Was working on the accent more difficult this time, given that Ada s personality changes?
A. I was conscious of doing that, of having some of the effects of Renée, espeicially in the last quarter of the movie. In terms of the Charleston accent, it s very different from the accents that the other actors were doing. And some of the sounds sound unusual, but they re very, very precise sounds, and you have to do them, because to a well-trained American ear, they can hear absolutely everything. Luckily, Charles Frazier gave me the thumbs up on the accent, which was all I cared about, and his wife and his daughter, and I remember when Charles visited the set and he d spent six years writing this book. So the idea of meeting the author and knowing that you re portraying something that has existed in his head for such a long time was very intimidating. I did it with Michael Cunningham [author of The Hours] but Virginia was a person in real life. But to actually meet the author and be playing a person that didn t exist, except to them, was very difficult. He was very generous to us
