Mastering the art of storytelling through dialects with Christopher Lakewood

Christopher Lakewood is an accent modification and dialect coach, working across film, TV, and theatre to coach actors. He also teaches at major acting schools and is an actor himself. 

In this episode, Christopher shares more about his own accent and dialect training and how he prepares actors for performance, and we'll hear some of his amazing accents along the way.

Website: www.lakewoodamdc.co.uk

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Transcript

Matt: Hello, and welcome to the Teach, Inspire, Create podcast. I'm your host, Matt Moseley, Chief Examiner for Art and Design at UAL Awarding Body. Each episode I speak to artists and creative industry leaders about three main themes; teaching, inspiring, and creating. We talk about their experiences of teaching and being taught, who or what inspires them, and we explore how they foster creativity in their work, with the hope of showing you that there are infinite ways to be creative in the arts. 

Matt: Today my guest is Christopher Lakewood. Christopher is an accent modification and dialect coach. He works across film, TV and theatre to coach actors. He also teaches at major acting schools and is an actor himself. In this episode, I'm going to talk to Christopher about his own accent and dialect training and how he prepares actors for performance, and we'll hear some of his amazing accents along the way. There is a transcript available for this episode. Please click the link in the episode description so you can read as you listen.

Matt: Chris, welcome.

Chris: Hello, hello!

Matt: Thank you very much for joining us today on the UAL Awarding Body Teach, Inspire, Create podcast. It's brilliant to have you. As a performing arts sort of specialist, is there an early memory of where performance started to kind of become your thing?

Chris: Oh, well, I was a chorister when I was young and my mum and my sisters, they sing in a barbershop group. And so there was always a lot of singing and kind of performing growing up. And in terms of voices and my interest in voices specifically, I've always been surrounded by lots of different accents. So within the sort of choir school that I was at, there was quite a lot of Oxbridge teachers, so there was that sort of more received pronunciation flavour.

Chris: I grew up in Yorkshire. My dad has quite a strong Yorkshire accent, by which I mean what's strong and what's light is very subjective. I'm sort of talking, I suppose, about how far an accent is away from a standard accent. Which in England is going to be received pronunciation or something within that family.

Chris: And then my mum's from Glasgow, and I've got American family, family from the Midlands, so I've got a sort of…

Matt: A smorgasbord of accents!

Chris: Yeah, exciting smorgasbord of sounds, yeah. I was always just really interested in them. I think it was probably through acting that I played with them the most. So, I went to Lambda and did National Youth Theatre and all that sort of thing and then, auditioning for stuff, I'd just go up for lots of different different roles with different accents and I just kept on digging down that rabbit hole. I just loved it and I've just never stopped digging. 

Matt: So did you sort of like to challenge yourself by looking for parts that maybe had an accent that you hadn't done before so that you could spend time developing a new skill? 

Chris: Yeah, I find that really fun. I love doing idiolect work, which is like an individual person's dialect, an idiolect. So I love playing real people. It's great when you actually have a person that you can listen to. That's really, really exciting, I think.

Chris: And I studied with Knight-Thompson Speechwork, which is a speech training which is very thorough. It's incredible, I think. So I'm a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork. Yes, there's play, there’s instinct, because accents can sometimes be quite an instinctual mimicry thing, but not always. We don't always have a huge amount of exposure to a particular accent and not everybody's an amazing mimic.

Chris: So it's really helpful, I think, to have some other tools to get into that. So, understanding a little bit about what's creating the byproduct of that particular speech sound. Because all speech sounds that we make is just a byproduct of what we're doing in our vocal tract. So everything from our nose to our larynx, what the, sort of, muscle configuration is there, is going to create a particular sound.

