For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman. So, I have a confession that I need to get off my chest, and I'm bringing in my friend, SIAM's very own Allison Parshall, to help. What is it, Kendra? I'm obsessed with the TV show Heated Rivalry. Wait, me too. The romance, the hockey, the tension. So good. The yearning. The Russian. I mean, one of the things that both you and I have talked about so much is how the American actor, Connor Story, who co-starred as the Russian character Ilya Rozenov, pulled off speaking so much Russian and perfected his accent. Yeah, it was shocking. And to help us understand the linguistics behind the hit TV show, we talked to Heated Rivalry's Russian dialect coach, Kate Yablunovsky. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Can you tell us a little bit more about dialect coaching? Like, what is it and how did you get into doing this work? Well, dialect coaching, I specialize specifically in Russian, Russian-Ukrainian. And it's about preparing an actor to speak with as much of an authentic accent, which it's not always what it sounds like. It's not always just to be authentic. Sometimes, actually, it's the opposite. Sometimes it's to take the perfection out of the accent so that the character feels authentic. This is something that I got into very unexpectedly. It started when a smaller production in my city, they had some Russian-speaking characters and they couldn't find a local Russian dialect coach. and I was casting that film and they were like, maybe you should coach them as well. And I jumped into the water and it took me on a journey because I learned so much through that very first experience. And I had to start to develop all kinds of techniques and exercises and try to understand speech therapy and everything that goes into it to be able to get best of the results for them as possible. And from there on, I went to work on a few other productions and started working with actors. And I think it was like a mutual evolution for actors and for myself. Before we get into the work that you did on Heated Rivalry, what are some of the hardest sounds in Russian for English speakers to pick up? Well, it's funny because when I coach actors to speak Russian, there's always this comment that comes up that they say, oh my God, you have so many sounds. You have so many sounds. And I joke with them as I'm telling them like, okay, I'm going to open you up to a whole new world of sounds. It's usually the vowels that kind of, you know, in English, they would feel like they're two letters, but it's actually one letter vowel that you have to pronounce with other consonants. So there's the sound y, like when we say the word ty. Y? Y. Yeah. Y? That's a hard one. Now imagine the way we say in Russian you is ty. So imagine now adding ty to the sound y, it's ty. So it's like one of the hardest vowels for English speakers to pick up, but is it one of the most common? Very common, because every time we say you, you know, ты is a very common word in speech. Я, as well. So, я is a vowel. And if you want to add consonants before it, you have to make it sound like they're merged, not to make it sound like you're saying the consonant and the vowel separately. Is there an example of that one? That sound, yo, isn't that in I love you? I love you in Russian is But here an example I said which has has the vowel yeah in it So yeah is similar Like you have to in the word you have to merge the B with the yeah and say тебя. Not тебя. This is the example, right? Not тебя, but тебя. And this is something that's very hard for non-Russian speakers to learn. I noticed this when I was trying, like even Ilya, one of the main characters' names. Is that the case with his name too? Because I feel like English speakers are often pronouncing it like Ilya rather than the way it's supposed to be. But I don't know if I can do the way it's supposed to be. No, no. Actually, that one is very serious. It's Ilya. Okay. That one's easier then. And if we go into accent coaching, it's just that the L in the name Ilya is softer in Russian. So it's not Ilya, it's Ilya. There's so many nuances that you kind of don't know until you get into it. No, totally. It's a whole world. But, you know, a lot of actors kind of misunderstand Russian. So they come with this kind of idea that it has to be aggressive. But it's actually not aggressive at all. It's not harsh. It's compressed. Can you say more about what you mean about compressed? Yes. It's just that the stresses are not about making it like harsh or aggressive, right? It's just about restraining a bit the expression, restraining a bit the emotion behind the words. But it's still lyrical, you know, it's still humorous. There's still warmth. There's irony. There's all kinds of things. It's not just like this kind of a monotone, harsh expression. I did want to ask a little bit about what you were brought on to do specifically for Heated Rivalry. Like what was the challenge that you were presented with when you started? Is it pretty normal for the kinds of work you often get as a dialect coach or was it a little bit out of the ordinary? So what was out of the ordinary on Heated Rivalry is just the amount of Russian that an American actor had to do. I was lucky to work with Connor's story because he was incredible and he really took the challenge like head on and it was very stressful but I was hired on a project before Connor was cast. So I just looked at the script. I saw all of this Russian. And to be honest, for a moment, I got nervous because the timing was short. We're like a couple of weeks before principal photography. And it's a very short time to start practicing Russian at that level for such an amount. When Connor got cast, when we had our first call, I told Connor, you you know, if you're willing, I'm willing that we show up every day and work on the Russian. And that's the best way that we're going to make it work. And he totally went into it. And we were meeting every day, including weekends. And we kept on working even after the principal photography started, you know, so on days off or after the shoot, on breaks, whatever, we kept on working as much as possible. What were some of the struggles that Conor encountered? Like, what was he really good at and what did he find especially challenging? So the beauty with Connor is that he came with a very good base. So first of all, he speaks French too. And that's a great tool because it gives him another tool bag of other pronunciations. If someone speaks only English, they are only aware of English pronunciation. French pronunciation is very different from Russian, but it still stretched his elastic, right? It's like his muscle was already stretched as far as working with accents. And then he's always very interested in Russian culture. He was listening to Russian music, Russian rap. It was fun to work in that way because we would exchange like music ideas and cultural anecdotes So he had some insight into the Russian culture and that helped a lot I think the challenges with