In a tribe of American accented Lions, why is it that the villain of Disney's The Lion King, Scar, is portrayed with a British accent? Disney has haunted childhoods with evil villains for generations, and The Lion King is no exception. The iconic Scar is portrayed by British actor Jeremy Irons who leans into his strong English accent for the villain.
The Lion King is one of Disney's absolute classics and was the second of all Disney movies to be given a live-action reboot in 2019 which featured some exciting changes to the original Lion King animation. But, the original animated version remains universally loved. The Lion King tells the story of Simba, a Lion prince whose father, Mufasa, is cruelly murdered by his own brother, Scar, who then persuades Simba that he was the reason for his father's demise. Scar, with his unsettling voice, convinces Simba to leave the kingdom in shame and never return.
In The Lion King, Scar's posh British accent, known as Received Pronunciation (RP), separates him from most other characters, highlighting Simba as the emerging underdog hero. According to an interview with linguist Chi Luu where she explains why so many movie villains speak in RP (via Jeremy Irons (seen as Ozymandias in Watchman on HBO), a typical Disney bad-guy, and someone the audience must keep their eye on. The British accent has been used to portray villains in Disney classics for decades; however, it is not just the British accent they have villanized.
Disney has a sad history of making their villains "foreign", as a tool to other them. This exposes the massive problem of discrimination within the Disney brand, and film and television generally. Particularly in children's films, dialects are used as tools for defining a "characters' personality traits", detailed in the 1998 Gideny Dobrow study (via portraying racial stereotypes. Moreover, Disney is historically known for queer-coding their villains which "create[s] a psychological association in people’s minds between ‘queer’ and ‘evil’" (via The Tempest) and propagates the standard of mocking those who don't conform to generalized gender norms. Like many other Disney villains, The Lion King's Scar falls into this trope with his voice, appearance, and mannerisms.
The Lion King, particularly when considering the family dynamic, takes huge influence from the Shakespearean classic, Hamlet, and is another reason why Scar's accent is intriguing. Having a British actor play the film's villain is a subtle homage to the Shakespearean influence from whence the story originated, without bashing it over the heads of a young audience who likely have no idea who Shakespeare is. In both The Lion King and Hamlet, Shakespeare's tragedy-cum-horror, there is a monarchy where the king is murdered by his brother, leaving behind a son who was sent away from his community before returning to defeat his uncle.
Despite it reaching a global audience, The Lion King caters primarily to an American audience. Because of this, the choice of casting Jeremy Irons as Scar creates the illusion of an outsider within the tribe, cultivating an air of mystery and intrigue around the character, making the audience wary of him. Having almost all of the cast played by American accented actors, there is a clear majority that also coincides with the film's target audience, which remains the same in the 2019 Lion King which received mixed reviews. This creates an alliance between the audience and the heroes of the film and alienates Scar even more. Jeremy Irons' performance as Scar in Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers' The Lion King leveraging his english accent uses the target audience of the film, young Americans, to its advantage as a vehicle to separate Scar from the remainder of the tribe and isolate him as the villain, while bolstering the audience's of the American accented protagonists.
