Opinion | What Austin Butler’s Elvis accent tells us about how stars use their voices

Enjoy it while you can.

After all the tweets, the posts and the blue suede shoes-y speculation about Austin Butler’s “Elvis voice,” the actor says he has plans to shed it. Is reeling it in.

“I try to stay off social media, so my publicist told me, you know, people are talking about your voice and these sorts of things. And it really made me self-conscious for a second because I thought: ‘Am I being phoney? Is this not my voice?’”

That is what Butler — newly nominated for an Oscar — said on “The Graham Norton Show” last week about all the attention lately to his vocal cords. About the drowsy southern drawl that has seemingly poured into him IRL (as the kids like to say) following a transformative experience playing Presley, the late music icon, in the recent Baz Luhrmann biopic.

Austin, who went on to say that his voice varies in different situations and with different people (in conversations with family and friends vs. interviews or super-public moments) and that, incidentally, he has likely damaged his vocal cords with all the singing he did in the movie — one song took about 40 takes — promised then, “I am getting rid of the accent.”

All of which got me thinking, in recent days, about the way in which some voices distinguish certain actors and how others use elocution as part of their starry arsenal — something that was much more conspicuous in the Golden Age years of Hollywood, but still lurks in parts. Morgan Freeman, anyone? Viola Davis? Jennifer Coolidge sounds only like Jennifer Coolidge, in all her nasal fabulosity. Meanwhile, husk-giving Scarlett Johansson has always seemed to me like someone who might not need to introduce herself if she happened to ring you.

But here is the thing: for all the pushback and sneering that Butler has gotten re: his Elvis immersion, is it really that different from Mr. “La La Land”? Some wonder, like awards season-watcher Kyle Buchanan who tweeted this last month: “If a Canadian Mouseketeer like Ryan Gosling can decide to talk like a De Niro character for the rest of his life, then I’ll allow Austin Butler to keep doing his Elvis voice.”

Personally, I had long felt that Gosling was doing De Niro doing Brando, something that Ryan pretty much confirmed when he told W magazine a few years back: “As a kid I decided that a Canadian accent doesn’t sound tough. I thought guys should sound like Marlon Brando. So now I have a phoney accent that I can’t shake, so it’s not phoney anymore … a phoney accent that becomes your trademark.”

The matter of real and unreal voices is, of course, a subject that stretches a long way back in movieland. Take Marilyn Monroe’s famous breathless whisper, a voice that has become a shorthand of feminine wiles (only infrequently did Marilyn use her real voice in public: in a few press conferences, in interviews with journalists, plus a few recordings that have found their way into collectors’ hands).

Take the “Mid-Atlantic” accent, which was near-ubiquitous in the films of the 1930s and 1940s, its impact extending far beyond American cinema. A carefully crafted dialect meant to imitate the upper-crust elite, it took off in the early stretches of the 20th century, combining what was considered proper British English and standard American English to create a kind of Translantic English. A mélange of the two.

Think Katharine Hepburn. Think Bette Davis. Think Christopher Plummer, who employed this tongue with great aplomb as the Captain in “The Sound of the Music” — and, well, never stopped using it until the last gasps of his career. Soft, long vowel sounds (“fahhhthuh,” not “father”). Dropped R’s (“theatuh,” not “theatre”). Heavy on the T’s (“better” becoming “behhTuh”).

Among the higher socioeconomic classes on the Eastern Seaboard, the Transatlantic accent become the de facto style, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis just a few of the people in the public sphere who also used it to soaring social success.

Speaking styles? Also pretty top of mind for me when catching up this week on the all new TV series “Poker Face.” A show that is almost delightfully, deliciously retro — a procedural like “Columbo” or “Murder, She Wrote” — it comes from the mind of Rian Johnson and stars Natasha Lyonne as an amateur detective. And Lyonne being Lyonne, she — as she was in both “Orange Is the New Black” and “Russian Doll” — is all soul and smarts and spark, a head full of unruly curls and that voice. A signature.

Rapturously raspy, glazed as a smoked ham, it is the voice of someone who has been burning the midnight oil. And then some. Or as a writer on the website PrimeTimer recently wrote, “It is a voice that says I don’t smoke cigarettes, the cigarettes smoke me.”

As this writer went on to say, and I agree, “If Lyonne’s voice were merely a handy character shorthand that would be enough. But there’s more to it. What places Lyonne in a league with such distinct voices as Tom Waits or Kathleen Turner is the incongruous elegance she brings to line delivery. Whether she’s eulogizing the Lower East Side on ‘Russian Doll’ or needling an exhausted Golden Globes audience (as she did a few weeks ago), that Borscht Belt cadence and off-the-cuff erudition make you feel like you could listen to her all day. Magic happens when it’s paired with a talented screenwriter and given dialogue that can take advantage of a voice so rich in character.”

Consider an early scene in Episode 1, when she and a casino operator played by Adrien Brody are talking about her gift for reading other people and he asks why she hasn’t gotten rich off of it. She tells him: “I been rich,” to which he asks. “How was it?” Her answer: “Easier than bein’ broke, harder than doin’ just fine.” A good line on the page, but an even greater one when registered by Lyonne.

Another reminder, alas: talk may be cheap, but a voice, it can be everything.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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