Have you ever seen an interview with Mia Goth, Daniel Day-Lewis, or Toni Collette and thought, Wait, that’s what they really sound like? Becoming a top-tier performer means diving completely into character work, which can involve dropping your natural speech patterns for a different dialect. Here are a few tried-and-tested strategies for making the lingual switch.
Understand the role—and your own accent.
First things first: Ask yourself why you want to mask your accent as an actor. In some cases, it can make sense for your career. If you’re trying to break into a major market like L.A. or New York but find yourself getting typecast due to your specific dialect, learning to disguise your accent can’t hurt.
That said, it isn’t a requirement for success. Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars found fame because of their distinctive delivery, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sean Connery.
You generally only need to change your accent if a particular role calls for it. Let’s say you speak with an Irish brogue. If you’re playing a character who lives in New York, you don’t necessarily need to change anything; plenty of Irish people live in the Big Apple! But if you’re portraying someone who was born and raised in Manhattan, then it’s all about serving the character.
Once you understand the why, focus on the what. Pay attention to your own accent; notice your speech patterns, rhythm, pronunciation, and pitch. Knowing these specifics will make it easier to understand exactly what you’re trying to get rid of, as well as what you’ll need to add to the accent you’re trying to learn.
Listen first.
Dive into clips of people speaking in the accent you want to master. Take note of all the differences between that dialect and yours, down to the smallest detail. Do you use a rhotic dialect—in which you pronounce the “R” in a word like “car”—or non-rhotic, in which “car” would become “cah”? Are your diphthongs (two vowel sounds combined into one syllable) short or elongated, e.g., “cat” vs. “cay-ut”? Use resources like the International Dialects of English Archives to find examples, and watch films featuring actors from the region you’re interested in. Immersing yourself in the accent will help create muscle memory; think of it like training your ear to learn a new tune.
The Ultimate Guide to Doing Accents as an Actor “Honestly, just [from] living in America…it does feel quite instinctual,” says Tamil Australian actor Geraldine Viswanathan. She had to adopt an American dialect for roles in projects like Simon Rich’s “Miracle Workers” and Ethan Cohn’s “Drive-Away Dolls.” “I don’t feel like I have a huge technique other than, I guess, that I’ve practiced for so long and I spend so much of my time doing an American accent.”
Get physical.
Suppressing your accent and picking up another isn’t just about the sounds—it will feel different in your mouth. As you start to practice out loud, pay attention to the way your tongue, face, and lips move. For example, “you’ll need to drop your jaw about twice as much as when you’re doing a General American accent,” says actor and dialect coach Anna Frankl-Duval, comparing her own British accent to typical U.S. pronunciations.
Try out diction exercises like tongue twisters and consonant repetition, both in your native accent and in the one you’re performing. Note the physical differences; what do you need to stop doing, and what do you need to start doing?
Practice, practice, practice.
Learning the how is just the start; it should eventually feel as natural to speak in the dialect as it does your own. “If you’re thinking about the accent [while you’re acting], you’re dead,” says dialect coach Paul Meier. “It’s got to be habitual and instinctive by the point [that] you commit to a performance. It’s a daily practice.”
Select a monologue that you know by heart, then recite it repeatedly in your new accent until the dialect feels like it’s coming out of your mouth effortlessly.
“Find what it takes to not think anymore about the accent. Just do the lines,” Meier advises. “By that point, if you can switch from speech to speech, from monologue to monologue, and stay in the accent, then you know that on a prepared text you’ve been rehearsing and you’ve been coached in, you’re more likely to be able to stay in it and not think about it once you are in performance.”
