I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.
My whole deal when I do accents or dialects is I gotta fool the locals. If I fool the locals then I've done my job.
I just love dialects; they're really fun.
When we started on 'Power,' I was committed to respecting the differences among Spanish dialects: Dominican, Nuyorican, Mexican, etc. I wanted the language our characters spoke to be as specific as possible, to reflect New York as it is.
At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.
Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.
Somebody sent me a British magazine listing the 20 worst dialects ever done in movies. I was No. 2, with the worst Cockney accent ever done. No. 1 was Sean Connery, because he uses his Scottish brogue no matter what he's playing.
In college, I went to school for acting; we had to learn phonetics just to be able to do dialects and all that stuff. I'm somebody who does better just hearing it. I'll just imitate it, and I get it better that way. When I know too much information, I'm not great.
Everywhere the sky is blue. There are a multitude of cuisines and dishes. I think of them as the languages and dialects of food.
I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.
