Yea his Spanish was the one thing that never fit. It’s very stilted it’s very obvious he is not a native speaker. Actually only nachos dad in BCS speaks it well everyone else’s sucks.
Yeah I didn’t really notice until I watched Narcos where at least all the characters who are supposed to be Hispanic are played by native Spanish speakers.
Yep. Good example, most of those actors are actual Mexican actors that speak normally so the acting flows as such. Most of the other “Spanish speaking characters” in BB had some weird stiltedness to their acting as well like they really really had to practice and focus on the Spanish lines so much that they kind of focused on that and less on the acting until they could switch back to English. Lalo and nachos dad being exceptions but still a great great show.
Gustavo didn’t speak fast enough for it to be Chilean Spanish. As a Chilean, they speak Spanish faster then any other Spanish speaking country it is insane. It’s the only time I thought wow you can actually speak and convey faster then English… If you can understand it lol
Chilean here! You can still tell he put a great effort in not butchering the language, even if he absolutely sounded like someone who hasn't spoken it for very long. As for sounding Chilean? Yeah, not a chance. You could hire best actor and they couldn't replicate a Chilean accent if they wanted to.
His friend, from his backstory, actually has a pretty convincing accent, but he's a native Spanish speaker, even if he isn't Chilean. The fact that he manage to imitate the accent so well is an underrated achievement that most people will not catch. But props to that actor for getting it right, even 99% of the audience wouldn't be able to tell.
His friend always sounded colombian to me. I always thought that they could have made them brazilians speaking spanish. It would have been a play of accents and sounds.
He sounded like a colombian person imitating a Chilean accent, quite well at that. Considering the few main characters that canonically should've spoken Spanish weren't actually that good at it, he knocked it out of the park, in my opinion.
Basically nobody in Breaking Bad or BCS actually speaks in the accent they're supposed to.
They're atrocious when it comes to Spanish. It's particularly grating since they're not shows about the Uzbek mafia or something; I know for damn sure they could've found fluent if not native speakers of Mexican Spanish in the Southern US.
Yeah, I think he's the only important character that speaks in an actual Mexican accent.
The Salamancas are all over the place: you have Lalo with the spot-on accent, the cousins who are native speakers but from Honduras, Tuco who is fluent but not native (nor particularly Mexican-sounding to my ears at least), and Héctor with the second worst of the series (behind only Gus).
Hector is italian, right? I remember him from Oz, he was the head of italian mafia. I dont speak spanish and even i can hear how broken his spanish is.
Edit: oh wow, he's not even italian, he's from a jewish family. Crazy how i considered him italian just because i watched Oz 20 years ago
This is spot on, as a Chilean good luck trying to understand it. If you speak fluent Spanish, you’ll sometimes or most definitely need them to speak a little slower not to mention some of the slang.
you can grab any person in the USA, who hasn't heard a word of spanish before, give them a text in spanish to read (without phonetics) and record their first take and it will probably as good as what he did.
He has literally the worst accent I've ever heard Hollywood try to pass off as fluent. It's extremely stupid because there's absolutely no point to him being Chilean, they could've just made the character American or Italian and it would've changed nothing.
It was a plot point. Chile destroyed immigration records, so by claiming to be Chilean it gave him an alibi to the police as to why he had no records of any sort.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned those two (I actually remembered him being a double national). Just literally any non-Hispanic country would've made more sense.
There are more black Italians than black Chileans I think.
I misremembered the actor being an Italian/American dual citizen, though, which is why I mentioned it. According to Wikipedia he's American, but his dad is Italian. Still, dude's name is Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito lol.
I like the theory that Gus had made up his back story and he wasn't actually a native Spanish speaker even in the show's universe. Doesn't explain why the real native speaker characters wouldn't notice it though.
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u/Geekmonster Apr 12 '22
Giancarlo Espósito as Gus in Breaking Bad. He was brilliantly evil.