Dialect coach Susanne Sulby spends a lot of time listening.
The renowned speech expert behind Mare of Easttown and Silver Linings Playbook has built a reputation for helping actors nail the infamously idiosyncratic Delco accent, among others. Essential to her process are dozens of recordings that she has amassed by simply stopping people on the street when she hears a distinct voice.
“I’m pretty bold. I’ll be sitting somewhere, I’ll hear someone speaking and I’ll say, ‘Oh, you have a really fantastic accent. Tell me about that. Where are you from?’ People love to talk about it,” said Sulby, who lives in Yardley.
When she heard that Mare writer Brad Ingelsby was returning with another Delco-set HBO series, Task, and sought her skills again, Sulby replied with an immediate yes. As she read the script, though, she realized the audio files from Mare might not be enough.
“You’d think that there would be no more recordings I needed to make, because I had probably 60 recordings of different people, but these [characters] have a different demographic and age group …[unlike Mare] the people in this show are actually from different regions in Philly,” she said.
So she went back out there to gather more material for Task, which follows an FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo) leading a task force to chase masked thieves (Tom Pelphrey and Raúl Castillo). At this point, she’s interviewed about 100 people in the Philadelphia area to capture the quirks and eccentricities that make the regional sounds so unique.
It’s more than just wooder and jawn: She tells actors what movements their mouths should make while saying certain words and drills them on that unforgettable “ouw” sound in hoagie and home.
“I was a little bit intimidated going into it, having never worked with a dialect coach before, but Susanne made the work really interesting,” said Castillo, who plays Cliff Broward. “As opposed to it being a hurdle, it became a way into the character. I found that Cliff’s rhythm was very distinct from Raúl’s, and the dialect helped get me out of my own rhythm and into this other animal.”
» READ MORE: ‘Task’ Delco accents are pretty close to perfect
British actor Kate Winslet, the Mare of Easttown star, made a ritual of listening to Sulby’s recordings every morning as she perfected the Delco drawl. She earned an Emmy in 2021 for the role, as well as a Saturday Night Live parody.
“With a Delco dialect, actually the temptation to make it sound like you’re doing a voice, it’s pretty high,” Winslet told The Inquirer in 2021. “‘I was all on my own, I was alone, you want some wooder.’ There were a lot of things I could have really [leaned] into that would have made it sound like I was doing something a bit gimmicky and I didn’t want that to happen.”
Irish actor Sam Keeley, who plays the biker gang villain Jayson in Task, felt similarly as he drilled with Sulby on Zoom for three months ahead of filming.
“The hardest bit was not going too heavy, not going too much, because, obviously, being a foreigner, I had to make sure that I wasn’t leaning too hard into the ‘O’s’ of the whole thing,” Keeley said.
Sulby loves to see how everyone approaches the accent work, which she sees as just one part of the larger creative collaboration that grounds each of these dramatic performances. Keeley in particular had his own immersive process: losing his native Irish accent for months while shooting.
“He was like, ‘I think I have to stay in this [Delco] accent, or at least an American accent, for the whole time I’m here,’” said Sulby. “Nobody knew he was Irish on set … He started speaking with an Irish accent at some point, and surprised everybody.”
During spring and summer 2024, the cast lived in and around Philadelphia, thanks to Ingelsby’s commitment to bringing productions to Pennsylvania and hiring local crews. Embedding themselves in the area helped the actors learn their characters’ specific twang.
Pelphrey, who shines as a foil to Ruffalo’s protagonist, benefited from hearing “real speakers” fluent in Delco as he trained. One of the crew members linked him up with her Delco cousin so he could hear the accent in action. Despite Pelphrey’s allegiance as a die-hard Giants fan, they bonded over a passion for football as the Ozark actor learned the dialect rules and how to break them.
From Howell Township, N.J., Pelphrey had an accent of his own — he’s always said wooder — but that didn’t necessarily make things easier.
“In a way, that almost made the accent more challenging to me, because there were parts that were the same — I kept wanting to slide back into how I normally talk. But that’s actually not right, because there’s a bunch of other sounds that are wildly different, especially that ‘O’ sound [that] makes the accent famous,” said Pelphrey.
Emilia Jones, the British actor who starred in the 2021 Best Picture-winner CODA, plays Maeve, the scene-stealing niece to Pelphrey’s Robbie. She bonded with the crew on set, too, and became totally enamored with the regional culture.
“I loved doing the Delco accent and spending time in Delaware County. There’s such a sense of community,” said Jones. “In June, they had community pool parties, so I went to a few [with a crew member who] took me under her wing.”
The Londoner was familiar with a “general American” dialect but Delco was harder. She flew to Philly a couple weeks ahead of the shooting schedule to visit bars and restaurants where she could listen to locals, at Sulby’s suggestion.
Sulby, knowing how much Jones loved the experience, gifted her a necklace with a “Delco” pendant in cursive when production wrapped. More than a year later, Jones says she’s still obsessed with Delco.