Carl! What do you think?

He's the best! He was a genius.

I'm so flattered.

Someone is always watching.

Hi, I'm Erik Singer.

(bell dings)

[Narrator] Erik is still spending

his days being a dialect coach

for film and television.

And I'm back!

Now with more beard.

So today we're gonna talk about

more accent performances in movies,

and especially how much it can contribute

to the overall telling of the story.

Pacific Northwest Accent.

Tonya Harding, Margot Robbie, I, Tonya.

I mean, come on.

How am I the poor sport in all of this?

Margot Robbie is really a

fantastic accent performer. What, do you like, like me?

She captured something really, really great

about Tonya Harding's actual voice here.

You pulled it off so beautifully.

Oh, thank you.

I knew I was gonna do it.

There's not a lot that's really distinctive about

Pacific Northwest accents.

I know.

One thing we do find there is a cot-caught merger,

where the vowel sounds in c-o-t and c-a-u-g-h-t

sound the same.

Can I talk to you for a second?

Talk, talk, talk to you for a second?

They're distinct in my accent,

and a lot of other American accents, cot and caught.

I don't give a shit.

But we can hear those vowel sounds in cot and caught words

sounding the same here.

Saying I'm sorry's not talking back.

Talk, talking back.

And here.

God, you don't like the way I dress, or talk,

God, God, talk, talk.

Another thing I find really impressive vocally

about this performance is the way the voice changes

as the character gets older.

You do dumb things when you're young.

Your vocal folds get stiffer as you age.

And one of the things that that does is

lower the fundamental pitch and timbre.

Everything went to shit.

Here's Tonya at 16.

We had plenty of money before.

I have, you know, I have a fur coat.

Here she is at 22.

My skating career's over and I have no savings.

And here she is at 45.

I never apologize for growing up poor or being a red neck,

which is what I am.

Chilean accent.

Giancarlo Esposito, Better Call Saul.

Hello, and welcome to the Los Pollos Hermanos family.

My name is Gustavo, but you can call me Gus.

The character is from Chile originally,

but he moved to Mexico as a young man.

Mexico. And I'm gonna guess

that that's where he learned English.

I apologize for being so transparent.

Because his English is actually more Mexican accented here

than it is Chilean accented. Correct.

Listen to the word customer.

We serve our customers-- A Chilean accent would be

more likely to have that

as a very open ah vowel, customer,

whereas he goes with a much more

typically Mexican version of that in English,

which is a rounded oh, customer.

Customer, customer service.

And I think that's entirely appropriate,

and is a really fine detail for the character.

Well, perhaps in the future,

you will consider working for me.

Okay, indulge me.

Take your hand, put it right in front of your lips,

and say the word take.

It will not be necessary.

Take.

Did you feel a little puff of air?

No. (laughs)

That's because we aspirate that sound.

A lot of other languages don't do that.

Spanish doesn't do it. And?

So usually, when you get

a Spanish speaker speaking English, they'll say, take.

He's doing that here.

We take, we take, take pride in everything that we do.

Elsewhere in the clip, he has a little bit of aspiration,

and of course, the character ends up mastering that feature

of American English.

Please, please.

I'm happy to do it. Which, again,

I think is so cool, 'cause it's like

he's working on it here.

It's just not all the way in place.

Someone is always watching.

Russian accent.

Jennifer Lawrence, Red Sparrow.

All I ever wanted to was to be a dancer.

Ever since I was a small child.

There's something that doesn't fully cohere here.

The logic of the accent is missing.

It was never my intention.

I wanna focus on the oral posture,

because I think Jennifer Lawrence's own oral posture,

we can see, we can hear that through this.

I've never done a foreign accent before,

so that was a first for me.

He told me about what happened to the park

after I established trust.

The back of her tongue is very loose and soft.

My, are we going to become friends?

And the front of her tongue is a little bunched

and kind of doing the work.

He told me about what happened to the park.

