Cracking the accent code
Dialect coach Natalie Grady explains how she uses her love of accents to help actors perfect their voice for a new role, revealing the keys to learning a new accent and why practice makes perfect.
Training to become an actor, Natalie Grady always had an ear for an accent. But it was when she took voice classes, learned the International Phonetic Alphabet and discovered a “secret code” for picking up new dialects that she started on the path to becoming an accent coach.
Since then, Grady has worked with actors behind the scenes on titles including One Day, Boat Story, The Lazarus Project, The Gallows Pole and upcoming BBC drama Virdee.
“A lot of actors in drama school see the phonetics classes as the boring bit. But something struck me about it. I saw it as a secret code,” she tells DQ. “I’ve always been a mimic, I had always been quite good with accents, so then to go to drama school and learn that there was a code to this was just fascinating.”
Though becoming an accent coach seemed “silly” at the time after spending three years at drama school, training to be an actor herself gave Grady an insight into an actor’s preparation process – and understanding that has become a key element of her work with them.
“People forget how nervous actors get, even the very experienced and, dare I say, the famous ones,” she says. “It feels to me that we forget that they’re human, and learning an accent for the first time can be quite exposing. What I’ve learned is I have to create a space where they can play, where they can feel safe with me to get it wrong. And I just feel that, sometimes, probably having that actor background creates an understanding and a rapport that makes most actors I work with feel at ease. We’re here to kind of fail and get it wrong. We’ll get there in the end.”
Working with actors on set or remotely, the dialect coach can now be added to the tools an actor can use to build a character. But an accent doesn’t just relate to where they come from or where they live.
“It’s not just about going, ‘Oh, this character is from Bolton and therefore sounds like this.’ There might be so many other facets to do with that character,” Grady explains. “Not everybody in Bolton sounds exactly the same. So then you’re helping with that process of going, ‘Well, when were they born? What’s the background? Did they move away at any point?’”
On crime drama Virdee, she partnered with lead actor Staz Nair to hone his Bradfordian accent, while one of Grady’s most high-profile jobs was developing Ambika Mod’s Yorkshire tone for the star’s role as Emma in Netflix series One Day. Brought on board by production company Drama Republic at an early stage, Grady began working with Mod several months before filming was due to begin.
“Actors need to be able to be flawless in the accent so they can be on set focusing on acting and not having to think about an accent. Only by spending a lot of time early on can you get an actor to that stage, and that’s what Ambika and I did – worked together a lot, probably three times a week, before shooting began,” Grady says. “Then I’d go to all the readthroughs in London and, during shooting, we’d meet on Zoom once a week. She also had me on hand every day with recordings. There was constant support for her.”
The character of Emma is a perfect example of how Grady also has to think about how a character’s accent might have evolved during their life. For example, One Day’s Emma was born in Leeds but attended university in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, and then moved to London. “So why would she have the same Leeds accent as someone that lived in Leeds, stayed in Leeds and never moved out of Leeds? Maybe some people don’t lose their accent at all,” she says. “But with Emma, certainly it seemed to me that it was important to slightly lessen her accent the longer she stayed in London.
“The story spans 20-odd years, so as she gets older, maybe her voice just changes. All of our voices change as we get older. I don’t know if anyone will notice that [in the show], but Ambika and I know.”
Most of the time, Grady is brought on to a project by the production company. But in some cases, actors themselves reach out. One star she regularly works with is Maxine Peake, who she supported on Anne, a drama inspired by the life of campaigner Anne Williams and the aftermath of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989.
When an actor is playing a real person, “that’s a different challenge in itself, although it’s helpful sometimes because there’s the ability to talk to the real person or listen to what they sound like,” Grady notes.
Coincidentally, a lot of the accents Grady – who hails from Lancashire – has had to work on have been from Yorkshire, from All Creatures Great & Small to The Gallows Pole. But such is the range of accents across the English county that she had to start asking questions about where exactly in Yorkshire the characters were from, such as Leeds, and what kind of accent the producers and directors wanted.
“Certainly with One Day, we didn’t want anything too strong,” she says. “I went on to a [BBC] show called Boat Story with Daisy Haggard and I needed to check this because it was set in a fictional Yorkshire. I checked in with [producer] Two Brothers Pictures and I said, ‘What do you want here? Are we talking about East Riding or are we talking North Yorkshire?’ They just said, ‘As Yorkshire as you can make her,’ and that’s where we went with Daisy.”
But what is the secret code to learning a new accent? Grady breaks it down into three components: identifying the sound of vowels (is there an ‘r’ sound in ‘bath’?), the sound of consonants (is there a stress on certain letters?) and the musicality of an accent (is there an inflexion at the end of a sentence?).
“Each actor will have their own individual way of working and understanding,” she says. “Then if I am on a set and I’m coaching eight different actors, I’ve got to remember, ‘Oh, he likes being reminded of that vowel by saying, ‘Drop your chin,’ or this actress likes me saying it to her so she can repeat it.’”
As far as her own prep is concerned, it involves “a lot of listening” and taking advantage of the endless material available on YouTube that allows her to hear different accents. But while it’s one thing to understand an accent herself, it’s another to be able to teach it to someone else.
“So I’m consistently breaking it down, and it’s hard. You can drive yourself mad if there’s one specific sound you’re not quite getting, but then you’ve just got to hope, as you get into the work with the actor, that they’ve done a bit of their own prep as well and you’re finding that work together.
“I’m there because I can hear when it’s right or wrong. I’ve trained my ear over the years to really be able to hear and understand accents, and that’s vital because the actor’s relying that I’ve got the ear to know when it’s right or wrong and then the skill to be able to correct it. Then also have the skill while correcting it do it in a way that isn’t going to ruin their confidence.”
Some actors decide to play a character with an accent even if one wasn’t specified for the part. “I once worked on a show called The Lazarus Project, with an actor, Tom Burke, who decided to make his character have a regional accent,” she says. “It wasn’t written in the script. He just thought it was an interesting character choice. So that’s different again. That’s something he’s not been asked to do. That was him as an actor going, ‘Oh I want to make this choice.’”
Like most areas of making a television series, Grady could use more time to work with actors before they step on set. “The more time I get, the easier it is,” she says. “The more time you get prior to shooting, the fewer problems there are going to be on the day of shooting because the actor will feel comfortable and ready to just play the role without having to keep second-guessing the action.”
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Another challenge is finding a place for herself on set, one where she is able to understand the best time to give notes to an actor between takes.
“You’ve got so many pages of script to shoot in a day; we are constantly up against it on set, and knowing where you fit into that role can sometimes be tricky because you’re aware that an actor is maybe desperate for you to come in and help, but now might not be the time because we’re losing the light and we just need to get this shot,” Grady notes. “So there isn’t time for me to go and chat to the actor about this scene for 10 minutes. Sometimes gauging that can be tricky.”
Her hope moving forward is that there is greater understanding of the fact that accents shouldn’t just be added to a character brief days before shooting is due to begin.
“It is a process, and that is something you do early on,” she says. “Gone are the days of the repertory theatre where an accent was something you just decided last minute to shove on at the end. That is where sometimes people can have a misconception of the role.”
tagged in: Boat Story, Natalie Grady, One Day, Virdee