HOLLYWOOD Q&A
Q: I notice that the actors, particularly the women, in Shonda Rhimes’s shows sound alike, whether in “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Scandal.” Does she ask them to use this particular style of acting?
A: As the creator and showrunner of all the shows under her ShondaLand production company, Shonda Rhimes is famously controlling. She has strong opinions about everything from acting to wardrobe. Rhimes freely admits this and says it came naturally, even in the early days of her first show, “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“Somebody would say to me, ‘What color shoes should Meredith be wearing?’ And I knew that answer,” she said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “I could tell you why the interns should be doing this activity. That stuff was in my head because I had really spent time to measure who those characters were.”
As for the acting itself, Rhimes’s characters are forever engaging in lengthy monologs delivered at a stunningly fast pace. “Scandal” star Katie Lowes compared it to rapidfire Shakespeare, and said that
the direction comes directly from Rhimes — who, incidentally, is the only person to ever ask her to speak faster. “It’s a totally different beat than anything I’ve ever worked on before.”
Slate magazine cut together a video of dialog from all the ShondaLand shows, identifying “a notably strange cadence to the characters’ speech, a rhythm particular to the worlds created by Rhimes.” The compilation is titled “Video Proof That All of Shonda Rhimes’s Characters Sound Exactly the Same.”
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