Permission to Speak is a podcast hosted by celebrity vocal coach and speech coach Samara Bay, and it’s all about how we talk. Not only the nuts and bolts of how our voices sound and how we can make them sound, but also about power – who has it, how we get it, and how we sound once we have it. On this episode, she sits down with Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood to talk about how she worked on various tones for her character, Dolores, her singing in Frozen II, her “mom voice,” and how she uses her voice to advocate for the rights of domestic violence victims in Congress.
Dolores is a computer program, Evan says, so she had to work on a lot of different tones to portray her: her analytics tone, which she wanted to sound sort of Siri-esque; the tone she has once she’s operating outside of her programming, which she wanted to sound more like Wyatt, the villain; and her programmed voice, which is a “very generic Southern accent,” she says. All these variations required serious thought and work to get right; Evan refers to it as building walls she can “bounce around” in. Similarly, when she was cast to play Anna and Elsa’s mother in Frozen II, she listened to Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell and tried to incorporate their voices into her own, so it would be immediately recognizable as their mother.
Evan has done a lot of work with the legislature to pass laws concerning the rights of victims of domestic abuse, testifying twice in Congress about her own experiences with violence and trying to get the statute of limitations lengthened, so victims could pursue justice. “We’re learning a lot about how long it takes to really process a traumatic event,” she says. “In really terrible circumstances, it can take years” to feel safe enough to come forward, and by then, victims “have no means to seek justice.” Her second time testifying was when Congress actually voted on the legislation, which made her very nervous. “It would live or die based on our testimonies,” she says, so she struggled to keep it together. Samara says in instances like that, it’s sometimes better to go off-script: “Authentic is better than articulate,” she tells us.
They talk about Evan’s singing career, her musical theater background, her “mom voice” (“It scares me because it’s my mom’s voice,” Evan laughs), what she’d like to do next, and other ways she’s been using her voice to elevate others; hear about all that and more on this episode of Permission to Speak.
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