#granted the show would not be as funny as it is if Robert and Debra were together

[starryluminary]

Forgive me for having feelings about a sitcom that ended in 2005 but God Debra and Robert would of been so much happier if they were the married couple instead of Debra and Ray

[marilynngmesalo]

‘Beale Street’ tops Spirit Awards, Glenn Close wins best actress

‘Beale Street’ tops Spirit Awards, Glenn Close wins best actress ‘Beale Street’ tops Spirit Awards, Glenn Close wins best actress https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Two years after his “Moonlight” triumphed on the eve of the Oscars, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of the James Baldwin novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” on Saturday topped the 34th Film Independent Spirit Awards, winning best film, best director and best supporting female for Regina King.

The Spirit Awards, always a casual, oceanside preamble to Sunday’s Academy Awards, featured a few things the Oscars don’t have: a host (actress Aubrey Plaza) and female filmmaker nominees, including Tamara Jenkins (“Private Life”), Debra Granik (“Leave No Trace”) and Lynne Ramsey (“You Were Never Really Here”).

But as much as the afternoon belonged to women, Jenkins’ lyrical period drama emerged the biggest winner two years after his “Moonlight” won at the Spirits and (despite a touch of trouble with the envelopes) at the Oscars. Given his fellow nominees, even Jenkins was sheepish about it.

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“I’m not gonna lie, man,” said Jenkins accepting the directing award. “I didn’t want to win this.”

Jenkins used his speech to instead largely urge more movies to be made with female directors and specifically credited the Scottish filmmaker Ramsey — who encouraged a Jenkins as a film student — for inspiration. “This award has your DNA in it,” Jenkins said.

“Leave No Trace” and “You Were Never Really Here” won other awards, though. “You Were Never Really Here” won for its editing. Granik was honoured with the Spirits’ second annual Bonnie Award, a grant for mid-career female directors. The audience gave her a standing ovation.

“I wasn’t expecting such a love bomb,” said a clearly moved Granik.

A day before many expect her to finally win her first Academy Award, best female lead went to Glenn Close for her performance in “The Wife.” Close was accompanied everywhere by her loyal white Havanese dog Pip: on the awards’ “blue carpet,” on stage with her, and backstage speaking to reporters. While Close accepted her award, Pip rolled on his back alongside her.

“I hope you don’t mind Pippy came up here with me,” said Close. “He’s my date.”

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This year’s Spirits included fewer Oscar contenders than usual, which meant a chance, as Plaza said, for the Spirits to get back to their roots and honour “the movies that are too good to be seen.”

Their best-picture winner has often predicted Oscar-winners, including “Moonlight,” “Spotlight,” “Birdman” and “12 Years a Slave.” But last year Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” took the Spirits’ top honour before Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” won at the Academy Awards. This year, “Beale Street” is nominated for three Oscars but not best picture.

King, though, is the front-runner for best supporting actress. “If you haven’t seen it, go see it,” said King of “Beale Street” before chuckling. “I’m still promoting.”

The Spirit Awards limit nominees to films with budgets of $20 million and under, eliminating bigger budget contenders like “Black Panther” and “A Star Is Born.” They also focus on American movies, limiting Oscar nominees like “Roma” and “The Favourite” to the best international film category — which Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” won.

Cuaron, whose film is favoured to become the first foreign language film to win best picture on Sunday, said he believes cinema is growing more diverse, “and that will make this category irrelevant.”

Plaza led a profane, sarcastic and often very funny ceremony that was broadcast live on IFC. The show featured a show-stopping song-and-dance performance by drag queen Shangela who turned the night’s top nominees, like Paul Schrader’s anguished religious drama “First Reformed,” into a disco medley. “If Beale Street Could Talk, what would she say?” sang Shangela while Jenkins doubled over in laughter.

Plaza also brought in her old “Parks and Recreation” co-star Jim O’Heir for a spoof on Andy King, the infamously dedicated producer featured in the Netflix Fyre Festival documentary, “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.”

Ethan Hawke won best male lead for “First Reformed,” an award collected for the absent actor by his co-star, Amanda Seyfried.

Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” took awards for both Richard E. Grant’s supporting performance and best screenplay for Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Witty. Holofcener called up Heller to join them on stage.

