UIC professor helped ‘Brutalist’ actors find their voices

Tanera Marshall received the script for “The Brutalist” in December 2022 and got to work.  

The UIC theatre professor is also a professional accent coach. She’s been called on by directors and producers around the world to help actors in “The Bear,” “Chicago Fire” and other productions learn to speak with specific accents.  

For the “The Brutalist,” she helped actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones develop their characters’ Hungarian accents and helped Joe Alwyn, who is British, sound like an American-born aristocrat. 

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Brody and Jones have been nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, for their work on the film. In total, “The Brutalist” was nominated for 10 awards, and the winners will be announced at the televised presentation on March 7.  

Marshall started her work with Brody, Jones and Alwyn by diving into the script and learning about the characters. Then she found recordings from the Shoah Foundation and testimonials of Holocaust survivors, real people who grew up and lived in the same time period as is portrayed in the movie, and she worked with the actors to develop character profiles.  

“The Brutalist” takes place in the 1940s and ’50s and centers on Hungarian immigrants who survived the Holocaust, then came to America. 

“The selection of the voices that we’ll use as our models for the work is so important,” Marshall said. “We have to find people whose background (is similar) — and by background I mean race and ethnicity, of course, and also cultural inputs, gender, gender identity, age, and the era in which they lived, because sounds change over time. So, all of these things have to be considered through the lens of who does this character need to become?”  

The main character played by Brody, László Tóth, was not a real person. Brody developed the look and sound of the character for the movie. He had the advantage of his Hungarian roots. Marshall said each actor works through a different character process, and having a family member with a comparable voice or story can sometimes help enhance a character.  

“It really depends on the actor,” Marshall said. “If they find that the accent they know from their life experience is similar to the character’s accent, that might help them arrive at some sense of truth and authenticity in that new accent quite quickly. But what if the accents are actually not similar? What if they’re somehow quite different? It could make it more difficult for the actor.” 

Brody talked about his work with Marshall in an interview with “Reel Pieces” moderator Annette Insdorf that was recounted in The Hollywood Reporter.  

“I was searching for a source with a formality of speech of that era — the era my grandfather had immigrated, and I found one who was a Holocaust survivor,” Brody told a live audience at The 92nd Street Y in New York. “I spent every day and night recounting his stories and listening to the nuances in the way that he spoke and always would draw back to certain things — how my grandfather would express himself. That is just in me. It was both a real luxury to have this and also an opportunity to honor his hardships and their hardships and sacrifice.” 

Marshall works with most actors in the “prep” stage before the cameras start rolling. Sometimes she joins the actors on set to help them with ever-changing dialogue. With “The Brutalist,” she was sent the dailies — the unedited footage shot over one day — and could see if an actor needed more coaching.  

She teaches Voice to first-year students and Accents to third-year students in UIC’s School of Theatre and Music, and she also keeps her phone on during a shoot in case she receives an SOS from an actor on the set. 

“It’s usually an audio text: ‘How do I say this?’ And then I just send it back to them,” Marshall said. “I will say, though, that it’s really important for an accent coach always to get the actor to the point where they’re feeling so free and true and consistent in the accent that (writers or directors) can make changes to script without an actor having to give me a call. That’s always my goal.” 

As a Chicago-based accent coach, Marshall is often called to help on movies and television shows based or shot in Chicago. She’s worked with cast members of “Public Enemies,” “Station Eleven,” “Widows,” “Shining Girls” and “The Lucky Ones,” among others.  

Marshall said she had some time to compile sample accents for “The Brutalist” before working with the actors. That’s not always the case. 

“Sometimes I get a call and it’s, ‘Hey, in two weeks, can you come to Atlanta? I’ll send you a script, and then I’ll have you meet with the actor, and, oh, and they need this really involved accent,’” Marshall said. “‘They have a lot of script, and there’s no time to practice. Can you do it?’ And so, I say ‘Yes,’ then I’ll figure out how to do it.” 

That’s just part of making movies, she said.  

“Things happen slowly, and then they happen very quickly, and you just have to jump in and say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s make something together!’”