He does an uncanny Christian Slater
If there’s a scene stealer in “Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story,” it might be Christian Slater’s voice coming out of another man’s mouth.
It’s not dubbing. It’s actor Chris Mason being really good at sounding like Slater.
The anthology series focuses in Season 2 on Broderick’s 1989 double murder of her ex-husband, Daniel Broderick, and his new wife, Linda Kolkena. Much of the series’ action is set in the run-up to the brutal killings, with Amanda Peet and Christian Slater portraying the couple amid the nasty breakdown of their marriage. But flashbacks of the young lovebirds, played by Tiera Skovbye (“Riverdale”) and Mason (“Broadchurch”), are introduced in the second episode.
With few resources to emulate Dan Broderick’s vocal cadence, Mason modelled his vocal performance on Slater’s to ensure a sense of symmetry between young and older Dan. Hailing from Liverpool, the 29-year-old actor credits his uncanny impression of Slater’s distinctive voice, which sounds like there’s a grin perpetually attached to it, to years of having to camouflage his thick Scouse accent.
“When I started acting in the U.K., there was a requirement for me to change my voice a lot to different British accents in order to work,” he says by phone. “When I moved to America, I hired a coach and I realized the actual work that goes into understanding a voice.”
The examination of Slater’s voice took many forms. Mason observed Slater on set — “I would watch him and then I would go away and make sure it’s grounded in what I was doing.” Mason also studied clips on YouTube and Slater’s films “Heathers” (1989) and “Kuffs” (1992) to get a sense of Slater’s rhythms. Plus, Mason and his wife had begun watching “Mr. Robot.”
“I had a few warm-ups,” Mason says. “I’d do a full vocal warm-up before I even head to set. But then on set, there were a few things — lines of Christian’s that I heard him say on set — and I would run them over and over and over and over, just as we’d run up to ‘action.’
Mason says most of the interactions he had with Slater were focused on how to marry their performance on some of Dan’s schticks — like the turtle and the alligator bit, in which Dan would come home inebriated after a long night and playfully drop to the floor and imitate the creatures. Mason read journalist Bella Stumbo’s book “Until the Twelfth of Never: The Deadly Divorce of Dan & Betty Broderick,” which served as the season’s source material, to learn more about the power couple and their very unhappily ever after.
“There’s an awful lot of stuff out there,” he says. “There’s tons on Betty, especially after this happened, and not a lot on Dan, so I read up until the point of the age I stopped playing because I didn’t want to know anything beyond that that might influence my performance. I didn’t want to be second-guessing something.”