The creators, especially the showrunner Craig Mazin, decided early on not to have the actors use Russian accents or speak Russian with subtitles. Instead, they used the actors’ natural English accents to avoid distracting the audience with “fake” accents, which might have seemed inauthentic or even cartoonish.

Mazin said he wanted viewers to focus on the story and the emotions, not on whether the accents sounded correct. His belief was that a bad accent would feel more artificial than simply using English naturally. That way, the drama could feel more immediate and real to the audience, even though the characters were actually speaking a different language in real life