Chris: You know, if you're looking at South Wales or something and you're trying to work out that sound, which is often spelt with a double L. So my wife's from South Wales, and if she was, well, not she, because she grew up with it, so it's very easy for her. But if somebody else was trying to work out, how do I say Llandailló, because I don't have that sound in my sort of inventory of sounds that I grew up with, then, yeah, we could listen to it and sort of go, “ooh, it sounds a bit kind of hissy, but I don't really know what I'm doing to produce that”. We might just sort of magically stumble across the sound, but we could also dig into, okay, what am I doing in my mouth? What's the shape that I'm making that produces that sound? And so I really love that you can have all of these different roots into the same thing. I think it's really useful to have as many different ways in, because you never really know until you're working with somebody, what they're going to find useful. What's going to help them achieve the sound or whatever it is.

Matt: Is it helpful then sometimes to also learn a bit about the history of a regional dialect? Does that sometimes support and assist some of the work?

Chris: Definitely, yeah. I think that's hugely important. So within Knight-Thompson Speechwork, there are four different, kind of, categories for looking at an accent. One of those is pronunciation, which is the sounds, the distribution of sounds. I think most people, that's the thing that they're most familiar with. There's also prosody, which is the music and rhythm of a particular accent. There's posture, which is kind of how your mouth feels, where it's resonating. And then the other thing is people. And I think in some ways - they're all important, you need all of them to produce an embodied, accurate accent - but, in some ways, people is kind of the most important, I think. Because if you don't have that, it might feel a bit like a kind of hollow imitation. And there's been lots of harm done, historically, I think, with accents. And that's because accents are a huge part of our identity. They matter. And, as you say, the history of where those accents come from, in some cases, the persecution is all sort of tied up in the culture of that. So I think, yeah, I think that's incredibly important to have an understanding of the cultural context, the world that this accent belongs to.

Matt: Does the accent extend beyond that area of the nasal to the throat? Because sometimes it feels like people often speak with their full body as well. So are there some of those elements about physicality beyond that main focused region?

Chris: Yes. I mean, if you were to imagine that you grew up in wide open spaces and you're used to shouting across valleys, then you can kind of imagine how that might make you hold yourself in a different way to if you grew up in inner-city London and maybe you're working on the markets and it's a very very noisy environment. So there are some kind of tendencies that we might see that go into body language but also into what the accent is as well.

Chris: So, lots of inner city accents, like if you think of a sort of old school Cockney accent [Speaking in a Cockney accent] that tends, I think, to have quite a lot of nasality, [Cockney accent stops] which I think helps sort of ping through quite a noisy environment. Whereas other places maybe they don't need that sort of sharp quality to help us get through.

Matt: So there's a functionality to the accent that's derived from where it's most used, in a sense?

Chris: I think there can be, yeah. I know lots of accent teachers can get a little bit hesitant about saying, [Speaking in a South Wales accent] “oh yes, well, if we're looking at South Wales, because of all the hills, that's why we go up and down”. [South Wales accent stops] And it's sort of nonsense.

Matt: Oh yeah, that's a bit, potentially, a bit tenuous, yeah.

Chris: Yeah, it's a bit tenuous, but it might be useful for an actor, or somebody that's playing with an accent. That might be a useful thing for them to remember. There's one that I really enjoy, which I think is a little bit reductive, but it's quite, sort of, fun. And it's if you're trying to coach somebody towards an Australian accent, but they can already do a Cockney accent, what we could say is… so, I spoke about posture earlier, which is sort of how our mouth feels, what the tendencies of the muscles are for that accent, what the kind of home base of the articulators is. [Speaking in a Cockney accent] For Cockney, there's quite a lot of jaw movement. As you're watching my mouth move now, maybe you can see my jaws opening a little bit more than it does when I'm speaking in my accent.

Chris: And if we go from Cockney to Australian, [Speaking in an Australian accent] I can basically just imagine that I'm closing my jaw a little bit more [Australian accent stops] because there's a lot of similarity in terms of the speech sounds. So the sort of slightly reductive thing that I've heard before, which is quite fun, I think, is that we could imagine that we're doing a Cockney accent and then a fly tries to get into my mouth, so I want to close up my mouth to keep the fly out and suddenly it sounds a bit more Australian. It's obviously a little bit reductive, but there is, you were talking before about accents and where they come from and Australian accents, there's obviously lots of different influences, there's the indigenous people of Australia and then there's also quite a lot of London accents that moved over to that place. And so there is sort of a tenuous link.