I think if she flipped that equation

so that the back of the tongue is bunched and stiff

and sort of anchored. Take your time.

And the front of the tongue spread out

a little bit like that and took over some of the movement.

Can I have a drink.

I think she would've had a foundational logic

that would've stitched the sounds together

and made it more organic and flowing.

I have done everything you've asked of me.

Fake Russian accent.

Alison Brie, Glow.

(crowd booing) You love to hate me!

Russia is supreme world leader!

So, what's great about this, is it's a comedy accent

that knows, in the framework of the story,

that it's a comedy accent.

(chuckles) Okay.

It's based on this, of course.

If I choose to go for the American title,

of course I will win it.

But I think Alison Brie just turns up the notch

even one level more.

No one can defeat Zoya!

I love the way she has that palatalized vowel sound

in capitalism. Capitalism!

Kind of like John Malkovich had in call, in Rounders,

which we talked about way back in episode one.

(chips rattle) I call.

Missouri Ozarks accent.

Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

I asked the judge not to give her bail

on account of her previous marijuana violations

and the judge said, Sure.

Sam Rockwell worked from a single real-life model

for this accent, a police chief, I think,

in a town in Southern Missouri.

It was a cool experience,

but I couldn't believe that it was happening.

I think it really shows.

It's such specific and detailed work.

I'm sure of that.

Let's just pull out two specific vowel sounds.

One of them is what we can call the goat vowel,

and the other is the mouth vowel.

We hear the first one in the word no here.

No!

And that mouth vowel

in station house. Station house.

Both of these sounds are diphthongs,

they glide from one sound to the other.

No! And they're really

wide diphthongs, wider than in my accent, for instance.

So instead of oh in no,

we get a starting point that's lower in the mouth.

Uh, oh.

No, no!

A similar thing happens with the ow sound in house.

House, house, station house.

Instead of a relatively constrained ow,

we get ow. House, house.

I love it when patterns show up like that.

No!

Texas accent.

Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water.

They're trying to raise a certain amount,

that's my guess.

It's gonna take a few banks to get there.

Pop quiz, what do Texas accents

and South Asian accents have in common?

Oh, well, uh...

Give up? Help me understand that.

The answer is retroflexion,

or the tongue tip curling back.

Does, does, does require, I think,

greater concentration.

You can hear that retroflex, very tongue-tippy d sound

here in How did you do it?

How did you do it?

It's making contact there, duh, duh.

Do it, do it. Does, does.

Note to linguists, it's not actually

a retroflex consonant here.

It's postalveolar, but the tongue tip is curling back

in that direction.

Now, we're getting somewhere.

That inflection too is just pure West Texas.

Oh, that was a good one.

You'll get the hang of this yet.

Vietnamese accent.

Hong Chau, Downsizing.

They do for me, I pay them good.

No problem, I go.

So, some people thought this accent

was an offensive stereotype.

Feel so, so guilty.

The actress is actually from a Vietnamese background.

This was a very personal role for me.

My parents were Vietnamese refugees.

And she based this on real people that she knew,

relatives and people she grew up around.

Nice people.

Vietnamese has some of my favorite

consonant sounds in all languages.

Thank you.

They're called voice implosives,

and they're these, buh, duh, tuh sounds,

where the larynx actually moves down on the consonant sound.

You can hear that here in big box.

You go find the big box, big box.

If you have a pronounced Vietnamese accent,

that way of forming those consonant sounds

will find its way into your English.

Me? So, that's right.

So happy!

American accent.

Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out.

They were asking me about the African American

experience maybe you could take this one.

This is just so good there's nothing

not to like in this accent,

I think it's a great performance.

I agree. Yeah.

Let's just focus on one individual word.

Listen to the way he pronounces the word good here.

You good, you good.

And let's compare this to the same vowel sound

in this episode of Black Mirror in Kaluuya's

own native accent.

Good, good.

You good.

So the vowel sound itself was a little different,

the arch of the tongue is in a different place in the mouth

it's further back the lips are in a different shape.

