Greg Endries
August 15, 2016
In The Mix

Speech Therapy

Kohli Calhoun is TV’s go-to coach for proper pronunciation.

Jane Wollman Rusoff

What’s the most daunting challenge for dialect coach Kohli Calhoun as she helps British actors hone an American accent?

“Getting them not to sound like game-show hosts or John Wayne,” she says. “They can completely overwork the accent. Their r ’s are too rrrr ’d because they’re trying so much to sound American.”

Over the past six years, the Columbus, Ohio, native has worked on 35 TV and feature projects, mainly helping English, Irish, Australian and South African actors perfect their American or Canadian accents.

In television, Calhoun has coached the likes of Ruth Wilson (The Affair), Eve Hewson (The Knick), Julian Morris (Hand of God), Annaleigh Ashford (Masters of Sex), Jodi Balfour (The Best Laid Plans) and Dan Stevens for the upcoming FX series Legion, among many others.

It’s a profession she was apparently destined for. As a child, she playfully gabbed in accents and she later taught dialects, voice and speech at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Calhoun attributes the high demand for her services largely to the programming renaissance of recent years.

“All of a sudden, there were a gazillion miniseries,” she says. “The productions were bringing in foreign-born actors to do them, and they needed to sound American.” Her first TV coaching job was helping Denver, Colorado, native Ashford perfect a 1950s Midwest dialect for Showtime’s Masters of Sex .

After analyzing a character’s history and social class, the coach provides sample recordings and word lists. Dialects can be finely nuanced or broad. For instance, Calhoun worked with London-born Damian Lewis to achieve his touch-of-Yonkers, New York, tone for Showtime’s Billions. But for HBO’s True Detective, she coached Ritchie Coster, also from London, to sound like an archetypal East Coast mobster.

Based in New York City, Calhoun coaches on set or via Skype; sometimes she prompts into an earpiece.

Recently, she received an urgent 3 a.m. text from a British client: “Please send me the word ‘details’!” he wrote, from a movie set. Calhoun immediately recorded a voice memo in the American accent he was using, then texted it: “ Dee-tails, dee-tails, dee-tails.”

“This is my dream job,” she says. “I’m part of the storytelling process, but I love being so much in the wings that no one knows I exist!”

Browser Requirements
The TelevisionAcademy.com sites look and perform best when using a modern browser.

We suggest you use the latest version of any of these browsers:

Chrome
Firefox
Safari


Visiting the site with Internet Explorer or other browsers may not provide the best viewing experience.

Close Window