by Ryan Bradley
[Actors are constantly faced with the need to
adjust their speech patterns. This is as
true for stage performers as it is for film and television actors. And it’s no different for actors raised with
a strong regional dialect than it is for
those who grew up with no recognizable accent: if you want to play a spectrum of
roles in plays by a range of playwrights, you have to learn to speak in a variety
of patterns.
[Most decent acting programs include speech
classes that focus on both helping student actors lose regional accents and
teaching them how to adopt accents and dialects for the stage or screen. There are also many dialect coaches who train
actors privately; some give classes and some hire on to productions to work
with casts on specific speech requirements.
If you skim the credits for a film or TV show or the program
acknowledgments for a play, you’ll often spot the listing for a dialect coach, especially
in productions of scripts by popular writers such as Tennessee Williams
(southern accents, including New Orleans), Sam Shepard (southwestern), Horton
Foote (Texas), William Inge (midwestern), or Athol Fugard (South African)—not to
mention the whole catalogue of British and Irish dramatists.
[Ryan Brady’s “Talk to Me” discusses speech
training for television, but the same parameters hold for all acting media,
including commercials. The article reproduced
below originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on 23 July
2017.]
* * * *
Peak TV has brought
in a flood of global acting talent. It’s the job of dialect coaches like Samara
Bay to help them all sound right.
Why should I trust you?” Dominic Cooper said to Samara
Bay, his dialect coach. “Trustya,” she replied, crushing the words together.
“Why should I trustya,” Cooper repeated. The actor and coach were standing in
the driveway of an old stone mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District, on break
from shooting a scene for the AMC series “Preacher.” Cooper, who was born and
raised in London, plays the show’s title character, a West Texas preacher
possessed by the offspring of an angel and a demon. He tried another line,
moving his mouth around the hard twang of the “am” in “vampire,” when the
vampire in question — his co-star Joseph Gilgun — interrupted their work.
“This is why yewr all fat, innit,” Gilgun joked,
stretching his Os, clipping his Is and waving a very large Smoothie King cup.
The crack was directed at Bay, the lone American among the three of them; Bay
is not fat at all, but slight and sprightly. Gilgun was born and raised in
northern England, but his character is from Ireland. He knew a lot of Irish
people growing up, he explained, so Bay often left him to his own devices.
The show’s other lead actor, Ruth Negga, was across the
lawn, practicing her lines in solitude. Negga was born in Ethiopia and raised
in Ireland. She was also playing a West Texan, but her accent was more flowing,
in part because she was relaxing her vowels — Bay described it as a legato to
Cooper’s staccato, appropriate for her world-weary character.
None of this was unusual: In the Peak TV era, a growing
supply of international acting talent has met the increasing demand for high-quality
television, and people like Bay were there to make it all work. Cooper
continued running his lines, pausing on his “yas” and “yurs,” drawing out the
edges of the deep-throated vowels, making sure he wrapped his mouth around the
words when he whispered them, which he’d need to do in the coming scene.
When it was time for a take, Bay followed her actors into
the mansion, slipping in her earbuds as she walked upstairs. She took a seat
just beyond the spare bedroom where Cooper and Gilgun had begun blocking their
scene. As the filming began, she leaned forward in her chair, cupping her ears
and staring into a bank of monitors. Occasionally she whispered to the script
supervisor about a word that might require rerecording, or “looping,” in
postproduction. When a problem was persistent, Bay quietly squeezed her way
past the crew to deliver a note directly to an actor — a bold entry onto the
director’s turf, but most of the time a welcome one.
Television viewers, exposed to hundreds of different
dialects every day, are increasingly aware of the tiniest differences in how
people speak, even as the number and degree of distinctions continue to expand.
There’s a wide and complex range of Minnesotan on “Fargo,” and Tatiana Maslany,
the Canadian star of “Orphan Black,” does a dizzying array of British, American
and even Eastern-European-inflected English accents. But the specificity isn’t
relegated to stars. Bay says she was recently dispatched to the set of another
TV show to work on a bit player’s Haitian Creole. She read the script and
character notes and went to YouTube, a miraculous repository (especially under
the “accent” tag), then crosschecked her YouTube finds with a Haitian-language
specialist at M.I.T.’s linguistics department, who narrowed them down and sent
her a few of his own field recordings. All for a few lines uttered briefly by a
one-off character in a network drama that has been canceled.
