Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Real Hot Tip.
Canadian casting director and Russian dialect coach Kate Yablunovsky.

It’s not easy to create believable accents for actors, whether in the theater, on tv, or in film. Recently, my husband and I saw an American portrayed in the British television series Endeavor. He sounded like an American, all right, but not one from Boston, which is what he was supposed to be. It was distracting.

At “Science Quickly,” an offering from Scientific American, Kendra Pierre-Louis interviewed the accent coach for the show Heated Rivalry.

Kendra Pierre-Louis
“I’m obsessed with the TV show Heated Rivalry. …

“The romance, the hockey, the tension … The Russian? I mean, one of the things that both you and I have talked about so much is how the American actor Connor Storrie, who co-starred as the Russian character Ilya Rozanov, pulled off speaking so much Russian and perfected his accent. … To help us understand the linguistics behind the hit TV show, we talked to Heated Rivalry’s Russian dialect coach, Kate Yablunovsky. … Can you tell us a little bit more about dialect coaching? Like, what is it, and how did you get into doing this work?

Kate Yablunovsky
“Well, dialect coaching, I specialize specifically in Russian, Russian, Ukrainian, and it’s about preparing an actor to speak with as much of an authentic accent, which it’s not always what it sounds like. It’s not always just to be authentic. Sometimes, actually, it’s the opposite; sometimes it’s to take the perfection out of the accent so that the character feels authentic.

“This is something that I got into very unexpectedly. It started when a smaller production in my city, they had some Russian-speaking characters, and they couldn’t find a local Russian dialect coach. And I was casting that film, and they were like, ‘Maybe you should coach them as well.’ And I jumped into the water, and it took me on a journey because I learned so much through that very first experience. And I had to start to develop all kinds of techniques and exercises and try to understand speech therapy and everything that goes into it to be able to get [the] best of a result for them as possible. …

Pierre-Louis
“Before we get into the work that you did on Heated Rivalry, what are some of the hardest sounds in Russian for English speakers to pick up? …

Yablunovsky
“It’s usually the vowels that kind of, you know, in English, they would feel like they’re two letters, but it’s actually [a] one-letter vowel that you have to pronounce with other consonants. … Now, i’agine, the way we say in Russian ‘you’ is ‘ты.’ So imagine now adding T to the sound ‘ы.’ It’s ‘ты.’ … I love you in Russian is: “я тебя люблю.’ …

“And if we go into, into accent coaching, it’s just that the l in the name Ilya is softer in Russia. So it’s not “IL-yah”; it’s “Il-YAH.”

Parshall
“There’s so many nuances that you kind of don’t know until you get into it. …

Yablunovsky
“Totally. It’s a whole world. But, you know, a lot of actors kind of misunderstand Russian, so they come with this kind of idea that it has to be aggressive. … Connor Storrie because he was incredible and he really took the challenge, like, head-on. … I told Connor, you know, ‘If you’re willing, I’m willing that we show up every day and work on the Russian, and that’s the best way that we’re gonna make it work.’ And he totally went into it, and we were meeting every day, including weekends. …

“He was always very interested in Russian culture. He was listening to Russian music, Russian rap. It was fun to work in that way ’cause we would exchange, like, music ideas and cultural anecdotes. So he had some insight into the Russian culture, and that helped a lot…. H was, like, miles ahead of anybody, and with everything that he had on his plate, you know, the challenge was just to run that marathon—and stay sane.

Parshall
“Something that people have noticed is when Connor speaks Russian in the show it seems like his face looks very different than the way it does when he’s just kind of himself, Connor Storrie. And I know this—in accents there’s this thing called oral posture, which is, like, how you hold your mouth and your tongue and everything. And speaking other languages I feel like my mouth changes shape entirely. And we were just kind of curious, like, do you coach people on changing the shape of their mouths in order to help understand how to make sounds? …

Yablunovsky
“English is very forward, right: the lips, the teeth, the breath. Well, Russian is more in the far back in the mouth, and there’s a heavier tongue base. So once you change all that it alters psychology. And that’s why, actually, you can hear different people who speak more than one language, when they speak different languages the sound of their voice changes because of how differently they intonate and possibly also their face.

“So Connor’s facial expressions is something that he brought to the table; that’s his creation. But it’s inspired from the fact that all of those things that I’ve explained, you know, they alter your psychology, and it’s part of the character. “

More at Scientific American, here.