But another thing that's really neat

is the way he leans in to the vowel.

How.

American accents generally tend to be

a little more vowel centric,

the vowel length is kind of flexible.

I see that.

As opposed to the more kind of

staccato, slightly less vowel centric rhythm

of Kaluuya's native accent,

and most British-English accents generally.

It's perfect, thanks.

Texas accent.

Michael Caine, On Deadly Ground.

So tell me more about the file,

what exactly did we lose.

That just sounds like Michael Caine to me.

I don't need that kind of problem right now.

I don't hear any evidence of an attempt

at an accent, which is an interesting choice.

I don't give a shit.

There is an interesting overlap

between a Cockney accent and a Texas accent

which is in that mouth vowel.

For both accents it starts from an ah

kind of higher place and goes ow.

You can hear that in the word now.

Now you know why I love this woman.

It's Michael Caine's own vowel

but it works for Texas.

Now, now, now you know.

But one accidentally overlapping vowel sound

does not an accent make.

Get out of here!

Kentucky accent.

Andrew Lincoln, The Walking Dead.

We've made a lot of noise,

you wanna wrap this up quick.

This is such a fantastic accent.

Me, me.

And so much is right.

You mean me?

So I'm gonna be picky.

No!

There's a pretty universal southern accent future

which I called the Pin-Pen Merger,

where we have the words pin and pen

or other similar words

come to sound the same or almost the same,

pin and pen.

And he actually does not have that going on

and one word here, which is the word ten,

which should sound more like tin.

Give me ten seconds, ten seconds.

But it's really great work overall.

Grateful.

Italian accent.

Penelope Cruz, The Assassination of Gianni Versace.

As you know, my brother,

who I love very much,

is dead.

As a non-native speaker,

to do a different accent in a second language,

that's hard.

How so?

She's really lowered her register,

it's so much lower in this performance

than in her natural voice.

I'm playing Donatella and everybody knows

the way she speaks, and it's a very,

it's a very unique very particular way of speaking.

Every room or every indiscretion.

Feels very very hard for me.

Very hard for me, for my family, for my children.

Just the killer, yes, but they're just the victim too.

She's really effectively shifted over her

stress and inflection from a Spanish pattern

to an Italian one.

Listen to this here.

He was a creator.

He was a collector.

He was a genius.

Da da da-da-da,

da da da-da-da-da,

da da da-da-da.

As opposed to this.

It was almost like she was also their psychologist.

Da da da-da-da-da.

Their psychologist.

Da da da-da-da-da.

I'm worried Gianni.

Our shoes were the future once.

Gianni was more than a brother you know,

we were always together.

Hey Australia.

It's been noted that we haven't given you a lot of love,

we haven't done any Aussie accents before,

so here are a few.

Australian accent, Dev Patel, Lion.

Do you have any idea

what it's like knowing my real brother

and mother spent every day of their lives

looking for me?

He has some very broad versions of the price vowel,

you can hear in words like like.

What it's like.

And lives. Lives.

And at the same time he does not have

a very pronounced Australian version of the a

diphthong in face, you can hear that in name.

Name, name.

And pain.

Pain, pain.

And it's actually very narrow,

the diphthong doesn't move very far.

And I'm not sure you can find that narrow name

and that broad price in the same Australian accent.

It makes me sick.

But the accent is right in a lot of particulars,

it is completely integrated and owned,

he is acting through it.

And ultimately that is the most important thing.

I bet you never imagined it being this hard.

Australian accent.

Kate McKinnon, Rough Night.

You don't have a calzone?

She does something really skillful and on point.

I'll take it.

With those o goat diphthongs,

in don't. Don't.

And calzone. Calzone.

They're really interesting in Australian english.

They have a totally different movement, oh.

Do you have swiss chard?

And there's a little pharyngeal squeeze,

a squeeze in the throat, oh, oh.

She's actually got that,

that's a really subtle thing.

Is this a practical joke?