The right dialects can help actors create a sense of
authenticity and also quickly transmit a lot of information about their
characters. An actor could sound generally as if he were from the South and
pronounce “pen” like “pin.” Or he could also speak in African-American
Vernacular English (for instance, pronouncing “south” like “souf”) and sound as
if he were from Bankhead, a largely African-American Atlanta neighborhood. An
actor could speak with all these linguistic specificities, but with a
particular quicker and more clipped speech pattern that has to do with his own
upbringing, and then he’d sound like Earn Marks, the character portrayed by
Donald Glover in “Atlanta.” In other words: exactly like who that character is,
and no one else.
This kind of efficiency and precision is pleasing for
actors who take pride in their craft. It also sends a powerful signal to
viewers: This is a quality production. For most of Hollywood history, accents
were a character feature that could reasonably be ignored or drawn from a very
limited menu of “Southern” or British or vaguely Eastern-European dialects.
Charlton Heston didn’t bother to modulate his theatricalized Middle American
accent for the role of a Mexican drug-enforcement officer in the 1958 noir
classic “Touch of Evil.” Mickey Rooney’s 1961 turn as the bucktoothed Mr.
Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was straight out of a World War II-era
propaganda cartoon. It was not until Meryl Streep took home an Oscar for her
perfectly accented portrayal of the title character in the 1982 drama “Sophie’s
Choice” that audiences began to understand mastery of dialect as a sign of
artistic merit.
With the rise of prestige TV in the United States, the
demand for skilled performers from around the world — particularly well-trained
British performers — has increased, as has the desire to quickly communicate
quality with authentic-sounding accents. Actors have worked hard to deliver.
For his role in the HBO series “The Wire,” Idris Elba (raised in London by a
Sierra Leonean father and Ghanaian mother) spent long days with cops to improve
his Baltimore sound, which is generally regarded as one of the most subtly
accurate and astonishing dialect portrayals of all time. His fellow Brit Andrew
Lincoln (“The Walking Dead”) set up camp in Georgia for a few months before
filming began to immerse himself in the region’s manner of speaking. Gillian
Anderson, born in Chicago and raised in North London, is a rare case of an
actor who is naturally bi-accented. In interviews on British television, she
sounds British; in America, she sounds American. It might seem like an act, but
it’s her personal history, which is exactly what an accent is: an ever-changing
assemblage of sounds based on where we’ve lived, who we’ve known and our
perception of how we should sound based on our surroundings.
All of that said, much of Bay’s day-to-day work involves
helping actors learn to eliminate specificity from their speech. Casting
directors for most gigs, especially commercials, prefer something called
“General American,” a kind of nowhere accent found only on TV. That makes it
hard for some actors to get a foot in the door. Olivia J. Holloway, an actor
from a small town in South Carolina, told me about the paradox of speaking in
dialect at a time when consciousness of dialect is higher than ever in
Hollywood. She hired Bay after she realized she’d been put in a box with other
black women from the South; agents kept mentioning how well she’d work in a “12
Years a Slave”-type movie or “Queen Sugar”-type show. To break out, she
realized, she would need to learn how to sound as if she were from everywhere or
nowhere — but “if you’re from nowhere,” she told me, “you’re nobody. And who’s
going to believe in you then?”
Attention to dialectical detail
is a relatively recent development, not just in Hollywood but also in human
history. Sarah Thomason, a professor of linguistics at the University of
Michigan, told me a story, probably apocryphal, set around the turn of the 20th
century. A French linguist named Jules Gilliéron began charting regional
dialects on maps. Lovely and rich with detail, his earliest maps disappeared
over time because of the unstable ink he had used to draw them. Thomason says
she often began her classes with his story. It perfectly illustrates the
slipperiness of dialect, she says, and our inability to capture it as it exists
out there, in the wild, where it’s ever-changing, messy and human.
Of course, being human, we’ve tried to tame its wildness.
For a long time, especially in an English academy like Oxford or on the BBC,
students and broadcasters were taught a standardized, “proper” form of English
called Received Pronunciation that tidied up and rounded off diction like a
polished stone. Boris Johnson, David Attenborough and Emma Thompson all speak
variations of R.P., which is an idealized accent called a sociolect, not a
dialect — its entire purpose is to manage sounds, not the regional
idiosyncrasies in vocabulary and grammar that make dialects dialects.
American English has always been more unruly. In 1942,
Edith Skinner, a drama professor at Carnegie Mellon who coached Broadway actors
on the side, codified what were to her the proper-sounding forms of
pronunciation and diction in a book called “Speak With Distinction.” Deploying
a series of lessons and drills — practice phrases included “or what ought to be
taught her” and “a tutor who tooted the flute” — she taught a form of “Standard
American English” that doesn’t exist in a natural form anywhere. (Central
Indiana is often cited as being the source of a sort of Everyman
broadcasterese, but people there in fact speak with an identifiable Midland
American, for instance merging words like “cot” and “caught” to sound the
same.)
