🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
When you started watching Florida Man and met all of Mike Valentine’s (Edgar Ramírez) extended family in Coronado Beach, were you wondering why he’s the only one speaking with an accent? Well, there’s a reason for that — even if it ended up on the cutting room floor.
Tudum spoke with showrunner Donald Todd to take us behind the “deleted couplet” that would explain why Mike speaks with a Venezuelan accent.
Well, for starters, it’s Ramírez’s own accent. “English is his fourth language, along with Spanish, German and French,” Todd says. “So it would’ve been impossible — we were never going to get him to not have an accent.” But in the context of the show, Episode 1 director Miguel Arteta was the first person who raised the idea that Mike keeping his accent in the show should be addressed. Arteta and Ramírez already knew each other from making Yes Day (2021), and Todd readily took Arteta’s word for it.
From left: Otmara Marrero as Patsy and Edgar Ramírez as Mike Valentine in Florida Man.
Here’s the story: Mike’s dad Sonny (Anthony LaPaglia) had worked as a fisherman on the coast of Venezuela (where Ramírez is from IRL), and he fell in love with a woman there and they had two children, Mike and his sister Patsy (Otmara Marrero). When Mike was nine and a half years old, they moved to Orlando, Florida. “Mike’s accent was pretty set at that point,” says Todd, who’s a Floridian himself. “That’s a place where you can go to get rid of it if you want to, or hold onto it.”
Patsy was only three when they moved, not talking much anyway, so she acquired a Florida accent, “which is not an accent at all unless you’re Southern.” On the other hand, Mike retained his. Psychologically, it was his way of staying connected to and emulating his late mother. “His mother hardly ever even learned English. She spoke Spanish her whole life until she took her own life,” Todd says. “Mike was far more connected to his mother than to his father.”
The deleted exchange in the series would have occurred in Episode 1, when Patsy drives Mike back home to his motel from the hospital after he was bitten by a shark. The few lines came at the end of the conversation you can watch below:
After she asks Mike if he’ll come to dinner, she says, “We came here together, right? How long has it been? Thirty years? So, why do you still have an accent?” Todd says. “He goes, ‘I don’t have an accent.’ She goes, ‘I don’t even understand what you’re saying right now.’ And that’s the entire exchange.”
That all stemmed from Arteta’s own experience, as he has a younger sister who intentionally got rid of her accent. “She would say to him, ‘Why do you still have an accent?’ And he would say, ‘I don’t have an accent.’ ”
The reason why Mike and Patsy’s conversation was cut short was just to remove exposition from the story. “It was more explanatory as opposed to moving the story forward,” Todd says.
Meanwhile, Mike and Patsy’s dad Sonny talks like he’s from New York because he is from New York. He does speak Spanish and probably lived in Venezuela for 12 years but wouldn’t speak Spanish to Mike. “If you were to see a prequel in their home, he tried to get everybody to speak English because that’s where they live now. It wasn’t jingoistic, but [just in the sense of] ‘we moved, we came here,’ ” Todd says.
And by the way, Sonny’s illegal smuggling operation? That all comes up the river on fishing boats from his connections in Venezuela.
Florida Man is now streaming on Netflix.