Not everything is quite that good.

I'm good, I'm really good.

There's an r there that shouldn't be there

at the end of the word where in where are we.

Where are we?

It might be there if you ran the words straight through

but she takes a pause afterwards

so there shouldn't be an r there in where.

Where, where are we.

It's also very careful,

I feel like she's conscious of it the whole time,

it's not really an owned accent.

You're sort of kidding me right.

Antipodses accent.

Elizabeth Moss, Top of the Lake.

Detective Sergeant this is inappropriate.

This character grew up in New Zealand,

she moved to Australia,

maybe her accent's supposed to be a little bit

of a hybrid, either way,

this sounds really American in name and case.

How do you know the case name?

As opposed to a much broader,

Name. Name.

Case. Case.

Which would be a lot of movement in the diphthong.

Something like that.

Australian accents, and even more so New Zealand accents,

are famous for what linguists call high rising terminal,

more commonly known as question intonation,

which is the voice rising at the end of

what might just be a statement,

something like, I like pie.

How do you know the case name?

And how do you know the girl?

What's curious here is not just that

Elizabeth Moss is using American sort of

standard falling inflections on these,

but that these are two questions

where you might really expect to have that intonation.

Australian accent.

Zac Efron, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.

Names Rick, just got in from Melbourne.

So we talked about the phenomenon

of goose fronting before,

that's where the vowel in words like goose,

through, two, is made with the arch of the tongue

a little further forward in the mouth, ooh.

Zac Efron's not doing that here and the word do,

it's way far back.

Why yes I do.

He's kind of supposed to be doing a bad accent,

he gets found out right away.

I know that's your brother he dated my niece.

Look mate, I don't know your niece.

So does it matter that he didn't get

that goose fronting in the word do?

I think it's probably better that he didn't.

It was the hat, right?

Was it the hat?

I just found this over there.

Australian accent.

Kate Winslet, The Dressmaker.

I can make you the most striking girl in the room.

This ones perfect.

Why are you so interested in what I do

all of the sudden?

Let's focus on something that's amazing.

It's a teeny tiny little detail of the oral posture.

Have a look at her lip corners here,

especially on the word dance.

I hear the footballers dance is Saturday night.

See how they're kind of turning down.

Dance, dance, the footballers dance.

There's a muscle here called

the depressor anguli oris,

which is responsible for pulling those

lip corners down.

(blowing raspberry)

She's activating those,

it's not something she normally does,

and it's just right for the accent.

Watch and learn.

California accent.

Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies.

This is, he's a wonderful father, I mean,

he's the best, the best,

I couldn't think of a better one, really.

So I'm gonna pick on something here.

No.

If we listen to the word best.

Best, the best.

This is her Australian accent creeping through.

Really?

Her tongue is a little bit arched,

a little bit high, eh, best.

Best.

Instead of eh, best, which is what would fit

better with the rest of the target accent.

The best.

Listen here to the word goddess.

He treats me like a goddess.

She kind of evenly stresses it, god-dess.

Goddess.

Which is an Australian english pronunciation

as opposed to the American, goddess.

(sighs)

But it's also the vowel in that first syllable,

where she's got a little bit of lip rounding,

we get gaw, goddess.

Goddess.

Which again is her Australian accent

as opposed to the unrounded ah,

goddess version of America.

Uh, stop it.

So this is an incredible performance.

You're sure about this?

So why am I being so picky?

Just to point out that this is really hard.

And it takes time.

If it's not completely second nature,

it can slip, when the actor is having to

focus on other things.

I don't know where this is coming from

I really don't.

Boston accent.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Black Mass.

You oughta come over to dinner sometime.

Mary and the kids would love to see ya.

We talked a little bit about Johnny Depp's

performance as Whitey Bulger in episode three.

Johnny Depp, Whitey Bulger.

So it's not just a Boston accent,

it's an idiolect.

I haven't forgotten where we came from.

Notice his oral posture here.

