- The actors are British (with the exception of one main character who is Swedish and speaks with a Swedish accent) so it's easiest for them to just use their own accents.
- For whatever reasons, they didn't want to film it in Russian, with Russian actors and subtitles. And they felt that foreigners trying to feign Russian accents starts to get comical. So they made the decision to just let actors use their own accents (they also felt that American audiences wouldn't process it well if they used American accents).
- I watched the show and the accents are annoying for about ten minutes until you get used to them and cease to notice/care
Dunno if this is the podcast response, but this is generally done in movies / TV when they have foreign characters speak English as a proxy for their native language. They almost never use American English unless the character is American; they’ll either use British English or a heavy accent.
Do you have a citation for this? I've never heard of using British English as a proxy for a foreign language. Instead, I always assumed it was because there are a lot of popular British actors, and if portraying non-English speakers, there's no good reason to "fake" an accent (so they just use their native accent), as was the case with "Chernobyl".
Most non-native English speakers around the world will be taught British rather than American English, so this 'accent' would be what you could expect from them in real life if they were to speak English.
I would also partly chalk it up to the ubiquity of American TV and movies. The midwestern accent is the norm for spoken English on TV, and most of those are set in America with American characters. If you want to say someone is from somewhere else but they’re all speaking a non-English language, speaking in a British accent sounds “foreign enough”.
- The actors are British (with the exception of one main character who is Swedish and speaks with a Swedish accent) so it's easiest for them to just use their own accents.
- For whatever reasons, they didn't want to film it in Russian, with Russian actors and subtitles. And they felt that foreigners trying to feign Russian accents starts to get comical. So they made the decision to just let actors use their own accents (they also felt that American audiences wouldn't process it well if they used American accents).
- I watched the show and the accents are annoying for about ten minutes until you get used to them and cease to notice/care