Matt: Do you find that sort of fun and play and that kind of energised experiences helps with, with teaching or coaching someone?

Chris: Yeah, definitely. And it depends how much time you have as well. I've started doing production coaching, I was working on The Wheel of Time this year, and sometimes when you're on set, you have 20 seconds with an actor. Hopefully you've done your work with them beforehand, because it's incredibly expensive when you're filming, there's so many people that are getting paid, so time is money. And unlike hair and makeup, costume, all of these other departments who have allocated time, dialect coaches, you don't have allocated time on set, so it's about being very aware of when an actor has a second. “Okay, I'm gonna go in and just hopefully remind them of something that hopefully you've already spoken about before. Because it's not the time to start, Okay, so let's think about the vowel space”. We just need to be as quick and fast as possible and try not to get in the way.

Matt: Do you have a process that you generally kind of start with an actor? 

Chris: Maybe an actor's approached me, they've got a casting coming up. I'll try to suss out what their speech training has been before, and if they already know what a lexical set is, for example, that's very helpful. So a lexical set is a word set, so, for example, there's the bath lexical set, which is words like after, grass, laugh. And English is very annoying because the spelling really does not match up with what the pronunciation is. But a native English speaker will use the same vowel, the same, not written vowel, but the same speech sound in any of those words. So, it's great if they already understand that, because then I can say, “okay, so the bath words for this accent are bath [saying ‘bath’ with a short ‘a’’].

Chris: So like in a Yorkshire accent, for example, I would say words like cat, hand, bath, grass with the same vowel as opposed to a Southern English accent, you might have two different vowels. So the cat had a bath [saying ‘bath’ with a long ‘a’’]. And, yeah, so if they have an understanding of things like that, that speeds things up quite a lot, which is great.

Chris: But, yes, I would say it's really tailored to the individual. I think this is rarer now. I think gone are the days of Sean Connery just sort of saying he's Russian and not really changing his accent and that being sort of okay for people. I feel like they want authenticity now, so you might occasionally get A-Listers who have been attached to the project for financial reasons who can't really do the accent, and that's when it's the real fun in games. But quite often, somebody will arrive and they've had to go through a casting process so they're probably…

Matt: They’ve got a foundation to work with.

Chris: Yeah, they've probably got some exposure and hopefully it's just tweaking and little things rather than starting from scratch and having to work everything out. 

Matt: [00:13:30] Have you ever had to devise an accent from scratch? Have you ever had to prepare someone to play a role not of this world, an alien dialect?

Chris: No, I've never done that. Although, I run the webinars for Knight-Thompson Speechwork and we did a webinar earlier this year which was called ‘Conlangs and Conlects: Made up Languages and Made Up Accents’ and we had a couple of dialect designers come on and talk about different projects that they've worked on. There was a guy who did their thesis on made up languages, and he did some very, very entertaining, quite sort of heavily researched stuff.  And I'm fascinated by that in terms of fantasy and the choice of what accents should be given to what kind of fantasy creatures, and I would love for that to be shaken up a little bit because pretty much every fantasy series you have the sort of upper class… so you have the Elves, and they're always received pronunciation, so a fairly old-fashioned traditional RP. And then you have the Orcs and they’re Cockney, and you have maybe a comedy dwarf or something with a Scottish accent, or maybe West Country or something. But I think it's pretty reductive, and it can enforce stereotypes which are unhelpful, to sort of be like, oh, this accent, we'll use this for the comedy character.

Matt: Right, yeah, so there's a sort of typecasting of accents.

Chris: Yeah, and I’d love for there to be different... I'd love for that to be mixed up and have like... so like the Multicultural London English accent. [Speaking in a Multicultural London English (MLE) accent] So it like, sounds something like this. [MLE accent stops] It's kind of like, it's kind of like a mixture of Cockney and then loads of other language backgrounds. It was an accent that started in London in schools where lots of people with different language backgrounds rubbed shoulders and linguistically created this, I think, incredible accent based off of those. And, like, why not have, like, an MLE high-status character? Why not have, like, an MLE elf? I think that sounds great. I'll watch that.

