[wayoutthere]

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.

[alistairSH]

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".

[mimixco]

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.

[wayoutthere]

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”.

See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheQueensLatin