Still Haunting Me

Tom Holland: Rob, I'd love to chat to you about something that I've noticed that I really think you are the best in our business at doing this. I've had the pleasure of working with you three times and every time I see you take the screen, you do something with your voice. You're like a chameleon. You have an ability to change your voice without an audience watching it going, 'Oh, he's doing a voice.' For actors everywhere, how do you do that? And what's that process like? Where does that start for you? RP: I'm not really sure. I guess if you're just spending so much time reading stuff, it's like, I think, in general, one of the first things that makes me want to do a job in the first place, you're kind of, you want to say something out loud. And I think, I don't know, I think maybe it's just always because you don't know what you're doing and it's always kind of interesting when you say something. This is the first time where I've really done something where you're really trying to imitate someone's voice. In general, I remember when we were doing [The Devil All The Time] and I kept saying that I wanted, I was going to do, to Antonio, that I was going to do an MLK impression the whole time and he was like, 'But why? Why? It has nothing to do with it.' And that was my– but I kept doing it the whole time. There's something, I guess, when you can just follow, some edge, something where you can kind of be like, oh, it's something to grip onto and if it feels unusual and pleasurable to speak in, I find a lot of pleasure in trying to find a different area of your voice to use. But this was like, it was the most rigorous, conventional way of doing an accent that I'd ever done where I found it really tough. And it was one of the reasons why I couldn't, I wasn't sure about doing the movie in the first place. I found my voice notes the other day and how I was doing this voice at the beginning, because I think I must have done it the week after we met, and I was like, 'Can I do it?' And I listened to his show and tried to do it and it just sounded like, completely nothing like it. And I think I only really got it when we were rehearsing. I remember being in the car and we were looking at locations and I was like, 'Oh, that kind of sounds like it.' And I remember doing a voice memo where I was recording him saying the same line I'd been saying afterwards. I'm like, 'You can't tell the difference between the two? Yayyy!' But I don't know how. I didn't initially find that an interesting part when I first started acting. But I guess it's the easiest thing you can do by yourself until you start doing a movie and you can kind of go like, oh, I can record myself doing it and I can kind of get some kind of feedback doing it. And then you can at least, if you turn up to set, at least you've got something which you can hold on to, I think.

rob: *gives a lengthy explanation of how he develops the voices for his movies* tom: so raw talent, brilliant! that's awesome, thanks. rob: but you're so good at accents! you did the same accent as me in the same job! tom: it's a joke, rob! rob: oh