Television Need a really good mystery to watch? HBO’s new crime drama is just the ticket To master the distinctive Delco accent, Winslet worked with her longtime dialect coach, Susan Hegarty, who first collaborated with her on “Titanic” and has helped her in more than a dozen projects since, including “Revolutionary Road” and “Contagion.” And that meant having the people that populated the community sound true to life.” “And if we were making the community a character, then we had to treat that character with as much honesty and authenticity as every other character in the series. The accent was important to Ingelsby because, he says, “we wanted to tell a story about this part of the world and this community in particular.” The screenwriter based the fictional Easttown on small towns like Coatesville and Drexel Hill (it also shares a name with the real-life Easttown Township in Chester County). “Every once in a while I’d say, ‘Brad, my God, you gave me seven Os in that one sentence,” says Smart, who plays Winslet’s sharp-tongued mother and, despite the occasional hurdle, relished the chance to learn a new dialect. Creator Brad Ingelsby, who grew up in suburban Berwyn, Pa., was determined to accurately portray the region and what makes it unique, from Wawa coffee to those bleeping Os. It’s something that I have to work on truly every day.”ĭirected by Craig Zobel, the mystery focuses on a part of the country and a socioeconomic class that looms large in recent American politics but has gotten far less attention from pop culture. “So it’s not like a voice that you hear the actor doing. “The thing about doing a dialect is making it just disappear,” Winslet adds. She points to features like the “obviously tricky ‘o,’” formed closer to the front of the mouth so that home sounds like hewm, and “the way people from Delco kind of smush words together” so “words like wouldn’t and couldn’t become wuh-ent cuh-ent.” Another vexing quirk is the short “a,” which varies dramatically depending on the consonant before it, so sad is just sad, but mad is closer to “meeyad” - and a throwaway line like “really bad crap” becomes a linguistic minefield. “It is absolutely up there amongst the top two hardest dialects I’ve ever done,” says Winslet in a video call. The drama has received positive reviews, with Winslet and her costars, including Jean Smart, earning praise for rescuing a beloved regional accent from pop culture oblivion.
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