Matt: I was watching Attack the Block with my son. I just remember it being such a brilliant moment in cinema because you were suddenly portraying these characters as they go from sort of anti-hero to hero, they're adopting those kind of, those hero's quest type roles. They're obviously using that sort of accent that you were performing so brilliantly then.

Chris: Maybe there haven't been that many mainstream films where that accent has been with the lead character, with John Boyega. So it's great in terms of people looking at that and seeing themselves. It's so important, I think, having inclusivity in the media.

Matt: You mentioned earlier about how important someone's accent is to their identity. There's something about accent bias, isn't there, in different spaces? Can you explain a little bit about that?

Chris: Yeah, of course. Yeah, so, accentism or accent bias is, I think, still a fairly prevalent thing. It used to be much more prevalent. It used to be you'd look at media and people had to speak with a particular accent to be on the BBC. Or, as actors training back in the day, you would be encouraged… you’d have to shed your regional sounds and you have to adopt this particular accent (received pronunciation within England, within America, a general American accent), so there's these kind of standard accents which you're expected to have within particular spaces. And I think that's really problematic, because it's creating a hierarchy where it's lifting one accent above another and, you know, it's absolutely fine to have our preferences. We might be fond of a particular accent or maybe we don't really like a particular accent very much. But what I think is dangerous is equating that accent with personality or with somebody's worth.

Matt: Yeah, so you mentioned with obviously the comedy characters often having that, that sort of thing, it's undermining, isn't it, to a community, yeah, to make those aspersions.

Chris: And I think the more we can embrace our sounds, the better, because it's great to have diversity in accents. I mean, yeah, there's the importance of maybe looking out for are there any clarity or intelligibility issues within your speech or within your voice? But I think a huge part of it actually is on the listener as well. And it's about them exposing their ear to hearing lots of different accents so that they've got familiarity with them. I think it's a two way thing.

Matt: So, do you see industry evolving and changing to be more open to a wider range of accents?

Chris: I think so, yeah. I think so. I think there's still, there's still some industries that have a lot of accent bias. I think in the corporate world, that's still fairly, kind of, fairly present. It's improving, but there is that unconscious bias. So, I think it's really, really useful to be aware of that. And also to know that our accents are kind of evolving things. An accent is a kind of hodgepodge of what our influences were growing up, how we learnt language. So, what languages were around me when I was growing up, what communities were around me, and also what our aspirations are. And our accent and our sense of self, our identity, is located within that, within those influences and those aspirations and it's not a fixed thing, our voices and our accents change.

Matt: For young performers out there who are aspiring to maybe move into more sort of voice type work Are there particular performers that you've seen or even worked with who you think are prestigious in this area?

Chris: Yes, there's lots of people who are great. The person that's coming to mind at the moment is Michael Sheen, who has played lots of real people. And I really admire his work. I had the pleasure of meeting him, because my wife was in a play with him once. And I had a drink with him and haha absolutely nerded out. He was talking about how when he… this isn't just the voice of somebody, but also trying to play a real person that people can maybe have a sort of image of that person in their mind, or there's lots of videos out there that they could check. And he was talking about his approach to that and how it's really important not to do an imitation, because you need to, as an actor, you need to, find something of yourself within whatever role you play.

Matt: It's an embodiment rather than a mirror.

Chris: Exactly, yeah. So, he spoke about how he'd find hooks, which he could sort of then hang the character on. And I think that's a really lovely way of thinking about playing real people, but also accents as well. Because when you're performing, you want to have done all of that work before, because unless you're playing a character who's very self conscious about their speech, it's going to be unhelpful to be thinking about it whilst you're doing it. Especially if you're doing screen work. The camera is incredible for picking up what you're thinking about. What your focus is on is sort of what the audience's focus becomes about, so I think that's really important.