Skinner’s Standard tries to do away with many of the
dialectic peccadilloes that make American speech sound so distinctively
American. “It’s the choos and joos, mainly,” Bay explains. “And that linking
‘cha’ sound: didya, cantya, wudya, cudya.” Still, American Stage Speech, also
called Good Speech, can be useful, Bay says. If you are asked to play the
smartest person in the room, for example, or an angry person trying to hold it
together, Skinner’s prescription can help you sound rather tight and clipped
and proper.
The world of dialect coaches is small — there are only a
few dozen working in Hollywood and New York, and nearly all of them share a
single manager (a woman named Diane Kamp, who splits her time between the
Catskills and a ranch in Montana). There is no union; nearly everyone is
freelance, and a few are associated with a university’s theater department. As
a result, they are generalists. At 37, Bay is among the youngest. She has a few
repeat high-profile clients (she also worked with Negga on the 2016 film
“Loving”), and while she now mostly books steady, longer-term gigs like
“Preacher,” her reliable fallback is still charging clients for sessions on a sliding
scale. (Dialect coaches charge from as little as $100 to $400 or more an hour.)
Actors, or their agents or managers, find her because they either have booked a
role that demands a certain sound or aren’t booking anything because they don’t
sound a certain way. They are often hoping to achieve that general American
sound to break in or refashion their career for the Hollywood market.
Bay grew up in Santa Cruz, Calif. She started out wanting
to be an actor and was introduced to speech training in San Francisco, at the
American Conservatory Theater. She performed in regional theater and eventually
Off Broadway, in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Measure for
Measure.” When she was 23, she was accepted into the Shakespeare Lab, a
six-week program run by the Public Theater in New York. There, she studied
under a dialect coach named Kate Wilson, who helped her realize that as great
as acting was, she also loved, and was adept at, helping other actors work on
their accents. Before long she had individual actors wanting one-on-one
sessions.
After 11 years of coaching, Bay has found a consistent
approach. Within the first five minutes of the first session, she is likely to
tell you to stand up, put away your notebook and run through a set of physical
gestures tied to vowels. “Now, we’re going to be like 5-year-olds,” Bay might
say. And: “Remember how acting takes your whole body? So does speech.”
She will rub her belly, make her mouth a circle, and go
“ooo-ooo-ooo” and nod at you to do the same. This is “oo” as in “do,” but a lot
of her clients, Western Europeans and South Americans in particular, misplace
this sound into words like “good,” so that the vowels in “do good” sound overly
alike, suspiciously foreign: “Doo goood.” This is fine if you’re an Italian
chef auditioning for the Food Network and want to keep a bit of your accent
intact. It’s not so fine if you’re trying to play a California surfer or a car
dealer in Michigan or nearly anyone else, especially someone blandly
all-American. You have to drop the “oo” and find the sound in the middle of
your mouth.
Bay will show you important variations. She will change
her belly-rub into a light stomach punch, and ask you to relax your jaw and
feel the sound travel back from midtongue to get the “uh” in “cup.” The
understanding of that back-of-the-throat “uh” — a sound so common we throw it
in between phrases to give ourselves time to think — will open up the sonic
landscape of America to you. Suddenly, “cup” is not “cop” — it’s like “love”
and “does” and “what” and “none.”
Yes, Bay will note, these words aren’t all spelled with
an O or a U or any single letter or series of letters that would tell you they
should sound the same. Spelling is truly, entirely irrelevant to pronunciation.
Then, if you’re smart, you’ll pick up your notebook and write that down.
Bay holds most of her
sessions in the living area of the three-bedroom apartment she shares with her
husband (a writer), their 2-year-old son and their dog in the hills below the
Hollywood sign. Bay sits at her dinner table, next to her client, with both
their chairs pushed as far out as the small space allows, because they often
move their arms, sometimes standing, leaning, positioning their bodies to more
ably work through awkward sounds.
One day Bay was working with Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, a
British actor who had been cast in a low-budget indie film as a struggling
American porn star. He and Bay ran through a whole scene — a fantasy about fame
and money — without stopping, then again, slower, more nit-picking, with Bay
acting as a sort of referee, pausing on spots that didn’t quite sound right,
offering corrections.
“I’ve already got this spot of land picked out,”
Stewart-Jarrett said. “I’ve got my mahnsion — ”
“Maaan-shun,” she said, “get rid of that big open ‘ah’!,”
The right sound was more like the “aa” in “can”: ugly.
“How ugly?” he said.