Best first feature went to Boots Riley’s madcap political satirical “Sorry to Bother You.” In his acceptance speech, Riley, a longtime musician making his directorial debut, spoke out against U.S. involvement in Venezuela. He said film is growing more socially conscious.

“There are real movements out there happening on the streets,” said Riley. “Rightly so, film is responding to that.”

Other awards included best documentary for the Oscar-snubbed Fred Rogers documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbour?”; best first screenplay went to the comedian-turned-director Bo Burnham for “Eighth Grade”; Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” won the Robert Altman ensemble award and best cinematography; and the micro-budget “En El Septimo Dia” won the Spirits’ John Cassavetes Award, which honours movies made for less than $500,000.

In her opening monologue, Plaza tweaked the Oscars: “The network’s first choice was no one, but they were already booked for tomorrow.”

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At a time when actors are held to high standards of authenticity, actors from the South say such artistic deference has rarely been paid to them.

From Scarlett O’Hara to the recent biopic of Hank Williams starring British actor Tom Hiddleston, Hollywood has often been indifferent to making Southern characters nuanced and real.

At a time when actors are held to high standards of authenticity, actors from the South say such artistic deference has rarely been paid to them. Then again, they also say they’ve thrived in and beyond their Southernness. Here, nine performers who’ve worked for decades in theater, film and TV reflect on their early years, how their accents helped or hindered them and why they have appreciation now for being “some of the strangest people.”

Big-City Bound

SISSY SPACEK (from Quitman, Texas) I was completely naïve about people judging me for how I sounded. I thought everybody else had an accent. [Laughs] But it’s why I got noticed by [writer-director] Terrence Malick for “Badlands.” That was the most important early film I did. My Southern accent got me that role.

BETH GRANT (Kenansville, North Carolina) I got a bachelor of fine arts and learned how to lose my accent. Then [in] New York I’m competing with actors who weren’t Southern. Guess what I ended up playing? Southern roles. [Laughs] Eventually I thought, “I’m just going to be me.”

ANDIE MacDOWELL (Gaffney, South Carolina) I started as a model and went in for a [commercial]. [I] had to say “oil-free shampoo.” Where I grew up, you say “oil” with just one syllable, like “ole.” The whole room broke out into laughter.

BARRY CORBIN (Lamesa, Texas) I did two seasons at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. I did “Henry V” on Broadway. I did a lot of New York accents. But funny enough I never played anybody from the South.

DALE DICKEY (Knoxville, Tennessee) I moved to New York in the ‘80s [and] saw “Broadcast News” starring [Southern actress] Holly Hunter. I thought, “Wow, she’s the lead and has that accent?” I had never seen a heroine with a Southern accent who wasn’t depicted in a cotton field, a flood or as a prairie woman. I was blown away.

JIM BEAVER (Irving, Texas) Everybody in my family had distinct, thick accents. But for some reason, I never talked like that. Texans would ask me, “Where you from, boy?” It wasn’t until I moved to New York and started auditioning for plays that people said, “That was really nice, but can you lose the Texas accent?”

Hollywood Calling

BILLY BOB THORNTON (Malvern, Arkansas) There is some prejudice against actors from the South. I didn’t really get auditions when I was coming up in Hollywood. They either wanted me to play a hillbilly or a killer, sometimes at the same time! Sometimes they’d even say I wasn’t Southern enough. Really, I am not Southern enough? They wanted me to talk like Big Daddy [in the Mississippi-set “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"].

WALTON GOGGINS (Lithia Springs, Georgia) I was 19 when I moved to Los Angeles. I knew no one. I was grateful to be pigeonholed as Southern. At least I was in a hole! [Laughs]

MacDOWELL My first movie was “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan” and they ended up dubbing over my voice with Glenn Close’s. That was a nice slap in the face. Yes, I was very green, but you say an actress who never acted before is perfect for the role and that’s what you do?

GOGGINS My acting coach, David Legrant, said: “You have to change how other people perceive you. That means changing the sounds that come out of your mouth.” So I read Shakespeare sonnets out loud to myself while I was valet parking in the San Fernando Valley.

Set Pieces

SPACEK Brian De Palma didn’t at all comment on my accent in “Carrie.” I was so focused on being the daughter of Piper Laurie’s character. If you listen, she put a little Southern into her accent and that took the oomph off me.

