Should You Do an Accent in an Audition? A Decision Guide

The sides arrive on a Tuesday night for a Thursday appointment. Your character runs a fish stall in Cork, or she’s a Texan in a New York boardroom, or he’s simply described as “British.” Nobody has said whether they want to hear the accent. You have two days, and the question sits on top of every other choice: do it, or don’t?

The short version: read the breakdown and the sides for clues, then ask which specific accent they want. Commit to the accent when the role calls for it and you can hold it under pressure. Read in your own voice when you’re told to, or when the accent would take your attention off the scene. Decide in advance how you’ll talk to the room before and after the read. And if you’re doing the accent, learn the lines in it from the first read, never in your own voice first.

Read the breakdown and the sides for clues

Before you decide anything, go through the casting notice and your pages and collect every hint about how this person sounds. Our guide to reading a casting breakdown covers the rest of what a notice can tell you.

• The breakdown says it outright. “Must do a convincing Glasgow accent” or “native speaker preferred” settles the question. So does “no accents, please.”
• The character’s history. Where they grew up, how long they’ve been away, and their class or job.
• Spelling in the sides. Dropped letters, apostrophes, and phonetic spellings are the writer telling you how the line sounds.
• Grammar and word choice. Regional grammar, slang, and idioms carry the voice even when the spelling is standard.
• What other characters say. If someone in the scene comments on how your character talks, the accent is part of the story.

Writers often show the sound for a line or two and then trust you with the rest. Bernard Shaw did exactly that in Act I of Pygmalion, in the public-domain text from Project Gutenberg:

THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son’s name is Freddy, pray?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

…

THE FLOWER GIRL [protesting] Who’s trying to deceive you? I called him Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself if you was talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant.

Pygmalion, Act I (George Bernard Shaw)

Shaw gives up on the spelling in a stage direction, but the voice doesn’t go away. If you was talking is still the flower girl, in standard spelling. When your sides look “normal,” check the grammar before you decide the writer wants a neutral read.

Ask which accent, specifically

“British,” “Southern,” and “Irish” aren’t accents. Each is a family of accents that changes with region, class, and age. If the notice only names a country, you don’t know the target yet. Our guide to learning an accent for acting explains why the exact target matters so much.

So ask. If you have an agent or manager, ask them to check with the casting office. If you were invited directly, a short, polite question in reply to the appointment email is normal: is an accent wanted for this read, and if so, which one?

Anna Frankl-Duval, a London-born actor who works in the US and often has to switch into an American accent, told OnStage Blog that unless a character is described as being from a specific place, “I just ask the team what accent they’d like to hear.” Sometimes that gets her several reads in different accents.

When nobody answers

If the question goes unanswered, make the most defensible choice from your clues. If the character’s town is named, prepare that. If only a country is named, prepare the variety that fits everything else you know (class, age, job, the world of the show) and keep it consistent.

Then prepare a second read in your own voice, in case the room asks to hear one without the accent. If you have both ready, that note costs you nothing.

When to commit to the accent

Go in with the accent when the role clearly calls for it and you can hold it while you act. That second part is the real test: an accent that works at your kitchen table may not survive nerves, a fast reader, and your character’s biggest moment.

Before you decide, try three things out loud:

1. Run your hardest line at full intensity. An accent often slips when emotion rises. If the vowels go home every time you shout, you’ll hear it now instead of in the room.
2. Run a cue you didn’t expect. Have someone feed you a cue from the middle of the scene, or a line out of order. Can you answer in the accent without warming up into it?
3. Take a redirect. Play the scene once angry and once amused. If changing the intention breaks the accent, it isn’t solid yet.

Accents you’ve already lived with tend to hold up better. In a Playbill piece on teaching yourself a dialect, the dialect coach Joel Goldes says learning an accent before you need it for an audition makes you more comfortable when those auditions come, so you can focus on your intentions in the scene. In his words, once you’re in the room, “you can focus on your performance and not the dialect.”

When to play it in your own voice

Read in your own accent when you’re told to, and when an attempt would pull the room’s attention away from your acting.

The screenwriter John August described the second problem while casting a TV project that had brought on casting directors in Sydney and London. The roles were written as American, but he and his collaborator were willing to change the backstories. Still, he wrote on his blog, nearly every overseas actor tried an American accent. “Almost every attempt fails.”