“Very,” Bay replied. She moved to Stewart-Jarrett’s next
line, which contained an especially tricky phrase that included the words
“America and.” Bay says that much of her training involves not just the words
themselves but “the liaisons between words.” It is there in the gaps that we
make sounds suggesting restive thought or high emotion — and where an actor’s
native accent has a tendency to creep in.
“America and” was a liaison minefield: It contained three
different “a” sounds, two of them in rapid succession between the words,
separate but intimately connected not just in the same sentence but also within
the same phrase, thought and breath. Our mouths also have a lot of trouble
linking one vowel sound to another. Different English dialects deal with the
adjoining-vowel problem differently, Bay said. British English solves it with
an R — “Americar and.” American English is, again, closer to the back of the
throat, burying the second “a” into a glottal “ungh” — more like “America’and.”
Stewart-Jarrett tried this a few times, his eyebrows raised in a look
suggesting both mild surprise and deep concentration. “Sorry,” he said, moving
on. “I got a little carried away. Carried? Cay-ree-d?”
“It’s a big open ‘care,’ like ‘air’ or ‘Eric,’” Bay said.
“The R influences the vowel sound. It’s not exactly right, but a bigger
proportion of the country says it that way, says it technically wrong, so that
it’s not really wrong anymore.”
Afterward, outside Bay’s apartment, Stewart-Jarrett and I
were walking to our cars when he stopped me. “It’s a bit weird,” he said,
“letting someone else into this process. A bit naked-feeling.” For the entire
session he’d been speaking with an American accent. Now his natural British
accent sounded jarring, like a put-on. He sounded like an actor.
[Many acting schools used to teach a “standard
American stage dialect,” based on upper-class New England speech. (Think Katharine Hepburn—though she came by her
accent naturally.) That practice became
obsolete in the 1950s because directors, playwrights, and audiences began to
demand more natural-sounding speech from the stage—film acting more quickly
began to emulate ordinary street speech and television never really copped into
the conceit of a mannered way of talking—spurred by the rising popularity of
Lee Strasberg’s Method acting as taught at the Actors Studio and practiced on
the stage and screen by stars like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Anne Bancroft,
Maureen Stapleton, Sidney Poitier, and Montgomery Clift.
[When I started classes at the American
Academy of Dramatic Arts in the mid-1970s, I was nonplussed to discover that
the school was still teaching this form of stage speech. Not only did no one (outside of New England) speak
that way in real life, but no one spoke that way on stage anymore—not even, to
my observation, in revivals of plays from the 1930s and ’40s. (We were actually taught to say TYEWS-dih and DYOOK for “Tuesday” and “duke.” Who talks
like that?) There’s a big difference,
when it comes to gaining employment as a working actor, between being trained
to speak clearly and distinctly while projecting to the rear balcony (miking
wasn’t common in the ’70s) and sounding like a Boston Brahmin. I only lasted at AADA for one semester.
[While I was there, however, I attended
several appearances by former Academy students—they were required events—such as
Robert Redford and Gena Rowlands. One of
these was an actress then appearing on Broadway in a musical hit—she’s now
deceased, but I won’t reveal her name here—who hailed from the American
South. I don’t recall much about her
presentation—she wasn’t very interesting or informative—but I do remember that
she declared, in her conspicuous southern accent, that she never ridded herself
of her native speech pattern. She sort
of giggled, like the stage caricature of
a flibbertigibbet, that she was never able to put her natural accent aside, so
she didn’t see the point of trying. Directors
would just have to take her as she was, she insisted.
[Aside from being amused at the actress’s flying
in the face of the Academy’s avowed position on speech training for the stage—I
didn’t really care about defying the school by this time in my brief tenure at
the American Academy—I was aghast that a working stage actress would
essentially refuse to remove an obstacle to employment this way. It didn’t matter if this actress spoke in her
native accent off stage or even on stage in roles where speech wasn’t an
issue. But why so cavalierly deny
herself the opportunities to work in productions where a southern accent was
inappropriate? Why limit her castabiliy
so casually? Even though the actress and
I were about the same age, I was just embarking on a hoped-for career as an
actor, and I was determined to be as acceptable for as many types of roles as I
could manage, not limit myself at the get-go.
I couldn’t do anything about my looks or my stature—but my speech was
something I could learn to control. I
may not have felt I had to talk like Katharine Hepburn, but I could learn to manipulate
my speech pattern the same way I was trying to learn to control my body with dance
and mime training. I just didn’t
understand this Academy grad’s attitude.
[Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los
Angeles. He last wrote for the Times Magazine about the Hollywood producer Jason
Blum.]
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