MARGO MARTINDALE (Jacksonville, Texas) When I did “Nobody’s Fool” with [writer-director] Robert Benton — he’s from Waxahachie, Texas — we became very close. It was set in a small New York town. He’d say: “Honey I’m going to have to keep on you about that accent.”

MacDOWELL Mike Newell gave me no direction about my accent in “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” And there was only one word that Harold [Ramis] corrected me on in all of “Groundhog Day”: the word “really.” I would say ‘rilly,’ Now I say it like I’m from Chicago because that’s where Harold was from.”

THORNTON I know for me, when I am not playing a Southerner, I have to make sure my diction is perfect. [Laughs]

DICKEY “Winter’s Bone” was [set in] Missouri. East Tennessee, the hills, the backwoods — they’re all the same. I fit in that world. I met people who didn’t think I was acting and that [director] Debra Granik just found me there. [Laughs]

GOGGINS “The Shield” writers leaned into my Southernness, but I never spoke with an accent on the show. It was about exploring this person who was like me: from the South but had been living in Los Angeles for nine years. Then with “Justified,” playing Boyd Crowder, I had such an appreciation for sounding Southern again. The longer I’d been away from the South, the more I had an affinity for it.

MARTINDALE Nothing suited me better than “Justified.” I could break all the rules. Claudia in “The Americans” was the opposite: all about restraint and economy. I tried to sound as if I’d learned English from someone who wasn’t an English-speaking person who thought she didn’t have an accent.

Artistry and Audacity

GRANT When I hear actors doing fake Southern accents, it does hurt me. Why wouldn’t [people] want the absolutely most authentic person they could find?

BEAVER As much as I idolize Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, I can’t stand to watch the remake of “Cape Fear.” De Niro simply has no idea how to play a Southerner.

DICKEY I’ve had people ask, “Can you teach me a Southern accent?” I’m like, ‘OK What state? What part of the state? What culture?”

GRANT Tommy Lee Jones in “No Country for Old Men” is letter-perfect. He’s from Texas, but he got the almost effeminate quality of those West Texas boys. Non-Southern actors always make those characters too macho. [He] makes me want to weep it’s so good.

MARTINDALE Actors can almost never get into the music of [the accent] except for maybe Meryl Streep? She can do it — hands down.

SPACEK There isn’t a non-Southern actor better at the accent than Jessica Lange. But the hardest thing now is that movies are made where there is a tax incentive. It used to be [movies were made] wherever the film was set. Hearing all the [local] accents was so helpful.

Reflections on Longevity

MacDOWELL I think I’m better as an actor when I have a little bit of Southern in my work. There’s something about the timing and humor. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” had that low-country, New Orleans feel to it; slow, hot and humid! I milked my accent a little bit for that one. Southern characters are my favorite to play because I think they’re some of the strangest people. [Laughs]

SPACEK I’m doing a Maine accent now for “Castle Rock” on Hulu and oh my gosh, I’ve never worked on anything so hard in my life! But I love my Southern accent. The more excited or mad I get, or as my husband says, as soon as we cross the [Texas] state line, it really comes out.”

GRANT I’ve done a few movies without my accent. But I used [it] in “The Mindy Project,” which gave me a whole new legion of fans.

GOGGINS A young actor recently said, “I’m from Georgia, and you got to know what you mean to the people who’ve followed in your footsteps.” There’s no greater compliment for me. What’s difficult is knowing that I have a child who doesn’t speak like me. He’s being raised in Los Angeles. There’s a part of my story that will only continue in the stories that I tell him, and that’s something I mourn.

MARTINDALE I’m playing mostly non-Southern people now. I just played New York in the late ‘70s in “The Kitchen.” I played Down East Maine in another movie. And for another one they said “All we want you to be is not Southern.” [Laughs] The lesson is: You can always get better.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Stacey Wilson Hunt © 2018 The New York Times

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THE FIRST-EVER Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America recently opened at the Neil Simon Theatre in New York City. The production, starring Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane, is as close to a perfect representation of the AIDS-era masterwork as any theatergoer could hope to see: the play’s alternately intimate and epic impulses are here happily aligned, and under Marianne Elliott’s direction, the two-part play more than lives up to its extravagant subtitle, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” Twenty-five years have passed since Angels first came to Broadway, and though the play remains politically relevant today, such relevance registers as beside the point: its themes now feel not so much “national” as borderless. I saw the whole production — all seven-and-a-half hours of it — over the course of a single Saturday, and left the theater freshly awed by the play’s endless appetite for life in all its wonderful and terrifying variety. This new staging, more than any I’ve ever seen, matches the ambition and heart of Kushner’s text. It could hardly be better.