There's a lip corner retraction

and a jaw protrusion,

both of which you can see in the real Billy Bulger.

My mother, she was born in Charleston,

and my father in the north end.

So that jaw is high as well,

so we have kind of a compressed space there,

it's almost shaped like a dinner plate inside the mouth.

You know what John, it's good to see ya doing so well.

You can see him listening and breathing

through that same shape and space and configuration.

So when he speaks again.

Give my regards to the boys at the plaza.

It's there, it's all ready to go.

He stays in it.

Boston accent.

Lucas Hedges, Machester by the Sea.

And what a delightful Boston neighborhood

have you selected for us to live in.

This is wonderful work.

Thank you, thank you.

I love the tight pulled in lips,

pulled in against the teeth.

You could do that anywhere.

We talked about price smoothing

in Kentucky accents and Texas accents.

Here's something that doesn't get talked

about much in Boston accents,

which is mouth smoothing.

What?

So instead of an ow diphthong,

it kind of starts in that ah place

and really stays there.

Listen to that here in town and now.

There's plenty of toilets

and clogged up drains all over town.

I gotta maintain our boat now.

What's great too is because these are open vowels

near the front of the mouth,

you can actually see that shape in his tongue.

Now, now.

Where it starts and stays.

Now.

American accent.

Matthew Rhys, The Americans.

Do not roll your eyes at me.

You can show me some respect.

There's a handful of little words

that show up all the time.

Was and what and of and from.

What a lot of British actors will do

is they'll use the American version of

the British vowel sound in those words

and say, was, and what.

Are you kidding me.

A lot of the time I think when we hear

an accent from a British actor that kind of is

almost perfect, but something sticks out,

it's one of these words.

Matthew Rhys gets all of them right.

Listen to what and was in this clip.

What is with you.

My life was, was, was the joke.

So you never hear him slip up on these words.

What, what's, what, what,

what are you, what are you doing.

Philip's American accent is a rhotic accent,

meaning all the rs are there,

even in unstressed syllables and after a vowel.

I know.

Every so often, Matthew Rhys' native accent

comes through and he actually leaves one of

those r sounds out. No.

Like in the name Kimberly here.

Kimberly, Kimberly.

It's a tiny little thing but I think

it makes a difference.

I'm done with that now I have been for a long time.

Texas accent.

Brendan Fraser, Trust.

You'd think that being rich would be a breeze.

I think we can tell where in Texas

this character is from,

and I think it's east Texas.

Austin, Corpus Christi.

What makes you so sure.

It's because of what we call the price vowel,

the vowel in words like life and right and time.

Life, right, time.

In my accent that vowel sound is a diphthong,

it moves, it travels, ah-ee, life.

In a lot of the south, and in west and central Texas,

that vowel gets completely smoothed out,

so that it's not a diphthong anymore,

but just a long ah sound.

Laugh, right, time.

East Texas has this on some price vowels but not others.

Is that right.

And he does it just right.

Well thank you very much.

So it stays a diphthong in life.

Life.

And ride. Ride.

But it's smoothed out in kind.

Kind.

Which is exactly right.

Isn't that cool.

English Cockney accent.

Dick van Dyke, Mary Poppins.

Alright ladies and gents,

call me call pull em.

This might be the most famous,

picked on, bad movie accent ever.

Well, not Royal Academy I suppose.

I don't know what I have to add,

let me just say that I think Dick van Dyke's

jaw was born to do a Cockney accent.

Still better than a finger in the eye, ain't they.

It's low, very prominent and protruded.

Mary Poppins.

And maybe there was an opportunity there

if he'd gone with his jaw to get closer

to a real streets of London Cockney accent.

Now how does that sound.

Wakanda accent.

Letitia Wright, Black Panther.

This corset is really uncomfortable.

So could we all just wrap it up and go home.

Wakanda isn't a real place, of course.

The accent that Letitia Wright is doing here

is actually (foreign language)

which is a South African language and accent.

