Devising #2 - Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, and their Scarily Good Accent Help.

Following on from the previous acting session with Ben on Tuesday, we were able to begin writing and plotting the story for our assessment. Myself, Faye and Saskia all discussed our ideas and what led us to them prior to the lesson, so when we wrote small snippets of script to edit for the session we didn't have completely different stories. Collectively, we decided that the prisoner, Caroline (myself), didn't actually commit the murder she’s on death row for, as that is very common, but that her older sister, Hayley (Faye), committed said crime and Caroline was covering for her, as she had a family; and Kimberly (Saskia), is the youngest sister who thinks she knows the full story but doesn't so there’s some real animosity in the family.

It will be a test for us to keep it interesting but also to keep it as realistic as possible as we have a lot of things to juggle. The accent is my biggest fear in this performance, as it is a Southern accent that can be difficult to recreate and write a script around. In saying that, after researching Southern phrases and Southern movies I think I will be able to keep the accent steady and believable. When going through the scripts we'd written, it came to our attention that Southerners don't swear like English people do, due to heavy religious beliefs, and so we had to adapt some of the language to fit the bill. As well as this, upon writing the script, we decided to change the time of year to Thanksgiving, as that seems to be a much bigger holiday in America than Christmas.

For my accent research, I found two movies that take place in Southern places in America to give me a vague idea on how to speak. One of the movies I looked into was Of Mice and Men (1992), based on the book by John Steinbeck, and I specifically listened to the way in which George speaks to Lenny, as he is sarcastic a lot of the time but has angry tendencies; which is what we want my character to be like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCM-sEpyh1Q

I also looked into actors who’re originally from England, portraying characters with Southern accents, focussing specifically on Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson in the Netflix film, The Devil all the Time (2020), based on the book written by Donald Ray Pollock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5l6WT2UnAA

I found it interesting that although all the characters are set in similar areas of the United States - George and Lenny are from Auburn, Alabama, and The Devil all the Time is set in West Virginia - the accents completely differ, so it was a fun yet difficult task to try and create a Southern accent with solely research and no training.