And yet, for all the production’s distinctiveness — for the electric field of feeling that seems to follow the performers; for the eerie, neon buzz of the design; for the sheer legibility of the script across the decades — it’s hardly the last word on Angels in America. No production is. That, at least, is the unspoken message of The World Only Spins Forward, a new oral history of Angels, written by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, who conducted, edited, and arranged the 250 interviews that constitute the guts of this propulsive, moving account.

So many books about the theater derive their power from the sentimental idea that the best productions and performances remain in the past, beyond the reach of the present-day reader. The World Only Spins Forward refuses to partake in such theatrical rubbernecking. Profiling a multitude of Angels productions — not just the original Broadway staging, but others that came both before and after — The World Only Spins Forward makes the case that Angels, like all truly great pieces of theater, transcends any individual production that might lay definitive claim to the play. In this way, though the book’s focus is on the past, it ultimately points to the future: even if you don’t get to see a production as wonderful as the current Broadway revival, you still haven’t missed out. With a work as great as Angels, there are no lost opportunities.

¤

Kushner’s play first appeared before the public in April 1989, in a staged reading produced by the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco. This was only one of countless developmental steps on Angels in America’s long road to Broadway. “There were eleven thousand workshops,” one of the play’s early stars tells Butler and Kois. “It was well developed.”

More than any piece of theater that preceded it, Angels both reflected and transcended contemporary concerns like AIDS, Reaganism, and gay rights. Audiences were ravenous for the play, and on the power of this enthusiasm, Angels quickly moved up the theatrical food chain. A host of theaters presented early versions of the play while Kushner was still writing and revising it; to read about these separate interpretations, some of which featured different creative teams and casts, is to marvel at the sturdiness of Angels. No matter the artistic context, the play thrived.

At the tiny Eureka Theatre, where Part One made its world premiere in 1991, director David Esbjornson staged the expansive play using the humblest of materials: a shower curtain, bungee cords, sawdust. “It was in some ways the most beautiful version of the play,” says actress Kathleen Chalfant, “and the most Poor Theater version of the play.” There was something deeply moving and oddly funny about the production’s handmade ethos. Critics loved it. Reviewing the show in the Bay Area Reporter, Deborah Peifer wrote, “To call this a brilliantly realized, profoundly funny, wickedly thoughtful piece of theater is to discover the severe limitations of language. I found myself wanting to say, simply, it’s more than I ever imagined.”

A swift, spare staging of Part One subsequently opened in 1992 at London’s Royal National Theatre. Directed by Declan Donnellan, this production unfolded on a mostly empty stage dominated by a huge American flag on the back wall. To increase the play’s tension, Donnellan overlapped the beginning and ends of scenes. Here, too, the response was rapturous. Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Kushner has created an original theatrical world of his own, poetic and churning, that, once entered by an open-minded viewer of any political or sexual persuasion, simply cannot be escaped.”

Other pre-Broadway productions also demonstrated the play’s multiplicity, its capacity to thrive under vastly different budgets and directorial visions. At the Juilliard School, Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me by Your Name), Elizabeth Marvel (Homeland), and other students showed that the play could work in the hands of young actors. In Los Angeles, at the Mark Taper Forum, a difficult rehearsal process nonetheless produced a bigger staging that “sealed your sense that this was the play of its age,” according to San Francisco theater critic Robert Hurwitt. “This was a masterpiece.”

The complete, two-part play finally opened on Broadway in May and November 1993, respectively. Directed by George C. Wolfe, the New York production was far more elaborate than any that had preceded it; stagehands called it “the Money Store” because of all the overtime they earned. And yet, though many of the actors who appeared in the Broadway premiere — among them Stephen Spinella, Joe Mantello, and Marcia Gay Harden — gave performances that are now legendary, The World Only Spins Forward situates these actors among a vast ensemble of other performers who also worked on the play as it grew. Again, the book here emphasizes the play’s pluralism, and demonstrates how Angels was propelled forward by the labor of all the actors who worked on it, not just the ones who opened the show on Broadway.

