David Tennant On His Gracepoint Accent: It's Part Of Defining The Character



David Tennant responded to fans who are fretting over the substitution of his native Scottish accent for an American one in his new show Gracepoint - by simply pointing out that it was also notably absent in the series for which he is best known.

“Well if they're fans of Doctor Who, I didn't use a Scottish accent in that, either. I used an English accent in that,” he said.

David was taking part in a conference call interview with multiple bloggers yesterday to talk about the Fox TV show Gracepoint. In the US remake of the hugely popular drama Broadchurch, David plays American detective Emmett Carver, the counterpart of the disheveled and perpetually grumpy Alec Hardy. He brushed off the issue of accents in his work.

“I think doing different accents is part of the job of acting really. It's something else that I quite enjoy the challenge of, to be honest," he said. The work involved wasn't a trial either.

"Preparing for an American accent, I think just about in every corner of the globe, we're brought up watching American movies, so it's something that we all have some kind of ear for, I guess. Obviously, it's something that you take seriously, and you work with dialect coaches and experts to help you, and then you just practice until it's kind of in your bones, really, so that it's not something you're thinking about when you're on set every day. You do your homework and then you wind it up and let it go, I suppose.

"It's part of what actors do. I always like seeing people transforming themselves in whatever way that might be, and a different accent is part of that. An accent, obviously, is to do with the way your mouth works and the sounds that come out of your head, but somehow it informs everything about you, I think. If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. I think it's part of trying to find what makes a character and it's probably one of the things that, because I've done a character very similar to this in the British show that preceded Gracepoint, I guess the accent is one of the things that helps define what's different about this incarnation of this particular character."

Gracepoint  premieres on Thursday 2nd October on Fox TV in the USA and on the Global Channel in Canada at 9pm ET/PT. The series explores the consequences of the murder of a local twelve-year old boy on a small coastal town in California. Though early episodes are closely based on Broadchurch the series is said to diverge and will have a different ending.




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