LOS ANGELES — As the SAG-AFTRA strike continues, actors have voiced their demands to no longer have to learn bullshit fake languages for future television and movie roles.
“I can’t do it anymore,” said Emilia Clarke, who played the role of Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones for eight years. “Learning fucking Dothraki was such a pain and, it turns out, completely useless now that the show is over. I could have spent that time learning French or Mandarin and then at least I’d have something to show for it. Now I just occasionally have dreams where I’m talking Dothraki and I wake up annoyed at how the show ended.”
Clarke wasn’t the only actor to complain about the time and effort involved in learning a made-up language for a project.
“Learning Na’vi for the first Avatar wasn’t the worst thing in the world,” said Zoe Saldana, who stars in the two Avatar films released over a decade apart. “The problem was James Cameron kept saying we were about to shoot the sequel so I needed to keep studying. For 13 years. I’d be studying it on the set of Guardians of the Galaxy while Chris Pratt laughed at me. Do you know what it’s like to be mocked by Chris Pratt? It cuts deep.”
Writers working in Hollywood and elsewhere took offense at these comments.
“How will people know that we’ve created a new world if there’s not a language?” said Winston Owen, a failed fantasy-author-turned-TV-writer. “I spent three years working on my world-building bible for the fantasy world of High Aurora and you all expect me to not create a weird-ass little language for my characters? I spent six months designing a magic system that doesn’t make sense, you can bet your ass my characters will refer to English as the common tongue and then talk a bunch of incomprehensible nonsense that my actors will practice day and fucking night.”
In light of these statements, Disney has confirmed that Star Wars writers will just keep using gibberish or African languages like they did in Return of the Jedi.