Naturally, many of the actors who didn’t follow the show to New York had strong, complicated feelings about the whole matter, and The World Only Spins Forward makes quite a bit of hay from this unavoidable fact. Indeed, one of the book’s most interesting chapters bears the subtitle “Getting Fired From Angels in America.” Kathleen Chalfant, one of the performers who did make it to New York, says, “There was, in one way or another, quite a lot of blood on the sand, as there always is in a long development process.” Many actors who worked on the show were terrified of being replaced. Jeff King, who played one of the lead roles early on, says, “It felt like my neck was stretched over a stump and I was waiting for someone to chop my head off.” The axe fell, and King was cut.

Most painfully, Kushner opted not to bring Oskar Eustis, a close friend who had commissioned the play and co-directed the Los Angeles iteration, to Broadway. “There were a lot of hard phone calls,” says Kushner, “but nothing compared to talking to Oskar about the fact that he wasn’t going to go with it. There’s very few things I’ve ever had to do that were harder.” Kushner gave the job to George C. Wolfe, who’d had a recent success with Jelly’s Last Jam on Broadway, because he felt Wolfe could bring the right kind of razzle-dazzle sensibility to the project.

And yet, for some of the fired artists, their experience working on those early versions of Angels counted as extraordinary and life-changing. “Very few people have that chance, being involved in something that is truly grand and important,” says Michael Ornstein.

I never had the same joy as an actor after that. I lost my taste for doing these plays that I didn’t feel were important, that I didn’t feel as much for. I thought about how the gods took the life of the runner of Marathon, because they knew he would never feel that way again, after he ran to announce the victory of the battle.

This sentiment is also shared by those actors who did ride Angels to Broadway. “I stopped acting after Angels in America,” says David Marshall Grant. “I didn’t think there was anywhere else to go. I felt like it touched me — I’m getting emotional, I’m sorry. (Cries.) It touched me very deeply.” Carolyn Swift, from the national tour, recalls,

It kind of ruined me in a sense. When it was over and I went back to auditioning, I knew that it would never be the same for me. And I kind of began plotting my departure from the theater after that. It was like having a brilliant lover, and after that lover goes, you just know.

Angels was such a monumental experience that it made other projects feel insubstantial in comparison. Having worked on such a singular piece of theater, it became harder for the play’s alums to go back to more earthbound productions, whose shortcomings were rendered all the more apparent in the wake of Angels in America’s achievements.

¤

Still, Angels launched far more careers than it ended. Eustis would go on to become artistic director of the Public Theater, producing shows like Hamilton and Fun Home. Joe Mantello, who starred in Angels on Broadway, is now one of the best and most prolific directors in New York. (His many hits include Wicked and The Humans.) Stars like F. Murray Abraham, Cherry Jones, and Debra Messing all appeared in the play, whether in development or on Broadway. Indeed, to read The World Only Spins Forward is to marvel at how many theater artists currently working in the United States began their careers, in some way or another, on those early productions.

This is true of the later productions as well. Roughly half of The World Only Spins Forward is devoted to versions of Angels that followed in the wake of its Broadway debut. We learn not just about the national tour, but about an opera treatment, a controversial student production, auteur-driven productions from Ivo van Hove and David Cromer, and London’s 2017 National Theatre production (the production now playing on Broadway).

The book also traces the play’s winding journey to the small screen. Conversations about a film adaptation began as early as 1991, before Angels had even made it to Broadway. Robert Altman was Kushner’s first choice to direct, but budgetary problems and creative differences ultimately brought the project to HBO and Mike Nichols, whose theater background made him an ideal candidate for the gig. Legitimate quibbles can be made about the film — in literalizing the play, some of its imaginative magic is lost — but Kushner’s vision still comes through with force and clarity. Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Mary-Louise Parker, and the film’s other stars are excellent. As Frank Rich says in The World Only Spins Forward, “It’s one of the very, very few successful film adaptations of a major American play. Maybe one of three: Kazan’s Streetcar, and Nichols’s Virginia Woolf.”

