and had gotten sued over using copyrighted stuff. Rather than try and fix the problem they just deleted everything before a certain time.
The interview unfortunately also doesn't exist anymore, but I found a transcript. Here's what #MichelleYeoh said to me about keeping her accent on the show.
I forgot about this: ”You know how it is. That's what we are."
(1) That article is from freaking 2017. There is zero point in critiquing it now. All you're going to do is get muted.
(2) If I knew it was going to go viral multiple times, and be read by an audience other than Asian American kids, I would have written it very differently. Please keep in mind that it was written FOR Asian American children of immigrants before anyone else.
@skrishna Nice article! I'm happy Strange New Worlds has continued the trend of leaving in authentic accents, particularly with Dr. M'Benga. It really makes Starfleet feel like an genuine global alliance as opposed to an Americans-only club.
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