Silly voices and the weight of words in ‘Shōgun’
Blackthorne’s speaking voice. It’s not the gruff baritone you’d expect from this barrel-chested man; it’s a little higher and faster and posher. There’s a bit of Richard Burton in there—and Blackthorne’s creative cussing brings to mind Ian McShane in Deadwood.
Jarvis commits fully to the voice, and everything else follows from it. There’s a scene in episode 3 that’s a litmus test for viewers in how it combines the voice done full-throttle with physical comedy. Toranaga is being smuggled out of Osaka, where his enemies have him imprisoned, in a covered palanquin meant for his wife. Just as they are leaving, a check is ordered. Blackthorne creates a diversion, yelling at the offending soldier in English for outraging the modesty of a woman. “It’s not proper!” he seethes. “Worse than that it’s vullllgar!” The same scene occurs in the 1980 miniseries adaptation of James Clavell’s novel. It’s played for slapstick comedy there, Richard Chamberlain dancing and pretending to have gone mad. The 2024 version of the scene is funnier and more believable because Jarvis, though louder, isn’t behaving too differently from his regular self. For all the locals know, this is how Englishmen are.
Actors doing unusual voices is cinematic catnip for me. Hollywood tends to value respectable passes at tough accents—say, Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar in Invictus. Even something as weird as Julia Garner’s Russian-GermanAmerican hybrid in the Anna Delvey series Inventing Anna is an expert take on something that already existed. But when Robert Pattinson’s first words in The King emerge as a mad Pepe Le Pew parody of Frenchified English… it fills me with a weird delight.
Blackthorne may not always choose words carefully, but Shōgun does. The new series, created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, makes a significant departure from the 1980 version by subtitling the Japanese dialogue. This has the advantage of making the Japanese characters much richer, and reduces the pressure on Blackthorne and Mariko’s exchanges in English (they are actually speaking Portuguese—the English were entirely new to Japan at the time).
The title of the first episode (and the name by which Blackthorne is addressed) is a pun—anjin, or “pilot”. It sets the tone for a show alive to the malleability of language, the ways it can sustain but also deceive and misdirect. The first translator for Blackthorn, a Portuguese priest, twists his words. The second, stung by Blackthorne’s assumption that he’ll misrepresent, “gives him” the Japanese word “teki” (enemy) so he can tell Toranga himself. When Mariko takes over as interpreter, her translations have bits of advice for the anjin she’s increasingly fascinated by.
This arrangement crumbles in episode 5, when Mariko’s husband returns practically from the dead and is immediately suspicious of the familiarity between the foreigner and his wife. Over a long dinner followed by a tense sake-drinking session, Mariko mistranslates almost everything Blackthorne says to her violent husband, and issues a stream of warnings in place of translating his words back. Conversation breaks down, Mariko suffers, and the two men nearly end up duelling.
The same episode shows the fatal power of words misconstrued. Blackthorne is given a pheasant by Toranaga as a gift for training his troops. Moved by the gesture, he hangs the bird from a hook outside his house, with the intention of cooking it later. He brushes aside the concerns of his consort and house help about the stench, causally saying “If touch—die” in Japanese. This leads to a tragic series of events: the gardener is ordered to take down the bird by the village head, but is then killed because of Blackthorne’s unwitting edict. “The bird meant nothing to me,” he protests to Mariko. “Your words gave it meaning,” she replies. In a genre where actions usually determine outcome, Shōgun is unique in its insistence on language being the real battlefield.