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At the core of the story itself is that accent. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where it’s from, given that Delvey was born in Russia, grew up in Germany and spent time in Europe before heading to the US.
But what makes all this much more relevant to SA audiences is that the coach who helped actress Julia Garner replicate Delvey’s accent is Barbara Rubin from Joburg.
Rubin, a theatre director with credits at The Market and The Baxter theatres, arrived in New York 21 years ago to fulfil a dream of working with Athol Fugard on his play Sorrows and Rejoicings as his assistant director. It was there that her passion for dialect work was first triggered; while being active on the directing side, she was also drawn to help the cast to master their SA accents. She has juggled both jobs ever since.
Speaking to the FM from New York, Rubin says she first began working with Garner about 10 years ago at the request of Pamela Scott, Garner’s acting coach.
“[Garner] was getting a lot of auditions for British characters, and Pam recommended we work together,” she says.
One of Garner’s early leading roles was in an independent film called Tomato Red, set in the US Midwest region of the Ozarks. Rubin coached her for that role, which then became the template for Ruth Langmore in the hit Netflix series Ozark.
Rubin says: “[Garner’s] ability to transform is really incredible. She will try something and suddenly it becomes very embodied: the sounds inform the gestures and the physical choices — it’s fascinating to watch her create the character and see how a small adjustment, or something very subtle, is layered into a complex persona.”
But Delvey was a particular challenge. “Very few people had actually heard [Delvey] speak at the time,” says Rubin.
So in 2019, Netflix gave Rubin and Garner access to publicly unavailable recordings of Delvey speaking in prison, as well as to video and audio interviews. “It was such a blend of things — there was so much going on, it defied imagination,” says Rubin.
She and Garner pored over Delvey’s Instagram posts too, where they could study how Delvey talked to her friends.
“From the start of the interview to the end [Delvey’s] dialect changes and she’s picking up rhythms,” Rubin says. “It was very chameleon-like, which is interesting, given the kind of person she is and what we know of her. You can’t quite pinpoint the story the dialect is telling, but it’s so compelling.”
Having said that, Rubin and Garner were clear that they were going for an artistic interpretation of Delvey rather than a strict recreation. It was about finding what impulses worked well for Garner, then selecting certain elements and softening others.
In interviews, Garner said that pulling off Delvey’s accent was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her career, partly because of the layers of Delvey’s deception.
“I didn’t even know what her accent was,” she told film website IndieWire. “This is a girl who said she was German, and people believe it, but she was actually born in Russia, so she [was] not going to have a Russian accent. And then she probably learnt English in the British way because she’s European, [and] they don’t learn American English.”
Not quite Winnie Mandela
Recreating Delvey’s accent may have been a unique effort, but Rubin has spent years working on various accents with some of New York’s finest theatre actors.
Not that it’s as simple as it sounds. It entails extensive research to make sure that not only is the general accent authentic, but that it’s specific to the character and tells the story of this person. “Ultimately, we design the dialect by selecting certain elements, and then we work to maintain consistency. The audience’s ear trusts consistency,” Rubin says.
Her work with Garner, for example, was entirely different from the process of working on Darrell Roodt’s movie Winnie Mandela, where she coached Jennifer Hudson, who played the title character, and Terrence Howard, who played Nelson Mandela. “We obviously had a lot of interview material of the Mandelas. Their dialects are recognisable to the ears of the
world,” she says. “But there was no exposure to the sound of the real Delvey’s voice when we began working.”
While Rubin works on set in some instances, she often works as a pre-production coach with an actor for weeks before they get to set.
“It’s a bespoke process, unique to each actor and how they learn best. Is it by listening, or are they more visual, or kinaesthetic? Do they need to see a phonetic symbol or feel a new shape in their mouths?
And how is their idiolect [their own unique accent] different or similar to the dialect they’re learning?”
The actor should get to a stage where it’s spontaneous, because if they’re listening to themselves, they’re not able to react in the moment.
“I’m usually trying to get out of the way of the actor, so the story is the important thing, not the dialect. If you’re listening to and thinking about the dialect you’re missing out on the storytelling,” Rubin says.
In Delvey’s case, however, the accent is part of the story
— a metaphor for her ability to morph into what she needed to be, and a clue that nothing is as it seems.
Is there anyone Rubin particularly admires in terms of accents?
“There are two British actors I’ve been super-impressed with recently — Kate Winslet in
Mare of Easttown and Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman. But while I think they’re wonderful, I also know they have incredible coaches: Susan Hegarty for Winslet and the legendary Tim Monich, who I was fortunate enough to be mentored by,” Rubin says.
While Delvey used New York as a buzzing background —
sashaying from nightclubs to luxury apartments — the city has proved both incredible and trying for Rubin over the years.
“Being in New York sometimes feels like being in one of those relationships where, when it’s great it’s amazing, and when it’s bad it’s like … ‘What the heck am I doing?’ But I still love it, the energy and possibility it offers,” Rubin says.
She’s the associate director for the Conor McPherson-Bob Dylan musical Girl from the North Country on Broadway. The production is now on hiatus, because of logistical issues relating to Covid, but is set to reopen in April.
The Joburg difference
Rubin feels her upbringing in Joburg prepared her well for a career as a dialect coach.
“I had a relatively welldeveloped ear because not only does Joburg have a rich diversity of dialects, my Latvian grandmother, who lived with us, had a strong accent and I was always trying to correct her pronunciation,” she says. She was also obsessed with the accent of her American cousins. “Early on, I was very interested in how we can change the way we sound,” she says.
“[Fugard] would always say: ‘This is not a documentary, we are not focused on creating an absolute replica; we’re focused on this believable fiction of creating a world for American audiences that is SA.’ That became a sort of credo for my approach to this work: there is artistry, a design, if you will, based on an understanding of who the audience is,” she says.
Rubin was reunited with Fugard as a dialect coach on a series beginning with the Broadway revival of The Road to Mecca starring Rosemary Harris. She coached for six Fugard productions at the off-Broadway Signature Theatre, which named Fugard its legacy playwright after he received a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2011.
As The Wall Street Journal gushed at the time: “Rubin … has helped the actors to inhabit their roles even more deeply than one would have said possible.”
Is an SA accent particularly tough to learn? If you’ve watched the horrific interpretations over the years, you’d imagine it can’t be easy.
Rubin says the problem in the US is that most American actors aren’t frequently exposed to SA dialects, and so have a blunt, stereotypical view of what they should sound like. “Actors here will leave drama school with a generic African dialect, which to my ear is a little more West African with a distinct Nigerian sound. So often it’s about trying to shift it into the region —
replacing sounds that make us think we are somewhere else in Africa, locating it more specifically,” she says.
Ironically, an interpretation that is spot-on can actually prove jarring. “If the accent is too authentic, the audience will be pulled out because they’ve never heard anything quite so strong, so while the actors may do a really authentic job of rolling their Rs, if it’s too distracting we pull it back,” she says.
Rubin was the preproduction coach for Daniel Radcliffe, who played Tim
Jenkin in Escape from Pretoria.
“He’s a dream to work with and he sounded really excellent — his mom was born in SA, so maybe it’s in his genes.”
Rubin also coached Adam Bakri, who played a Turkish
Kurd in the film Official Secrets,
directed by South African Gavin Hood.
The final word on Rubin’s craft ought to come from
Delvey herself. She hadn’t planned on watching Inventing Anna, but ultimately couldn’t resist. Speaking to The New York Times about Garner’s interpretation of her accent, Delvey said: “She got it right, in a way.” Which is perhaps the most praise you can expect from someone whose darkest machinations have now been captured for posterity.