Nicholas Braun tells PEOPLE he "felt a big responsibility" to get his English accent right in order to play a Brit in The Sheep Detectives
NEED TO KNOW
-
Braun costars in the new movie with Molly Gordon, Hugh Jackman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris O'Dowd, Brett Goldstein and more
-
The Sheep Detectives is in theaters May 8
American actors are not often cast as English characters in the movies, butNicholas Braungot that exact opportunity when he signed on toThe Sheep Detectives.
In the film, Braun, 38, portrays Tim, a police officer in a countryside town in the United Kingdom who is tasked with investigating the murder of local shepherd George (Hugh Jackman). As such, theSuccessionalum spent a significant amount of time developing his own English accent for the role.
"I felt a big responsibility to get the accent right because, as an American getting to play a British part, it's pretty rare," Braun tells PEOPLE. "Those guys are taking our parts all the time, and I felt honored and obliged to do this accent right."
"So I'm excited to hear what the Brits think of how I did," he continues, "but I stand by it. Let's see what they say."
The actor says thatThe Sheep Detectivesfilmed roughly "an hour or so" outside London to match its rural England setting. Braun worked with Hollywood dialect coachWilliam Conacher, who has worked in the movie industry since at least 2000, to develop an English accent "that felt at least pretty close to the region that we were in."
"We found anestuary accent, is what it's called. It's something between a London accent and a sort of western English, more like country English accent," Braun says. "It's kind of a hybrid."
"Literally, we're kind of choosing things like, 'Do we say the Ts here? Do we hold off the Ts?' We're just going by feel. It was really fun to figure that out," the Emmy nominee explains.
Braun's character is not the only investigator on the case of the deceased shepherd.
Advertisement
InThe Sheep Detectives, George's flock of sheep is all too familiar with murder mysteries — prior to his demise, Jackman's character reads murder mystery novels to his animals every night before they go to sleep.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus,Bryan Cranston, Chris O'Dowd,Regina Hall,Patrick Stewart,Bella Ramsey, Brett Goldstein and Rhys Darby voice the sheep at the heart of the movie, with Louis-Dreyfus, 65, leading the way as the intrepid sheep Lily.
The animals help Tim, who proves uneducated in the methods of deduction, investigate a series of local suspects portrayed byMolly Gordon, Hong Chau,Emma Thompson, Kobna Holbrook-Smith,Nicholas Galitzine, Tosin Cole and Conleth Hill, among others.
Braun is no stranger to accent work, having deviated from his normal speaking voice to play comedian Andy Kaufman in 2024'sSaturday Nightand an Australian character for 2016'sWhiskey Tango Foxtrot. Still, he actively worked on his English accent throughoutThe Sheep Detectives' shoot.
"Every day we ran through the entire script, everything we hadn't shot, just so I could keep it in my ear," Braun tells PEOPLE. "I would watch YouTube videos of English actors with a similar accent to what we were doing and I'd watch it on like half speed so I could like just keep the sort of rhythm of it, hear all the little stuff."
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE's free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
The Sheep Detectivesis in theaters May 8.
Read the original article onPeople
