OHMYGOSSIP — Jenna Coleman nearly rejected ‘The Serpent’ because she thought a French actress should play her part.
The 34-year-old actress stars alongside Tahar Rahim in the crime-drama series, but Jenna – who plays French-Canadian Marie-Andree Leclerc, the girlfriend of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, in the show – initially worried about her on-screen accent.
She said: “I was doing ‘All My Sons’ at the Old Vic at the time, and I said, ‘There’s no way I can take this on – you need to cast a French actress.’
“I’ve been a fan of Tahar since he starred in the movie ‘A Prophet’ more than a decade ago.
“The script had these scenes where we flip in and out of French and English, so you need to believe them as a bilingual couple. I was asking, technically, how can we make this work?”
Jenna described her character’s accent as an “absolute beast”, and she only mastered it after working with a French teacher.
The actress – who previously starred in ‘Emmerdale’ and ‘Doctor Who’ – told Radio Times magazine: “It wasn’t a case of just learning the lines in French – it was about the delivery, the muscularity.
“It was a beast, an absolute beast. The accent uses different parts of the mouth to English speakers, so it was like ‘My Fair Lady’ – I spent the first four weeks just training muscles in my mouth to get certain sounds.
“Fabien [Enjalric], my amazing French teacher, taught me the lines phonetically.
“When people speak naturally, they condense their language, and in the time I had, this was the only way that I had to get to that point where I could embody the character and not stumble with the pronunciation.”
Source: VacationHunter.Online
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