Matt: Have you ever worked with someone who has really struggled with a voice that they're trying to develop and was there a particular eureka moment in that?

Chris: Yes. I think quite often when maybe there's a particular sound or something, it's quite often because they're kind of hearing it differently in their head. So the example that came to my head, I remember working with an actor on a Northern Irish accent and we were looking at the mouth lexical set, so words like how, now, brown, cow, all that sort of stuff. And they, I think they had a kind of idea of what it was in their head, and they had the sort of muscle memory of what they did in their speech, and they couldn't quite hear the difference. And so my strategy was to trick them. So I said, just imagine that you're saying hi, as in hello. And they said hi. And then do a kind of minor inflection. [Speaking in a Northern Irish accent] Hi. Hi. [Northern Irish accent stops] And I was like, yeah, so that's the mouth sound. That's ‘how’ in a Belfast accent. “Hi, ni, brine, kai”. So yeah, sometimes it's about being aware that people have very, very strong muscle memories and then sort of getting them out of their own way.

Matt: [00:23:00] It’s just such a creative process. I'm always really interested to see how that creative process applies in lots of different spaces. And clearly it's similar here. So, you mentioned some teaching tools that you use with some of the performers that you're, that you're working with and developing… something called Accent Olympics. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Chris: Yes, I can. Yeah. So Accent Olympics is a game where we, like athletes, we jump between different accents. And I think you can do it with maybe just your accent and another accent and it can be a really useful way to work out how those differ and to work out some handholds for them. Or if you're feeling a little bit fancy, you could, you could throw in quite a few. And I think as an actor that's worried about getting stuck in particular patterns, maybe they've learnt a particular kind of way of doing a bit of text that they have and they're worried about it becoming stale, it can be a really useful way of breaking all of that up as well. So there's lots of uses to it, but it's also quite fun as well. Do you want me to demo some?

Matt: I wouldn’t mind year, if you, if you feel okay to do that, it would be lovely to hear a couple of your accents.

Chris: Okay, so let me talk about my morning routine in some different accents. I'll start off with my own and then maybe you could click at me and I'll just go into some other accents.

Chris: [Speaking in his own accent] So, I woke up and paused the alarm. [Speaking in a Scottish accent] I snoozed it because I was feeling a little bit tired. And then I eventually [speaking in a Northern English accent] got up out of bed and went downstairs and washed a frying pan. Just in time to do my eggs. [Speaking in a Northern Irish accent] I like to do scrambled eggs because it's, I think it's the only eggs I can do well. [Speaking in a Welsh accent] And I'm trying to remember what I've done. [Speaking in his own accent] Right. Here we are.

Matt: That is amazing! A round of applause for you. Thank you very much, that's very impressive. That was brilliant.

Matt: [00:25:00] So you do so many different things in your working life and it seems more and more within the creative area, a portfolio type career where you are working in different roles and managing different activities and different customers, clients, situations. How do you manage your different elements of your job?

Chris: Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, initially, I found it quite stressful having so many different kinds of plates spinning, but now I find it incredibly creative and it's interesting the parallels that you find between them and how you can borrow things from your kind of actor hats to your public speaking hats, to your dialect coaching hats. And there's a lot of crossover in skill, which can be really useful. In terms of balancing time as a freelancer, it's often, what are the opportunities that crop up? But also, I don't know, different stages of your life and what is interesting you the most at a particular time. I'm in a project called Masters of the Air, which is a sort of follow on from Band of Brothers, which is coming out in January 2024. And in that, I'm playing a real person and that was such a fun experience in terms of speech as well as the sort of acting stuff, as well actually as the public speaking stuff, because there was one scene where I was talking in front of about 300 extras, and I was very kind of aware of, oh, it's amazing how all of the different creative hats can sometimes align and inform one another.