The effect of reading about this interpretation, and the others brought to life in this book, is to make Angels appear all the more impressive and timeless an artistic achievement. It’s a play that can work whether it stars an Oscar winner or a high school student; whether it has a Broadway-sized budget or no money at all; whether it enjoys a Hollywood special effects team or little more than a shower curtain, a bungee cord, and a pile of sawdust. In illustrating this fact, The World Only Spins Forward makes Angels seem like an endlessly productive volcano, one that spits out productions of all shapes and sizes, each scorching with the desire for “more life,” a blessing the play’s hero gives the audience in the Epilogue for Part Two. Readers who know Angels will appreciate the effect of this overflow more than those who don’t, but even the uninitiated are sure to be moved by the play’s impact on the world.

“Here’s what I think might be the thing about Angels in America,” says director David Cromer. “It’s never been defined by a single production, and I don’t think it can be […] It’s like The Cherry Orchard. It’s not conquerable. It’s a mountain you can never totally climb.” It is this idea, as manifest in Butler and Kois’s kaleidoscopic and fabulously entertaining book, that firmly turns the book’s attention to the future. One leaves the narrative hungry not for productions past, but for productions yet to come. More life, the book seems to exclaim. More Angels.

¤

Harrison Hill’s writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review and American Theatre Magazine. He is an MFA candidate at Columbia University’s nonfiction writing program.

The post There Will Always Be More “Angels” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Entertainment: Southerners not always at home in Hollywood

At a time when actors are held to high standards of authenticity, actors from the South say such artistic deference has rarely been paid to them.

From Scarlett O’Hara to the recent biopic of Hank Williams starring British actor Tom Hiddleston, Hollywood has often been indifferent to making Southern characters nuanced and real.

At a time when actors are held to high standards of authenticity, actors from the South say such artistic deference has rarely been paid to them. Then again, they also say they’ve thrived in and beyond their Southernness. Here, nine performers who’ve worked for decades in theater, film and TV reflect on their early years, how their accents helped or hindered them and why they have appreciation now for being “some of the strangest people.”

Big-City Bound

SISSY SPACEK (from Quitman, Texas) I was completely naïve about people judging me for how I sounded. I thought everybody else had an accent. [Laughs] But it’s why I got noticed by [writer-director] Terrence Malick for “Badlands.” That was the most important early film I did. My Southern accent got me that role.

BETH GRANT (Kenansville, North Carolina) I got a bachelor of fine arts and learned how to lose my accent. Then [in] New York I’m competing with actors who weren’t Southern. Guess what I ended up playing? Southern roles. [Laughs] Eventually I thought, “I’m just going to be me.”

ANDIE MacDOWELL (Gaffney, South Carolina) I started as a model and went in for a [commercial]. [I] had to say “oil-free shampoo.” Where I grew up, you say “oil” with just one syllable, like “ole.” The whole room broke out into laughter.

BARRY CORBIN (Lamesa, Texas) I did two seasons at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. I did “Henry V” on Broadway. I did a lot of New York accents. But funny enough I never played anybody from the South.

DALE DICKEY (Knoxville, Tennessee) I moved to New York in the ‘80s [and] saw “Broadcast News” starring [Southern actress] Holly Hunter. I thought, “Wow, she’s the lead and has that accent?” I had never seen a heroine with a Southern accent who wasn’t depicted in a cotton field, a flood or as a prairie woman. I was blown away.

JIM BEAVER (Irving, Texas) Everybody in my family had distinct, thick accents. But for some reason, I never talked like that. Texans would ask me, “Where you from, boy?” It wasn’t until I moved to New York and started auditioning for plays that people said, “That was really nice, but can you lose the Texas accent?”

Hollywood Calling

BILLY BOB THORNTON (Malvern, Arkansas) There is some prejudice against actors from the South. I didn’t really get auditions when I was coming up in Hollywood. They either wanted me to play a hillbilly or a killer, sometimes at the same time! Sometimes they’d even say I wasn’t Southern enough. Really, I am not Southern enough? They wanted me to talk like Big Daddy [in the Mississippi-set “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"].

WALTON GOGGINS (Lithia Springs, Georgia) I was 19 when I moved to Los Angeles. I knew no one. I was grateful to be pigeonholed as Southern. At least I was in a hole! [Laughs]

MacDOWELL My first movie was “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan” and they ended up dubbing over my voice with Glenn Close’s. That was a nice slap in the face. Yes, I was very green, but you say an actress who never acted before is perfect for the role and that’s what you do?

