The audition comes in for a teenage leprechaun who wants to fit in at a high school for magical creatures. He sounds young, subdued, and has an Irish accent. This isn’t your typical leprechaun. Are you confident that you can capture the youth, the mental anguish and the humanity of this teenager without making him sound like a Lucky Charms commercial?
You don’t need to be an expert in world dialects to craft a dynamic and compelling character from another country. All you have to do is get the job and be confident in your ability to give a consistent performance on the day of your session. Once you’ve got a solid accent under your belt, you’ve opened yourself up to any audition that calls for it, and being twice as cast-able.
You can try to imitate something you’ve heard by doing, do an impression of someone you know with that accent, but accents aren’t impressions, and New York isn’t full of 20 Million Christopher Walken’s and Joe Pesci’s. Accents need to be adaptable to the situations the script calls for. And for the character to be authentic, you need to be able to steer the accent through a range of emotions, intentions, and actions. If you’re struggling to craft a dynamic and believable performance with an accent, talk to a dialect coach.
A good dialect coach can teach you an accent in thirty minutes. It’s a lot like learning the alphabet. But learning sounds isn’t the hard part. The same way one lesson with a personal trainer showing you how to work out won’t put you in the best shape of your life, you won’t master an accent in a day. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get regular training, just learn and practice. We hear accents as sound, but they’re also muscular, and getting your mouth in shape takes exercise. accent makes performing effortless.
The performance is where many people’s accents fall flat. Actors can get so distracted by pronunciation that their character disappears. Anything that makes the accent the focus of a performance takes an audience out of a scene. Beyond mouth shapes and vowel sounds, accents have history and culture and music woven into them that can all be researched and performed. Having a coach with the knowledge and the ear, and the technical understanding, of ends up making your performance more authentic.
If all we end up hearing is a word pronounced a way we’ve never heard it before, we might laugh, but the integrity of the character is lost.
But not everyone who goes to a dialect coach is trying to learn a foreign accent. Generally if someone can teach you to speak with an accent, they can usually teach you to speak without one (or more realistically, to speak like a native since every voice has some kind of accent). “Accent reduction,” as experts refer to it, is essentially the same process as learning an accent and is useful for anyone trying to achieve a ‘neutral’ or non-regional speech. In public speaking, clinical and industrial narration, news broadcasting, strong regionalisms can get in the way of clear communication. Learning what adjustments to make in your speech is quick, easy and could be the missing element in your auditions that gets you to book more.
When it comes to accents and dialects, versatility is the name of the game. Being able to toggle between speech patterns allows you to play characters with totally different lives, and the right coach can help you turn a crude caricature into a vivid character study.
I always tell people you can hear a person’s life story in their voice. So changing the voice can change the whole story.
If you’re interested in doing dialect coaching through SAV, check out our in-house expert Adam Michael Rose!
