Irrespective of when and where polls for the world’s most attractive accents get taken, Queen’s English almost always lands in the top five. But if British actress Emilia Jones has her way, those lists will look a lot different.
The London-born Jones, who plays Maeve Prendergrast in the Delco-set HBO show, Task, was recently seen sporting a Delco pendant. Why? Because “I was so obsessed with Delco and I loved doing the accent,” she said in a social media video released by HBO.
Sitting at a table with cups of Rita’s water ice and co-star Tom Pelphrey, who plays her uncle Robbie, Jones said the pendant was a gift from the show’s accent coach, Susanne Sulby.
Sulby, whose dialect coaching credits include Mare of Easttown and Silver Lining Playbook, spent most of her life in Bucks County and is an UArts alum. The now Lower Makefield, Pa. resident is a veteran of regional accents and does an exceptional job with Jones.
“Even as someone whose first job was at the Folsom Ack-a-me, I am still shocked that Emilia Jones, who co-stars as Maeve in Task, is somehow not from Upper Darby or Marcus Hook,” Ridley Township native and Inquirer reporter, Nick Vadala, wrote recently.
As Vadala points out, the cast’s Delco accent remains consistent through the show — which will be airing the fourth of its seven episodes this Sunday — and remains distinct from, what he calls, “Philadelphia’s famed Hoagiemouth.”
To prepare, Jones says in the video, she and Sulby walked around town, often stopping at the Italian Market. Jones would chat with waitresses, “deciding what I would sound like. Or what I thought Maeve sounded like.”
“You two tore up the town, in the name of the accent,” said Pelphrey, a Howell Township, N.J. native, who was joined by Mark Ruffalo at the Eagles vs. Rams game last week.
The series, that follows FBI agent Tom Brandis (Ruffalo) and his task force investigating a series of violent crimes in Delco, was directed by Brad Ingelsby, the Mare of Easttown creator, a Berwyn native.
“I’d be lying if I said it was a Philly story,” he said of Task. “It’s a suburban story, I was a suburban kid. I don’t want to tell viewers, ‘Oh, this is about Philly,’ and they come in and go, ‘Dude, he lived in the woods.’”