Matt: So, when you're preparing for a role, do you have a process that you go through then?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, there's a huge amount of methodologies that different actors might use. There might be certain projects where you kind of feel like, oh, I don't think I need to do very much research to this, I just sort of instinctively connect with this, I instinctively understand this person. And then sometimes, there's quite a big difference between you and the character, you need to think about how am I similar how am I different and there might be particular things that you really need to work on for that, but trying to understand, trying to relate, trying to empathise, that's the most important thing. Sometimes that comes very organically, sometimes you've got to do quite a lot of research into the world.

Matt: You mentioned about the role that you were playing, sort of talking in front of, you know, potentially groups of people. Are there things that people can do to appear more confident or more assertive within those types of environments when they are talking about either their own work or a subject?

Chris: Yes. The thing that's coming to my mind first and foremost is to stop thinking about yourself so much and to think more about the people that you're speaking with. And I say the word with rather than at because, if you want to connect with a person, or a group of people, it's really important that we're speaking with them and not at them And I think that's true of teaching as well. If you're teaching live, then work with who's there, I think, and embrace the expertise that's in the room rather than teaching at people. Because then it could be recorded, it could be a one size fits all class. And I think similarly from a public speaking perspective, you could just record it and then you don't need to do it live, but there's something wonderful about it being live and that connection. Because, I think good communication should be a two way thing. It shouldn't be that it's just one person speaking at, it should always feel like a conversation, even if it's one person that's doing most of the talking. So, focusing on the other person or people and how they're taking the material, whether they're understanding it, whether they're digesting it, is hugely important, I think.

Matt: The world that you describe sounds incredibly exciting and I think for lots of our listeners, particularly those that aspire to work in any of those areas, how would they go about getting into voice coaching or accent work?

Chris: So for people that are particularly interested in playing with different accents and character voices, I would say listen. Listen to people, start playing around, be curious about how things differ from you. I think the most useful starting point might be, in terms of voice work, is starting to get familiar with your own voice and knowing what your tendencies are. If we know what we do, it's much easier to move to someone else. So, if you know that for your price sound, so words like I, time, sight, etc., you do what's called a diphthong, which is where I'm moving from one tongue shape to another, there's a movement in my tongue… great. Now, if I'm playing a character that has a monophthong there, a singular sound, so they might say, ‘aaah’, so prahce, tahme, something like that, that's a great thing to know about yourself, and it's then much easier to move to something else. So, I think, listening is really important, and then in terms of performing more generally, I think it's really useful to try and get some sort of training. It's a very competitive industry, so I think it's useful to get some things that give you credibility within the industry, which could be some training, it could be lots of experience. But those are a couple of things that I would recommend.

Matt: [00:31:00] Yeah, that's fantastic. So, at the end of this podcasting process, what we like to do is ask our guests to offer a provocation to our listeners. So, that can be a call to action, a thought, a concept, just anything that you want to put out there to inspire our listeners to do something creative. Do you have something in mind?

Chris: Yeah, so the thing that I'm thinking about is about accent bias and I would love for people to develop more awareness of what their unconscious biases are with regards to accents. So, my provocation would be to notice when you listen to a particular accent, or maybe you're listening to yourself, and do you have an association with a particular personality trait as a result of that? Because we can have positive responses as well as negative responses. We might hear, “ooh, I think that person might have gone to a particular university”. Or, “that person sounds like they've read these sorts of things” or whatever. And yeah, as I say, I don't think it's a bad thing to have preferences. But it is useful to be aware of when we have biases which are about personality traits. 

Matt: Brilliant. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's really important for people to be reflective, isn't it? That's great. Thank you, Chris, for your time today and for being so exceptionally generous with your expertise and your experiences. I've had so much fun listening to you today, so I'm sure everybody listening to the podcast has as well, so thank you.

Chris: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Matt: Thank you for listening to this episode of Teach, Inspire, Create. Thank you to Christopher for such a fun and enjoyable episode. I'm definitely going to go away and practise some accents of my own. If you want to know more about Christopher and his work, you can visit www.lakewoodamdc.co.uk. You can find the link to this in our episode description.

Matt: So, if you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and why not share with a friend? And please do go ahead and rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. It's so helpful for us to continuously improve this podcast for you, the listener. Thanks for listening and until next time, take care.