Conor were not the usual challenges that I had with other actors I trained. The challenge with him was just how much he had on the plate, because he had a very short time. He had to not just learn Russian, and we're talking about not only learning Russian, but eventually memorizing it putting a character on it acting it out and everything but he also has to prepare all the rest of the script all the English parts of it he had to learn to skate he had to prepare for hockey you know there was just so much so I felt like with Connor it's not that he had challenges necessarily the hard sounds that we talked about before everybody struggles with it And we always had to work a little bit extra on it. But I think he was like miles ahead of anybody. And with everything that he had on this plate, you know, the challenge was just to run that marathon and stay sane. Something that people have noticed is when Conor speaks Russian in the show, it seems like his face looks very different than the way it does when he's just kind of himself Conor's story. And I know this in accents, there's this thing called oral posture, which is like how you hold your mouth and your tongue and everything. Speaking other languages, I feel like my mouth changes shape entirely. And we were just kind of curious, like, do you coach people on changing the shape of their mouths in order to help understand how to make sounds? Is that part of anything or does it just come along with making the sounds correctly? So what I do coach people is more about the insight into the culture of how people speak, the way a Russian speaker would pronounce, would enunciate, and the way their body language would go. However, the facial expression is actually, it's more the placement of the speech, right? So for example, in English, English is very forward, right? The lips, the teeth, the breath. While Russian is more in the far back in the mouth and there's a heavier tongue base. So once you change all that, it alters psychology. And that's why actually you can hear different people who speak more than one language. When they speak different languages, the sound of their voice changes because of how differently they intonate and possibly also their face. So Hunter's facial expressions is something that he brought to the table. That's his creation. But it's inspired from the fact that all of those things that I've explained, you know, they alter your psychology and it's part of the character. One of the most impressive scenes, I think, for many people is the monologue that Connor does when he's talking to Hudson's character, Shane, in Russia. Can you talk a bit about how that scene came together? Yes, this monologue was something that we were stressed about because it was a few pages long. It was very emotionally charged. So it was not only to learn it, memorize it, but also hit the emotional mark. And here it was very important, you know, where he would place the stress, where he would pronounce it the right way. This is what makes all the difference. And it started with, I make sure that when I teach actors Russian or prepare them for a Russian text, that they actually know what they're saying. So they're not memorizing Russian lines without understanding what they're saying to the word. Right? It's not like this line, it says this. I translate every word for them, even if it doesn't make sense. So meaning if in Russian the placement the order of the words is different than in English I would translate it as is so that they understand each word that they saying and understand where the stress has to come and how do they enunciate this whole sentence. Is there an example? I don't know if I remember how it was in the monologue. Oh, when he says, I love Svetlana, but not the way that I love you. Well, he was saying, I'm just giving a free translation word by word into English. Let's have the line, I love you so much and I don't know what to do about it. I so strong, you love. So just to show you, you know, how the order is different. Well, I could see how they need to know that because otherwise the stress might fall on the wrong spot. Like you wouldn't really know how to feel it. Right, because you'll notice that in the monologue, Connor did it perfectly. It was very beautiful and very touching. I was touched on set as well. But he said, you know, he put this trust on like on the so much. I love you so much. And he put this trust in Russian. And the is like strongly, you know, so much is what it means. He knew perfectly what he was doing. Some of the reaction to Connor's accent on the show is that many of us have attempted to learn foreign to us language and struggled with accent and pronunciation. and it often feels like we're sort of left to our own devices to sort of like figure it out on how to like speak like a local. Do you have any tips for language learners sort of generally who aren't in a position to hire a dialect coach? I think when you learn a language, if you're doing it by yourself, you can try the same principles of dialect coaching. Listen to the pronunciation and understand the sounds and try to understand what's happening in the mouth when you're trying to pronounce that sound. And at first it won't work, right? But then you have to kind of move the needle to find that sweet spot where you can make the sound, right? I mean, I think one of the interesting things about language learning is what you said earlier of thinking of having learned any language as like stretching your elastic. I thought that was like a nice metaphor. It seems like we're hard on ourselves because we want to sound quote unquote correct. But I think of all the people who I know and love in my life who speak a different accent of English than mine. And it's only like more beautiful flavors of English. So totally. It's about communication. Exactly. And it's different for actors because actors seek to attain a perfect accent. But the problem is that sometimes trying to attain a perfect accent is actually counterintuitive. It makes the character not real. And when there's a struggle, I actually tell the actors, drop the accent and they panic. But then when they say it in their own voice, they kind of start hearing like, where is the accent logic behind that language? In my case, Russian, right? Like, where's the logic? Where's the stress? Where's the restraint? And then they hear it, they understand it. They're able to do it like a bit more calmly, you know? The accent has to live on top of the character, right? You can't come and just perform it. It has to be part of the feeling. This has been so interesting, Kate. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much. That's all for today. Tune in on Friday when we explore how kissing came to be. Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierluis, along with Fonda Mwangi, Shishmita Patek, and Jeff Delvisio. This episode was co-hosted by Alison Parshall and edited by Alex Siguiera. Shana Poses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Kendra Pierre-Lewis. See you next time.
