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Why Are Irish Actors So Good at Accents?
Dialect coaches share their theories.
Believably inhabiting a new accent largely boils down to embracing a new communication style, and this takes work: breaking it down in terms of vocal posture, placement, and prosody and practicing sound lists over and over. That doesn’t happen much where I live.” Gerry Grennell, a coach who hails from Dublin, says that if you’re traveling by bus through Ireland and sit by a stranger, “it is not unusual to step off with their entire life story.” While many top drama programs in the U.S. also have courses dedicated to dialect training, Lilja believes schools in Dublin and the U.K. — where many Irish actors might move in pursuit of more jobs and vaster exposure — tend to emphasize teaching different dialects simply because “that’s what the market is.” William Conacher, who worked with Murphy on Oppenheimer and with Mescal on the upcoming period drama History of Sound, in which Mescal plays a rural Kentuckian, says that in Ireland and the U.K., “you’ve got definite cultural centers so people tend to train in those places.
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