The moment Kate Winslet’s character is in HBOs Easttown Mare says the word ‘overdose’, and drags the O’s out so that the word is closer to five syllables than three, you know exactly where the murder mystery takes place in the small town – at least, if you’ve ever heard a Philadelphia accent before. Unless you have spent time in the region, there is a good chance you have not done so yet. The characters in Rocky do not speak as if they are from Philadelphia. Neither do those in Silver Edge Playbook or The Irish. For all the stories that take place in and around the city, there is a pronounced lack of authenticity when it comes to how the locals speak – not a matter of failed attempts, but a failure to try.
Daniel Nester, who wrote for the New York Times in 2014, calls the Philadelphia accent “probably the most distinctive and least imitable, accent in North America,” but on screen, the distinction seems to work against it. You’re more likely to hear fictional characters speak as if they come from Pittsburgh or Baltimore than from the pockets of the city – mostly old Irish and Italian neighborhoods – where people drink ‘wooder’ by the glass. It makes Easttown Mare, located in neighboring Delaware County, not only distinctive but also virtually a unicorn. From the moment the first trailer crashed, the residents almost chopped off that Winslet was even trying to do the accent, and even more so that she and the rest of the cast tried to take it out.
If you recently encountered the Philadelphia accent, chances are Christine Nangle had something to do with it. A writer and artist on Kroll Show‘s Pawnsylvania ‘sketches, she went viral last year in a video where she played an employee at Four Seasons Total Landscapingto tiredly explain to a Trump staff that they do not have the habit of doing campaign events. With a similar extravagant attitude, she returned to February plays the secretary of Michael van der Veen, the Trump indictment attorney whose reference to his office in “PhillydelphiaAsked the Senate to laugh out loud. (To be clear, this is not a Philadelphia thing, but to drop half of the consonants of the word do not have is.) Like many Philadelphia natives, Nangle has trampled on her dialect along the way, thanks in part to what she calls ‘accent dysphoria’. “When I was in college,” she recalls, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, everyone can say I’m an idiot. ”
There is so little representation of the Philadelphia accent in popular culture that it can sound wrong outside ears if people get it right. “I just don’t sound right,” Nangle said. “It’s like a South African, where you hear it and like, ‘This is not how anyone ever speaks. ‘”When he sat down The fighter among white working-class Bostonians, David O. Russell had his entire cast adopt thick Southie accents, making them all sound like Mark Wahlberg. But in Silver Edge Playbook, among the Italian-American Eagles fanatics, there is no regional accent to be found. Bradley Cooper, who grew up in neighboring Montgomery County, may break the accent for local TV, but in the film itself there is no whispering anywhere. Even M. Night Shyamalan, who famously insists on recording and compiling most of his films in the city, his actors rarely try it, with the notable exception of Toni Collette in The sixth sense. “She at least tried,” Nangle said.
Even in the Philadelphia area, the accent is dying out. (The culprit: of course millennials.) Go to a dining room in South Philadelphia or call someone to fix your oven, and you’ll probably hear it. Walk through downtown or a college campus, and the chances drop. And outside the area, few people are even aware of the accent of missing its presence. It has thus become customary over the years to use in the vague New Yorkese that Hollywood uses as a universal signifier for white working class. (Think: the police who were already at the scene Law and orderdetectives appear.) Susan Hegarty, who worked as Winslet’s dialect coach Eastwood Mare, recalls the conversation with a veteran colleague from the Philadelphia area, who told her, ‘I have been working in this business for 25 years and have never been able to coach my own accent – not once.’ When she tried to put producers on accuracy, she was told, “Nobody cares. Nobody knows what this accent is. We’re just going to do New York.” Since the shadow by New York is inherent in the Philadelphia state. , the residents seem to take it in a slim position – Rocky may not sound like he’s from Philly, but he’s completely absorbed in the city’s identity – and the rest of the world continues to point the finger. try, if you the wage to fix is that you sound awful?
Easttown Mare creator Brad Ingelsby grew up in Delaware County, where the fictional Easttown is located, and has been trying for some time to set up a project in the area. (His screenplay for 2020s The way back was also in eastern Pennsylvania, but the area was moved to California so that star Ben Affleck could shoot near his children.) And his screenplay for the seven-part series was riddled with phonetic spellings to help interpret the scene. But he says it was only when Winslet decided to put everything into the accent that production across the board could connect to it. “I think it was really important to Kate,” he says. “She said, ‘When it comes to this part of the country, about this community, if we try to have the community as a character in the show, then it really has to be. ”
“It’s like a South African, where you hear it and like, ‘This is not how anyone ever speaks. ‘ ”
Winslet said in numerous interviews that the ‘Delco accent’ – a short section of Delaware County, and a close cousin of the Philadelphia accent – was one of only two accents so difficult that she ‘threw’ her. (The other was Joanna Hoffman’s Armenia-by-way-of-Buffalo accent in Steve Jobs.) Craig Zobel, who directed Easttown Mare, remembers she showed up on the set with a text covered in characters, and Hegarty pulls up one of the many lists she made to help Winslet with certain vocal sounds. (The “O-list” for the first installment, of course, begins with an overdose.) Hegarty says that while they were concerned about accuracy, it was also important to keep in mind the ‘taste aversion’ that some people may have from the accent. to keep. in its strongest form. “We just had to come up with a subtle version that was honest, but that would not turn people away.” Nevertheless Rolling Stone critic – and University of Pennsylvania grad – Alan Sepinwall wrote about the show that ‘Every long’ o ‘will make you question the life choices that lead you to it.’
Although Ingelsby does not speak with the accent, so does his wife, a resident of Delco, but Winslet’s first model was audio recordings of his family – his wife, her parents, their children – talking to each other in the car. Later, Hegarty and Winslet decided on a woman whose accent was strong enough to understand Winslet, but so flexible that she could accept it and still have room to act. Zobel notes that she’s comfortable sliding it in and out, and changing between Kate’s and Kate Winslet, while some of the other actors would cling to their accents like life rafts. ‘Even at the craft services table, they would still try to try the accent, because they just felt,’ I have it – I do not want to lose it. ‘
There is more to Easttown Mare of course as the accent, but that’s an important part of the story. Winslet’s character, Mare, is a high school basketball player who settled into a desperate, inconspicuous life in the small town in which she grew up. The way she talks tells you she’s not going anywhere. Her daughter, meanwhile, plays in a band and hangs out at the university radio station, and it sounds like she can fit in anywhere. But if the daughter does make it out, she must be careful when she returns. “One of my aunts moved to California,” Nangle recalls, “and when she returned, she said ‘water’ – and hit the T in the last word. “We just destroyed her.”
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