Catherine Zeta-Jones Uses Her Real Welsh Accent for the First Time in Kill Jackie
Catherine Zeta-Jones uses her real Swansea accent on screen for the first time in Kill Jackie, an eight-part thriller series premiering 2 October on AMC+ in the U.S. and on Amazon Prime Video across the U.K., Ireland, and several other markets The Hollywood Reporter.
The Oscar-winning actor plays Jackie Price, a glamorous woman presenting as an art dealer who is actually running from her past as an international drug smuggler. When Jackie learns that a squad of assassins called The Seven Demons has been hired to kill her, she goes on the offensive, hunting them down one by one. AMC Networks released the first trailer on 2 September, depicting Zeta-Jones being pursued and forced to confront that past AMC Networks press release; Deadline.
Zeta-Jones hails from the Mumbles area of Swansea and has kept close ties to the city throughout her career. Kill Jackie is the first time she has used her natural Welsh accent on screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Parts of the series were shot in Swansea itself, as well as in Bilbao, Lisbon and London.
The show is adapted from Aidan Truhen's novel The Price You Pay. Tom Butterworth serves as writer and showrunner — the person who oversees the writers' room and keeps the creative vision consistent across episodes. Damon Thomas is the lead director. Both are among the four co-creators, alongside Conor Keane and Peter Lawson. The series is co-produced by Fremantle and Steel Springs Pictures The Hollywood Reporter.
The cast runs deep. Daniel Ings, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Óscar Jaenada, Hattie Hook, Darci Shaw, Raff Law, Enzo Cilenti, Christine Adams, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Ron Perlman all feature alongside Zeta-Jones.
For Zeta-Jones, Kill Jackie marks a return to U.K. television production. She broke through on the British series The Darling Buds of May in the early 1990s, a show that made her a household name in the U.K. before her Hollywood career took off. She currently stars in Netflix's Wednesday and was part of the main cast of Disney+'s National Treasure: Edge of History, which was cancelled after one season The Hollywood Reporter.
The series also streams on Prime Video in the Netherlands, Turkey, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Canada, and will be available on the Australian streaming service Stan Deadline.
What makes the accent detail resonate is simple: Zeta-Jones has spent more than three decades on screen playing characters with American, English and other accents. Swansea is where she started. Kill Jackie lets that voice back in.
