‘Hey china, y’all wanna cast me in your movie, ek sê?’

MOVE over, Charlize Theron — South Africans able to imitate that American twang on screen are rapidly becoming a dime a dozen.

South Africa’s attraction as a location for international film productions is creating opportunities for local actors to break into the big time. But first they have to learn to sound the part.

The foreign accent business is booming, nearly doubling over 18 months for The Voice Clinic, according to CEO Monique Rissen-Harrisberg.

“We have a significant number of clients who are actors,” she said.

The most popular accents to acquire and or refine were American and British, Rissen-Harrisberg said, but there was also some demand to learn Italian and French inflections, mainly for commercials.

The most important factor is “the desire to learn or change the accent”, she said.

“Some of the hardest accents to reproduce are Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian or Czech, if one is English or American to start with.”

Talent agent Emma Ress has also seen an increase in business for her clients — and thinks local actors can be more than just extras in a crowd scene.

“It’s not that South Africans can’t audition for the bigger roles . . . If casting directors could see how brilliant our talent was, perhaps they would be marketing them on the international stage,” she said.

The trick is “good coaching” — someone with a good ear, like voice coach and actress Fiona Ramsay.

“It is easier for Englishspeaking actors in South Africa to shift to US and UK accents, but it is easier for Afrikaans speakers to shift to Dutch, German and Slavic accents,” she said.

“Vernacular language speakers are at an advantage when learning any of the myriad accents of the continent.”

Leon Clingman, 49, has been acting for 25 years and doing accent work for a decade. He has worked with stars such as Sienna Miller, in New Girl, and Sam Neill, in Tutankhamun. He has also appeared in the hit TV series Black Sails, which is shot in Cape Town.

Clingman said the ability to switch accent was essential to get film work in Cape Town.

He said he had mastered the Russian accent and was looking forward to learning to speak like a Scot.

“Ninety percent of my work is in the British accent. I can do posh for a period piece, but there’s a new mixture of posh and not-so-posh that I’ve had to master,” he said.

Putting on an accent needed practice.

“It’s a muscular thing. If you stop working on it, those muscles become stiff. It’s like being at the gym. The more you do it, the more the muscles adjust,” he said.

The film industry employs 15 000 people nationally and contributes about R5-billion a year to the Cape Town economy.

Some of the hardest accents to reproduce are Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian or Czech