Portland's film and television industry has become increasingly successful over the past several
years, and one of the most fascinating people in the industry there is Mary McDonald-Lewis,
an internationally recognized dialect coach and longtime voice actor on such iconic animated
shows as
G.I. Joe and
Archer. Portland based Blu-ray.com reviewer Jeffrey
Kauffman interviewed Mary Mac (as she's known to her friends) about her work on the Oregon
shot
Green
Room as well as some of her other credits.
Give us some general background on your career.
Sure. I became fascinated with voice in college. While
other students were active on stage, as I was to some extent, I was already interested in
radio, reader's theater, public speaking, and certainly writing. I was an English and Theater
Major at California State University in Sacramento. It was Harlan Ellison, the well known
science fiction writer, who kind of pointed me in the direction of being a voice actor in that I
went to a talk given by him and after he was done I went up to compliment him on an essay
he had written about the death of a dog. He simply responded, "That voice, that voice, I want
to put that voice in the Smithsonian Institution." I had no impression of my voice as
compelling, but I knew that people had commented on my voice. I bummed around for a
while after college, and needed to ply a trade, if only I could figure what trade I should be
plying. So I moved to Los Angeles, and ultimately I did a voiceover workshop by a DJ named
Tom Clay, and I got into the booth and took my first run at commercial copy, came out of the
booth, and Tom Clay and said, "You're a wild mountain pony, we just need to break you to the
bridle and saddle and you're going to work in this business." I made my demo tape, a year
later I finally got an agent, and a year after that I got my first job for Arrowhead Pure Spring
Water. I was amazed I had made $200 in 10 minutes, and a friend said "You just made $200
in two years!" One in ten voiceover jobs were for women back in the day. I was assured that
I would never work in this business—ever. But I was too young, and dumb, and innocent but
also courageous and kind of backboned to believe them. And so I foolishly carried on.
How specifically did you get into dialect coaching?
Let's swiftly move through the years as a voice actor. I worked (and still work) in animation,
in looping and dubbing, commercials, industrials. I became the first and longest working voice
in speech recognition as the voice of OnStar, which interestingly enough in 1996 was placed in
the Smithsonian Institution, just like Harlan Ellison wanted it to be. Along the way as a voice
actor, you're called on to do dialects more than actors who are seen on screen. Voice actors
are very voice oriented, we hear things more distinctly more than other kinds of actors do. So
I became adept at accents, a good ear learner, and I knew where accents lived in my body. I
became a professor, a journalist, a seminar speaker, a moderator. Any form of communication
or instruction. I even taught ESL in Los Angeles for twelve years. When you add all of that
up, my love of voice, my good ear, my passion for helping people, my love of immigrants, my
fascination with language, that makes a pretty good dialect coach. Pretty good, but not
perfect. So here in Portland I was doing some informal coaching, and I got a call from the
Oregon Film Commissioner, and he said, "You're a dialect coach, aren't you?" and I said
without hesitation, "Why yes, yes, I am." And I got a Hallmark movie that was set in North
Carolina (though it was being filmed in Oregon). So I got in my car and drove, and thank
goodness I had an hour and fifteen minutes on that drive to figure out what the hell a dialect
coach does. I'm blessed with founded confidence. I don't have any obstacles between what I
can do and what I think I can do. The difference between the woman who drove to that
location and who I am today is, very quickly I realized I was as passionate about this, if not
more passionate, than I was about my voiceover work. And so I began taking courses. I
joined the Voice and Speech Trainers' Association, which includes dialect coaches but which
also includes academics who teach voice and acting. One of the touchstones for me as a
dialect coach is that all accents, languages and dialects are equal. They are neither beautiful
nor ugly, but I'm not comfortable saying that. I think they're all beautiful. There are no ugly
accents, only ugly thoughts.
What sorts of regimens do you employ as a dialect coach?
One of things I love about coaching is its tenderness. People are very vulnerable when they're
learning to speak a different language, a different accent, or a different dialect. The difference
between an accent and a dialect is an accent is how you sound, a dialect is what you say. The
dialect has more to do with your vernacular. So, I'm aware of the fear, and the shame and
the worries and concerns that most people experience when they're learning languages. So
the question becomes, how can I best reach this person and help them manifest this
language? My first job is to figure out, what's the key to this person's heart. I bring some
basics to the work. I bring my use of what are called lexical sets to work, which were invented
by a guy named John C. Wells, who's still living and an academic. The lexical sets can be seen
as a roadmap to dialects. There's a series of 24 words, each of which refers to a vowel sound.