His explanation is the useful part. An actor who suppresses their own accent doesn’t automatically sound American, and that in-between sound can be worse than an obvious accent. The listeners hear that something is off, and while they’re wondering what, they lose track of the performance. His advice to actors: if a producer or director tells you to use your natural accent, trust him. It isn’t a judgment on your talent.

If you choose your own voice, choose it fully. Don’t drift halfway into the accent on some lines. Play the scene with the same specificity you’d give it in any other read: who you’re talking to, what you want from them, what’s in the way.

And if you’re unsure, you can offer. After a read in your own voice, “I’m happy to do it in the accent if that’s helpful” leaves the choice with the people deciding, which is where it belongs.

Should you stay in the accent when you talk to casting?

Actors disagree about this one, and there’s no rule. Frankl-Duval lays out the options clearly in the same OnStage interview. There are three ways to do it:

• Your own voice in conversation, the accent for the read. You say hello as yourself, switch for the sides, and switch back. She finds she does better work this way. The risk: once people know it isn’t your accent, they may think they hear mistakes that aren’t there.
• The accent for the whole visit. Nobody listens for errors, because nobody knows. The risk: someone asks where you’re from, or your résumé gives you away.
• The accent until the sides are done, then your own. A blend that keeps the room from judging only your accent work, while staying truthful.

The same article repeats the story that producers who watched Hugh Laurie’s read for House described him as “a real American.” Frankl-Duval used to audition that way but mostly doesn’t anymore: being as true to herself as possible gives her the best results.

A sensible way to choose: pick the version that lets you act best, and decide before you walk in, not in the doorway. Whatever you choose, never lie when someone asks you directly where you’re from. Answer, smile, and go back to the work.

Prepare the accent so the lines stay free

Here’s a common mistake: learning the lines in your own voice and adding the accent on top two days later. The dialect coach Erik Singer calls this out in an interview with MovieMaker. He says less experienced actors often memorize lines and set their intentions first, then plan to add the accent later. Because accent is such a fundamental part of who we are, he says, that doesn’t give good results.

The fix: the accent goes in the first day you say the lines out loud, so the words and the sounds go into memory together.

1. Mark the sound changes on your sides. Goldes’s fellow coach Dawn-Elin Fraser, in the same Playbill piece, suggests writing down the sound changes, in phonetic symbols if you know them or in any notation that makes sense to you.
2. Listen to real speakers, not actors. Goldes recommends primary sources: people who grew up speaking that way. He’s an editor of the International Dialects of English Archive, a collection of recordings of native speakers.
3. Say every line aloud, in the accent. Silent reading won’t build the muscle. In a University of Waterloo study of 95 people, reading material aloud to yourself led to better recall than reading silently, hearing someone else read, or hearing a recording of yourself. It wasn’t a study of accents, but it’s one more reason to do this work out loud.
4. Run the scene with cues. Lines learned alone tend to fall apart when a real cue arrives. Run the whole scene so every line starts from the line before it.
5. Talk in it for a few minutes a day. Goldes suggests brief conversations in the accent with people who don’t know you, like a store clerk or a call to a business, to see whether you can keep it up.

Offbook helps with step four. Upload your sides, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character, then wait for you to finish your line before playing the next cue. The video below shows that setup, from a PDF to a first run. Run the scene in the accent from your very first pass, and the lines and the sound will settle together.

As the words settle, hide your lines and run the scene again. To start on a speech tonight, our free line memorizer turns your lines into first-letter cues.

The night before, record the scene once and listen as if you were casting it. If you hear an accent instead of a person, spend your last run on what the character wants.

Questions actors ask

What if my accent slips during the read?

Keep going. A sound that wobbles for a word matters far less than a scene that stops. If you get another take, find the accent on your first line and play the scene. Our guide to messing up a line in an audition covers recovering in the room.

Should I put accents on my résumé?

Only the ones you could do on the spot, today, with cold sides. A listed accent is an invitation to be asked for it. Keep the list short and keep those accents in regular practice, because they get rusty quickly if you don’t use them.

The role is from my hometown. Do I need to do anything?

Usually, just let your own voice be there. Check the character’s class and age, since your everyday accent may be softer or stronger than theirs.

Should I send a self-tape both with and without the accent?

Follow the instructions first. If they ask for one take, send the version that best fits what you learned from the breakdown and the sides. If extra takes are welcome, a second read in the other choice can help. Our guide to breaking down audition sides covers reading the pages for clues.