Alex O’Loughlin Talks About Accents in “Australians Hit Hollywood”

Kalee St. Clair, the director/producer of Australians Hit Hollywood has now also posted an interview with Alex O’Loughlin from her documentary. Alex talks about his approach to mastering different accents!

As the sound quality is rather poor, here’s a transcript:

AHH: Has there ever been a problem, like when you’ve gone for an audition, the fact that you are Australian, was anyone worried that you couldn’t sustain the accent?

AOL: No, never, never. Accents are something… no, that’s never been a problem. Accents for me are… I think, ’cause I’m — again I use this term VERY loosely — I’m a musician. I’m not really a musician at all, but I love music and I play music and I write music, and it’s really something that calms me, you know, something that I love. And I’ve always treated accents like I treat music and I’m self-taught. I know how to read music, so I’ve learned everything by ear and I have a way of hearing it, filtering it and then doing something with it. So I sort of do the same thing with accents. It was a part of the curriculum at NIDA that I took very seriously — I took the whole thing seriously — I took accents very seriously and Betty Williams, who is one of the best voice coaches in the world, as far as I’m concerned, she said something to me once and she said… I can’t remember what it was, but it made me realize that for me, doing an accent isn’t about the sound I’m making, it’s about the thought process that happens before the sound. Since you’re playing an American — Americans actually think differently to Australians and Glaswegian Scots think differently to Americans and Belfast Irish think differently, and so on and so forth. And so I believe you really have to find the essence of that people before you can make that sound. And so I try to be as diligent each time I come to a new accent as I was the last time. More than anything, I mean you don’t want to look like an idiot at the end of the day, but also because I feel that we have a duty to …no that only makes sense to my ears… But I feel when you’re playing another people, you have a duty to them, to understand where they’ve been and where that sound comes from, what it means to be that. So I usually go into the audition in the accent.

AHH: Are you playing that American the whole time?

AOL: Yeah. It’s not that I want to fool anyone, it’s just because it’s the way I do it. And like August Rush, I went in Irish when I did my auditions and met everyone in Irish. Because that’s the other thing, if you’re meeting people in the accent, you’ve got to be thinking differently because it’s all improv.

[tags]alex o’loughlin, alex o’lachlan, australians hit hollywood, kalee st. clair[/tags]