If I said to you, in a southern Irish accent, "kit" sounds more like "dress", you'd get to
something like "ket". Similarly, an Italian accent would shift "kit" to "fleece". Learning where
the vowels live in the body requires anatomical understanding of what's going on in the
mouth. Pace, rhythm, pitch, is it staccato, is it legato, is it a stress timed language like
English, or a syllable timed language like Italian? Then you've got character and circumstance
and context, and the finally you have the "pixie dust." The pixie dust has to do with the
relationship between myself and my client.
Will you ever discuss things after a take if the dialect isn't to your liking?
I'll tell you a Patrick Stewart story. I was very excited when I found out he was looking for a
coach and he called me. (Launches into a spot on Stewart impersonation): "You know, Hugh
Jackman has a dialect coach, and she whispers to him and he becomes Wolverine. And I
thought to myself, that's really the way to go." So he had it in his head to get his first dialect
coach ever, and his first legitimate American accent ever. I got with him, and thought who is
he, how does he learn, where is the gate into his heart? I'm honest when I'm with these
clients, and I said to him, "Patrick, we'll work on your American accent. But we've got the
voice of yours that's so quintessentially you. What do you think about a ruined voice, a
damaged voice, a voice that is sandpapery and harsh and affected by the hatred you're
engaged in as a white supremacist?" And he liked that very much, and went on and did that.
And every time I gave him a note, which could be five or six different things after one take,
he'd say, "Thank you, I see, that's much better." He wasn't trying just to appease the buzzy
dialect coach, he was taking the note and applying the note. So, when I'm working with a
client on set I'm with the director and DP in "video village" with my cans on with some of the
rest of the crew, watching the monitor, and when they call "cut" I slip in like smoke, slip up
quietly, whisper a word or two and off I go. And because we have lexical sets, we have
shorthand. I can just say, "Remember what the 'kit set' does."
How did you get involved with Green Room?
I actually got to Patrick Stewart first. Other than Oregon Shakespeare Festival coaches, I'm
the only working dialect coach in Oregon. But what happened is that Patrick Stewart's son
Daniel worked on a play at Portland Center Stage, where I'm the house dialect coach. Patrick
asked Daniel about dialect coaches in Oregon, and Daniel wrote to Portland Center Stage, and
they recommended me. I got a letter from Patrick Stewart saying, "My name is Patrick
Stewart, I'm Daniel Stewart's father." (Hearty laugh).
Tell me about some of your other Oregon projects.
I'm going into my tenth year as a series dialect coach without leaving Portland, though I work
internationally and live part of the year in New York working on shows there. The fact that
the two series shot here,
Leverage and
Grimm, needed a dialect coach
weekly is extraordinary good fortune. I had the good luck to work with all the leads and guest
stars on
Leverage, and then along came
Grimm, which has need not just for
"regular" dialect coaching but also for whimsical things like what I call Grimmish. Grimmish
has a Germanic pedigree, and so it has to follow certain rules. Working with my experts, I
ensure that there is some sense to the pattern of Grimmish that we use. I also work with
dead or esoteric languages, like heiroglyphics. I reach out to experts like Egyptologists, I learn
what I need to know which I then pass along to the relevant crew members. Greek, Latin,
Mayan—I am the language guardian.
Tell me about your voicework in animated features.
One of the sweetest things about my life as a voice actor is that I got to create several
characters in pop culture. The greatest of these was Lady Jaye in
G.I. Joe. I'm still
called upon to appear at ComicCons. It's one of the easiest ways I know of to make people
happy. There's a statistically high number of first responders who come to "JoeCons" and
attribute their careers to the show, which is amazing. Now, it's a quarter of a century later,
and I have a new character, Veronica Deane on
Archer. She's similar to Lady Jaye, in
that she's very strong, very capable and very dangerous. The only difference is she's most
decidedly a bad guy, while Lady Jaye was a good guy. But I now have a whole new generation
of audience members I can make happy, that I can delight. It also affirms my early choice,
the choices made by that very, very naive kid that this was the path for me.