The hungry John Wick fandom will be fed this week as the new TV series The Continental: From the World of John Wick debuts. The prequel series takes place in 1970s New York, decades before the first John Wick movie, and follows Winston Scott in his younger years, as he rises to become the manager of the Continental hotel.
The John Wick fandom is nothing if not observant and some eagle-eyed (and eared) fans have noticed that Colin Woodell, who plays young Winston in the show, is rocking an American accent throughout the series. This is noticeably different from Ian McShane’s version of the character, who adopts a more British accent that is closer to McShane’s natural speech.
As it turns out, this didn’t go unnoticed by the filmmakers either.
Ahead of The Continental’s premiere, Gizmodo Australia spoke to Albert Hughes, director of episodes 1 and 3, who explained that Winston’s accent was a big topic of conversation.
“It definitely was something that was very, very much talked about. It’s a very hard thing to do, not that we shied away from it, [but] Ian McShane has a very transatlantic kind of accent,” he said.
“I think, for me, the smart thing to do as an actor or as a filmmaker is you have to embody the feeling of the character. If you start getting into imitating accents, you’re going into real trouble. And we didn’t want to go down that dangerous road.”
Speaking to IGN earlier in the year, Woodell said he purposely veered away from Ian McShane’s portrayal of the character:
“I really didn’t want to match what Ian was doing because Ian does something really specific and it’s hard to gauge exactly what it is, and it makes him so special,” Woodell said.
The Continental serves up quite a lot of backstory for Winston, much of which has remained unknown until now. Hughes explained that this allowed them a lot of freedom to explore how Winston came to be the man he is in John Wick, including the origins of his accent.
“Our storyline actually explains how he got to London. He’s actually American-born and then he got to London. So we started talking about these backstories like, well, what if we do something like Halston? Like, he eventually created a character for himself,” Hughes continued.
“He was a conman in London, right? So maybe later on down the line, he decides I want to throw in a little bit more of this British accent. So I’m creating a character for myself so that I get respect. So right now you’re seeing the baby rattlesnake of Winston, who doesn’t know how to use his power fully effectively. Even though he’s very clever and very smart, he’s not the Winston you’ll see 40 years later.”
While The Continental features a massive time gap from its John Wick predecessors, the whole series takes place over a remarkably short amount of time – just three consecutive nights, in fact, with one episode dedicated to each night.
We’ll see if the new Winston can win fans over when The Continental: From the World of John Wick premieres its first episode on Prime Video on September 22.
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Image Credit: Prime Video