I’ve been paying attention to how Caribbean people sound and look on screen since I was a teenager. I’m in my mid-forties now, writing my own books and stories with Caribbean characters, and I’m still having versions of the same conversation. A film can be affectionate toward Jamaica and still make me wonder who decided how Jamaicans in it were supposed to sound. Cool Runnings is the example I keep coming back to.

The 1993 Disney comedy took inspiration from Jamaica’s Olympic bobsled team and gave the world an underdog story. The trouble, to my ear, is that some of those voices sound more like a performance of Jamaica than people who come from Jamaica. I can appreciate what the film did and still ask what an audience learns when the first Jamaican voices it hears are ones we barely recognise. Disney’s film page

Who decided what sounded Jamaican?

It would be wrong to say the cast had no Caribbean connections. Rawle D. Lewis, who played Junior, was born in Trinidad and grew up around Jamaicans. Doug E. Doug, who played Sanka, has a Jamaican father and has said his comic voice in the film wasn’t how Jamaicans actually speak. Director Jon Turteltaub and members of the cast have recalled pressure to make the speech easier for American audiences to follow. Malik Yoba remembered being told that “people in Middle America won’t be able to understand you.” Those are the people who made the movie describing a production decision, not an audience guessing at one. Rawle Lewis interview · Doug E. Doug interview · Cast and director interviews

There’s no single Caribbean accent, and there’s no single way Jamaicans speak. Think about a character slipping into Patwa in the middle of an argument, speaking more formally at work, then dropping the formality the minute they get home. Those shifts tell you who the character trusts and what they’re trying to get away with. They’re also choices I get to make on the page. On screen, if every Caribbean character is asked to sound the same, the actor loses some of what the writer gave them.

British TV shows what happens when the casting goes further

Channel 4’s Desmond’s gave a Guyanese family a whole comedy built around their Peckham barbershop. Lenny Henry could lead the BBC’s Chef! as a brilliant and infuriating restaurant chef, then write ITV’s Three Little Birds about three women leaving Jamaica for Britain. Those are very different jobs for a performer and a writer. That’s exactly what I want more of: Caribbean people and their descendants carrying stories in different genres, not being called in for the same few parts. BFI on Desmond’s · Museum of Broadcast Communications on Chef! · ITV on Three Little Birds

Jamaican actor Shantol Jackson has played Yvonne in Idris Elba’s Yardie and Detective Sergeant Naomi Thomas in the BBC’s Death in Paradise. One role is in a film about migration, grief and revenge; the other is in a long-running weekly mystery. That range should make it hard to take the old question about whether Caribbean actors are good enough seriously. The harder question is whether their names are getting onto the list when an international production is deciding who can carry the whole thing. Warp Films production credits · Red Planet Pictures

Authenticity belongs in the script and the casting room

Bob Marley: One Love shows a different approach. The 2024 film cast British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir, who has Trinidadian roots, as Marley and brought in Jamaican language expertise. Broadcaster Fae Ellington and linguist Joseph Farquharson helped the production work with Jamaican Patwa and Jamaican English. That care matters. So does asking whether Jamaican actors are being considered for the lead as seriously as they are for the work of making a lead performance sound right. UWI’s account of the language work · Associated Press interviews with the filmmakers

Start the search for leads in the places the story comes from. Bring in a casting director who knows the talent there. Hire language specialists early enough to work on the dialogue, and let actors speak up when something rings false. If a viewer needs help catching a line, use captions or let the scene give them context. It’s what viewers already do for stories set in places they don’t know.

I’m writing more Caribbean characters because I want them to get the same freedom other characters take for granted: to be ordinary, funny, ambitious, irritating or hard to read without having to explain where they come from every time they open their mouths. That’s what I’d like to see more often on television too.

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