John Kani originated the role of T'Chaka,

T'Challa's father in Captain America The Winter Soldier.

I am grateful to the Avengers

for supporting this initiative.

And he is an (foreign language) speaker

so that just became the language of Wakanda.

(speaking foreign language)

In any case, Letitia Wright is doing

an amazing job of it.

Just because something works

doesn't mean that it can not be improved.

Queens accent.

Tom Holland, Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Yeah um and with pickles and can you

smush it down real flat, thanks.

This is really good. Thanks.

All the way through, top to bottom.

I'm actually an actor, I'm British,

and I'm playing Spider-man.

He's doing something which is specific

to a lot of younger Americans.

What.

The vowel sound in the i-n-g endings,

words like joking.

I'm joking, I'm joking.

The way this accent usually gets taught

to non Americans is with more of an ih sound,

as in the word kit,

and he's doing more of an ee sound,

as in the word fleece, so joking.

Joking, I'm joking.

And that's something you hear from lots and lots

of younger Americans so it's totally

appropriate for the character.

This is great.

Southern Irish accent.

Joe Gilgun in Preacher.

Don't snap with me.

You've not cornered the American all

being pissed off, alright.

Southern Irish accents when they get

really expressive tend to have

a very high fall,

that's the pitch contour,

listen to him here on there's no way.

There's no way.

It's really free and expressive.

Why, why in the, what in the shite is that

supposed to mean.

I just also want to give a shout out

to Ruth Negga in this,

who's doing an amazing job,

she's actually from Ethiopia but raised

in Limerick Ireland.

Cassidy I know what you want.

One of the things that's cool is that

the trap vowel, which is the vowel in words like

asking and that, is a little higher.

So the arching of the tongue, it's arched up a little bit,

so ah, ah, and you can hear that here in,

stop asking me that.

Stop asking me that.

This is a really great southern American accent.

I know.

Southern Irish accent.

Gerard Butler, P.S. I Love You.

Geez, that's a long walk.

That's a bad jog.

Gerard Butler apologized to

the nation of Ireland for getting

their accent very wrong.

Well good luck with that.

In southern Irish accents the strut vowel,

the vowel sound in words like come.

Come on.

Mother. To your mother.

If you click in to that sound,

ah, done, mother, son,

you're gonna get some crucial information

about the whole posture for the accent,

and if you don't get it,

you're probably gonna really struggle.

And he does.

Are we finished now love.

Belfast accent.

Daniel Day Lewis, In the Name of the Father.

Why do you always follow me when I do something wrong.

Why couldn't you follow me when I do something right.

I think this is one of the best movie accents ever.

Let's just talk about one diphthong,

which is the mouth diphthong,

you can hear it in the word house.

The only fuckin metal that was every in our house.

So in American english,

the tongue starts down in the front, ah,

and moves up in the back, ooh, ow, house.

Belfast english is almost the exact opposite pattern,

it starts in the back of the mouth, ah,

and moves up to sort of an arch in the middle, ooh, house.

House.

It's also just a great sound.

Honest to God I was happy, I was delighted.

So there is an American english diphthong

that is similar to this,

say the word, ice.

Now put an h in front of that, hice.

It's not exactly the same as house,

but it's not a world away,

it'll get you in the neighborhood.

I don't understand your language.

Scottish accent.

Christopher Lambert's, Highlander.

I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan

on the shores of Loch Shiel.

Did he try? Not much.

I'm not sure.

There is one taft r you can hear in the word immortal.

I am immortal.

The funny thing is you wouldn't necessarily

need to do that in a Scottish accent.

You talk funny Nash, where are you from.

Lot's of different places.

Conclusion.

The final thought I wanna leave you with is,

again, this is hard.

Speech is really complex.

It's about the most complex thing

we do physically as human beings,

and it's kind of what makes us who we are.

So if I'm being really picky on occasion,

or even splitting hairs,

it's because I think this is incredibly important stuff,

and because I think we can always be better.

(light instrumental music)