Dialect Coaching Quotes

I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.

I never worked with a dialogue coach before, but I'd hate it if an American did a British accent and didn't do it well. It would be insulting.

I actually had a cockney accent before I went to drama school. It's softened up a bit.

The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.

I took speech training. I took a few voice lessons in college.

I often have scripts sent to me with allegedly Scottish characters where I end up telling them, 'You're going to have to rethink this whole thing!'

I could do an American accent, if I were immersed in the accent, meaning if I were living back in Los Angeles and rehearsing and auditioning the whole time.

When I arrived in L.A., I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult, so I had six months working with a dialect coach, and it's become a habit.

I've never had my own accent in a film. It's something I schedule into my preparation. That's one of my favorite things, hearing all the voices.

If I'm going to be honest with you, when I trained at school, I feel like I was training to be a chameleon. I want to be that versatile actor who can do anything - that's why you learn fifty different dialects, you do Shakespeare, you do commedia, you do it all so that if any job comes your way, you should be able to do it.

Before 'Scandal,' I was actually cast in two other pilots. Both went to series, but I was fired and recast. For both, it was because they wanted me to sound more 'girlfriend,' more like 'hood,' more 'urban.'

When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.

To be honest, it's easier for me to speak with an American accent.

I have a dialogue coach who helps me out with some of the more tricky Chicago vowel sounds.

I know that people who have been to RADA and LAMDA can smash accents and do Shakespeare: all those things that I never really trained in.

One of the challenges obviously with doing an accent from a time period early in history is that there aren't recordings. You would never really get the opportunity to hear exactly what you were shooting for.

'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws.

When you act, you want to emote and think in that language. I don't enjoy the process of doing a film in a language I am not good with.

I have worked really hard to reach where I am - I worked hard on my Hindi and diction because I am a Parsi and Hindi is not my strong point, and I've also learnt Tamil and Telugu because I want to get my lines right. I want to be known as a performer.

You can't do Shakespeare with a Southern accent, honey.

I played a Siamese girl from Thailand. I played an Arabian girl. I did a lot of American Indians. I never, ever was able to do a part without assuming some kind of accent.

I worked with an amazing dialect coach named Jill McCullough. We did Skype sessions while I was shooting "No Escape" in Thailand, actually. So three times a week I would have long, two-hour sessions with her just working on the nuance of the accent, which I had had a huge background in because I went to drama school in England for four years.

It was hard to do 'Vikings.' It was hard to do 'Copper.' Part of that was, like, there's dialect and other things.

When I first came to the States, I thought I had a perfect American accent, and then I was abruptly becoming aware that it wasn't. So I did have to work on it a little bit, but I was hesitant working on it because I thought it was good.

By county, there's like 14 different accents in Mississippi alone. And now, present day, a Mississippi accent is different than in 1963. So we had a dialect coach, which is like going to visit France and having to translate all your emotions into French, and French isn't your first language. I had to go through that filter, so it was interesting.