Bryce Dallas Howard was so determined to make sure her English accent in Rocketman was convincing that she even maintained it in between takes.
The 38-year-old actress stars as Elton John's mother Sheila in the critically acclaimed biopic, and had to swap her American twang for a British lilt for the role. Perfecting the accent was a challenge, so Bryce decided to fully commit in order to get it right.
"I worked with a wonderful dialect coach, and I actually stayed in the accent the entire time," she told Popsugar UK. "The process is like learning a language. If you immerse yourself in the country, and you're speaking in a language all the time, your brain is going to connect the dots much faster than practising in isolated spurts.
"The fact that we were shooting in the UK, I thought to myself, 'I might well just just go for it.' I did that as well on a movie that I did years ago with Kenneth Branagh, called As You Like It. I did a British accent on that which was really fun. David Oyelowo was actually the person who told me - encouraged me - to do that. To stay in the accent the whole time. He's a very loving person, and so he made me feel not embarrassed about it. I'm really grateful to him for that! So that's kind of always been my approach to a dialect."
Bryce also acknowledged that she had a slight advantage when it came to getting the accent sorted - thanks to her father, director Ron Howard.
"When I was younger, and my dad was filming Willow, we shot a lot of it in the UK," she explained. "I learned to read and write while going to a school called Cavendish here in London, so my parents told me that after living here at the age of six for five days - or three days, actually, for three days - I had a full British accent. They were like, 'You phoney!' So, I kept it the whole time. There's so many videos of me as a kid. Oh my gosh. It's just so funny."
