In the past few years, two Irish men have gotten Best Actor Oscar nominations and neither of them were playing Irish characters. For Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy, who won the award, practiced the creator of the atomic bomb’s voice by walking around in circles talking to himself. To play the young Scottish father vacationing with his daughter in Aftersun, Paul Mescal imitated the Edinburgh sounds he’s admitted to having struggled with in drama school. And on TV, Andrew Scott got an Emmy nomination for his role in Ripley, where he perfected how an American who speaks pretty good Italian would sound.
“I think it’s a very Irish thing to do accents,†said Saoirse Ronan in a 2018 interview. She’s also somewhat of an accent savant, having convincingly played a teenager from Sacramento and a recovering Scottish alcoholic in the course of her career. “When you’re telling a story, you just naturally go into the character’s accent. I had grown up with Mam and Dad doing that an awful lot. Naturally, when I would play with my dolls, they’d all be American—and Polish.†Dialect coach Maeve Diamond, who’s worked with Paul Mescal and comes from Derry in Northern Ireland, agrees: “When I was a kid on the playground, when we were playing whatever made-up imaginary games, we did them with American accents.â€
The Pluck of the Irish
The Pluck of the Irish
Presumably all great actors can do accents. Are the Irish better at it than the rest of us? Jill McCullough, an experienced U.K.-based dialect coach who has worked with Ronan and Domhnall Gleeson, says it would be hard to prove that the Irish have an innate advantage. Anyone can have a naturally good or bad ear. Actors are obsessive no matter where they are from, and Diamond says dialect coaches are meant to help them find the target they’re aiming for and close the gap in between. 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.
But the Irish do seem to have at least one clear advantage going for them: exposure. For an Indiana-size country with 32 counties (including the six counties in Northern Ireland), Ireland has a wide accent variety. “There’s an ability to pick up the subtleties in an accent simply because of the range of accents you’re exposed to from a young age,†Diamond says, also citing the American, British, and Australian TV and movies she watched growing up. Plus “the accents of Ireland are quite embodied physically. You’re already setting yourself up for easier access to something new.â€
Elisa Carlson, who helped Andrew Scott find his working-class accent for the 2018 film A Dark Place and who hails from the American south, theorizes that American Southerners and the Irish “traditionally share a love of storytelling—not language for its own sake, but language used in a theatrical sense,†that might translate into “vocal flexibility†or a knack for picking up accents. Carlson says she’s observed the Irish to have “this sense of drilling down, specificity. Wonderful listeners, too. Because you really only speak as well as you listen.â€
And then, of course, there are pubs. “I hate to bring up pubs because we have such a reputation already, but there is an element of that in our ability to do accents or inhabit different characters. People just love getting together and having the craic and spinning yarns,†says Diamond. (Craic is Irish slang for banter or good vibes.) “And if they don’t get up and sing a song, they’ll recite a poem.†McCullough, who’s based in London, agrees that this is a distinctly Irish phenomenon: “You go to the island and people are talking in the pub, people play instruments. Conversation is cultural. 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.â€
“There’s such a rich history of the arts in Ireland so they’re more exposed,†says Sam Lilja, a Juilliard-trained coach who now lives in the U.K. “If you’re in that soup of music and art all the time, it elevates everything.†He adds that “I think that’s why, in my experience, Saoirse is so adept at picking things up.†During Little Women, Lilja and Ronan would warm up in hair and makeup every morning and run lines in Valley Girl or Scottish accents before returning to what they imagined Jo March’s 19th-century American accent might sound like.
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. I think in America it’s different. Everything is much more spread out and unless you get into Juilliard or one of the big conservatory programs, it’s harder to have access to that kind of training.†Whether or not dialect pedagogy is quantifiably more intense at Trinity College’s Lir Academy (where Paul Mescal trained) or the Gaiety School of Acting (where Colin Farrell started out), the pressure to perfect different accents certainly would be. “They are told from an early start in their training that if they want to have more of an international career, then they have to get good,†Carlson says.
Many of the coaches I spoke to agreed on this point: Irish actors have an easier time sounding American than Brits. Using the way I pronounce the word car as an example, Jill McCullough explains that Standard Irish and Standard American sounds already share significant overlap, including rhoticity, meaning that the r sound is pronounced wherever it is written. (Sorry, Bostonians.) Carslon, who lives and works in Atlanta, stressed that “We’re very Scotch-Irish down here. If you’re coming from Ireland and playing someone from Appalachia, that’s much easier than to be Australian or from London.†Grennell, who visits family in the States whenever he can, says the Irish diaspora may be the source and cause of this similarity. “It’s almost like the United States is an Irish colony!†he jokes.