GOGGINS My acting coach, David Legrant, said: “You have to change how other people perceive you. That means changing the sounds that come out of your mouth.” So I read Shakespeare sonnets out loud to myself while I was valet parking in the San Fernando Valley.

Set Pieces

SPACEK Brian De Palma didn’t at all comment on my accent in “Carrie.” I was so focused on being the daughter of Piper Laurie’s character. If you listen, she put a little Southern into her accent and that took the oomph off me.

MARGO MARTINDALE (Jacksonville, Texas) When I did “Nobody’s Fool” with [writer-director] Robert Benton — he’s from Waxahachie, Texas — we became very close. It was set in a small New York town. He’d say: “Honey I’m going to have to keep on you about that accent.”

MacDOWELL Mike Newell gave me no direction about my accent in “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” And there was only one word that Harold [Ramis] corrected me on in all of “Groundhog Day”: the word “really.” I would say ‘rilly,’ Now I say it like I’m from Chicago because that’s where Harold was from.”

THORNTON I know for me, when I am not playing a Southerner, I have to make sure my diction is perfect. [Laughs]

DICKEY “Winter’s Bone” was [set in] Missouri. East Tennessee, the hills, the backwoods — they’re all the same. I fit in that world. I met people who didn’t think I was acting and that [director] Debra Granik just found me there. [Laughs]

GOGGINS “The Shield” writers leaned into my Southernness, but I never spoke with an accent on the show. It was about exploring this person who was like me: from the South but had been living in Los Angeles for nine years. Then with “Justified,” playing Boyd Crowder, I had such an appreciation for sounding Southern again. The longer I’d been away from the South, the more I had an affinity for it.

MARTINDALE Nothing suited me better than “Justified.” I could break all the rules. Claudia in “The Americans” was the opposite: all about restraint and economy. I tried to sound as if I’d learned English from someone who wasn’t an English-speaking person who thought she didn’t have an accent.

Artistry and Audacity

GRANT When I hear actors doing fake Southern accents, it does hurt me. Why wouldn’t [people] want the absolutely most authentic person they could find?

BEAVER As much as I idolize Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, I can’t stand to watch the remake of “Cape Fear.” De Niro simply has no idea how to play a Southerner.

DICKEY I’ve had people ask, “Can you teach me a Southern accent?” I’m like, ‘OK What state? What part of the state? What culture?”

GRANT Tommy Lee Jones in “No Country for Old Men” is letter-perfect. He’s from Texas, but he got the almost effeminate quality of those West Texas boys. Non-Southern actors always make those characters too macho. [He] makes me want to weep it’s so good.

MARTINDALE Actors can almost never get into the music of [the accent] except for maybe Meryl Streep? She can do it — hands down.

SPACEK There isn’t a non-Southern actor better at the accent than Jessica Lange. But the hardest thing now is that movies are made where there is a tax incentive. It used to be [movies were made] wherever the film was set. Hearing all the [local] accents was so helpful.

Reflections on Longevity

MacDOWELL I think I’m better as an actor when I have a little bit of Southern in my work. There’s something about the timing and humor. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” had that low-country, New Orleans feel to it; slow, hot and humid! I milked my accent a little bit for that one. Southern characters are my favorite to play because I think they’re some of the strangest people. [Laughs]

SPACEK I’m doing a Maine accent now for “Castle Rock” on Hulu and oh my gosh, I’ve never worked on anything so hard in my life! But I love my Southern accent. The more excited or mad I get, or as my husband says, as soon as we cross the [Texas] state line, it really comes out.”

GRANT I’ve done a few movies without my accent. But I used [it] in “The Mindy Project,” which gave me a whole new legion of fans.

GOGGINS A young actor recently said, “I’m from Georgia, and you got to know what you mean to the people who’ve followed in your footsteps.” There’s no greater compliment for me. What’s difficult is knowing that I have a child who doesn’t speak like me. He’s being raised in Los Angeles. There’s a part of my story that will only continue in the stories that I tell him, and that’s something I mourn.

MARTINDALE I’m playing mostly non-Southern people now. I just played New York in the late ‘70s in “The Kitchen.” I played Down East Maine in another movie. And for another one they said “All we want you to be is not Southern.” [Laughs] The lesson is: You can always get better.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Stacey Wilson Hunt © 2018 The New York Times

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/08/entertainment-southerners-not-always-at_17.html