Acting With An Accent – Tips for the Actor

Mimicking is a great tool for picking up any accent. Don’t be afraid of mimicking, it is how we all learn to speak in the first place. We pick up our own accent from our parents, our surroundings. Friends may take a year off to travel in America and come back with a yankee twang, or perhaps take a gap year backpacking in Australia and return with their voice going up at the end of every sentence. Its human nature to mimic, so use it!

If I have an audition in another accent, I will immerse myself in You Tube and find documentaries or news reports from that area. I will listen to real people talking in that dialect and parrot style I will copy them. I concentrate on how it sounds for me to talk like that, the pace, the inflections, how my mouth is moving.

Copy, copy copy! Your voice and face need to feel comfortable making these sounds. I do all of this before I even begin to tackle the script.

The Rainbow Passage is a great tool to help you with any accent. You need to find someone who speaks the accent you are trying to master. Get them to read aloud the Rainbow Passage and record it. This is your gold mine!

The Rainbow Passage contains all the English phonemes, all the different sounds of English. If you have a recording of someone reading this in the accent you need to act in, listen to it over and over again and then copy what you hear.

Click to read the Rainbow Passage

Practice makes perfect and it is vitally important you take time to practice speaking in your new dialect. You might get some funny looks but try talking in that accent for a few hours. Out and about at the supermarket, or down the pub.

I like to read aloud in the accent. I find a book, any book (not the script) and read it aloud in the accent. I take my time with tricky words and phrases, and repeat them if I slip up the first time. I spend hours reading aloud in the accent until it is becoming second nature.

Once you are feeling comfortable with the accent, you need to really start the character work. You need to know the character inside and out for an accent to sound natural. So often you hear actors adopting an accent and although they are doing the accent accurately it just somehow doesn’t sound like the voice belongs to them. They are not ‘inhabiting the voice.’

Know exactly where your character comes from, almost down the the street. Learn about the weather of that area, the slang they use Explore how your character would dress, the way they walk. All of this will add to your confidence in the character and also to your comfort with the accent.

One of the most important things with accents and dialects is the musicality of the voice. Concentrate on musicality, rhythm, pitch, pace and physicality.

Mastering an accent is often so much more than learning how to say the word ‘laugh’ or ‘grass’

Think of it as learning a dialect rather than learning an accent.

Often you will find massive clues to mastering an accent when you start to look at the unique words and grammar of a particular region, and how they fit into everyday use.

When you are researching make your first stop the real thing.

Don’t head to You Tube and listen to an accent coach teaching you how to do the accent often they will teach a mild or ‘watered down’ version of the accent (often they are hilariously bad)!)

Look at real people speaking in this accent, with some research you will easily find the right voice on the internet. Practice first with strong accents then you work on making them understood to an audience, you do the watering down yourself.

Remember that your job is an actor. You are all about character. Spend time on the accent and dialect, but back this up with all of your character work.

Think about your character’s class, age, outlook on life, their parents, their education. All of this will have shaped how your character speaks.

Don’t get scared and concentrate all your energy on the accent, do your homework on the character – that is the most important thing.

Working on an accent will be using your whole instrument in a new way. You must make sure that you spend extra time doing your vocal warm ups when you are speaking and acting in another dialect, make sure your voice is supple and free or you could do yourself more damage than good.

Cockiness and overconfidence can be an actors downfall.

Be extra truthful on your CV or resume when it comes to accents. If you get called in for a casting in an accent that is on your CV the casting director is expecting you to be great at it. They will not be happy if you have barely a grasp on the fundamentals, chances are you will completely tarnish your relationship with them for future castings.

You don’t have to know everything. Don’t fall into the trap of being a ‘jack of all trades and a master of none.’