Australian accents have long been considered one of the hardest in Hollywood to master, and now, the dialect coach behind some of Hollywood’s biggest transformations is revealing why.
Behind many of Hollywood’s biggest accent transformations, from Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice to Austin Butler in Elvis, are dialect coaches like Australia’s Felicity Jurd working behind the scenes to reshape how actors physically speak.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: The dialect coach behind Hollywood’s most convincing accents
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Jurd worked closely with Taron Egerton to help the Welsh star sound convincingly Australian in Netflix’s thriller Apex.
She told The Morning Show actors often struggle because Australian speech requires them to “muddy up” crisp pronunciation and completely shift the rhythm of the way they talk.
“I think one of the things is that he [Taron Egerton] has a beautiful, crisp British accent. He trained at RADA. He’s beautifully well-spoken,” Jurd explained during a television interview.
“So the neatness of the consonants, we had to sort of muddy them up. That was one of the first changes.”
Jurd said Australian accents differ from British speech because they rely less on sharp pronunciation and more on heavier rhythm and relaxed mouth placement.
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“If you think about a British accent, it often feels very light. But Australian is kind of like a heavy beat on it,” she said.
Using a bespoke phonetic system tailored to each actor, Jurd breaks down scripts with special markings to help performers understand where to place sounds in their mouths.
Jurd believes Australian accents have historically been difficult for actors because the accent hasn’t been as widely distributed globally as American or British accents.
However, she said global hits like Bluey are helping expose more international audiences to Australian voices from a young age.
“There is actually a sense to which the number of listening hours that you do correlates to how well you can pick something up,” she explained.
Jurd’s previous work includes coaching Tom Burke for George Miller projects and working with Indigenous supermodel Charlie Fraser during her transition into acting for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Egerton’s Australian accent can now be heard in Apex, currently streaming on Netflix.
