I had the great pleasure of working with Ramón Rodriguez to create the voice of Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Agent Will Trent for the hit new ABC TV show (also available on Hulu). Ramón gave a great interview with the Washington Post about the process of working together to develop Will’s voice and idiolect.
I found this incredible dialect coach. His name is Erik Singer, and he’s just a really brilliant guy and understands several dialects and really is very intellectual about it. He breaks it down in a really interesting way with the history of dialects and where they come from. So when we spoke about this character and where he came from and his childhood and what his surroundings were, we came up with some models and ideas of people that we could use — just as inspiration, not to copy them but, like, are there things and traits that we can take from them that will help ground this dialect and make it very specific?
One of the voices that we really responded to and liked a lot and, again, this isn’t like I’m not trying to mimic this at all, this sound, but it was something that we can kind of look at and reference was André 3000 from Outkast. You know, he’s got such a beautiful voice and how he speaks and his rhythms and intonations. So we looked at that as a model and would sort of reference it and go back to it.
As a Latino actor, how do you feel about playing someone who doesn’t have a specific Latino identity? In your mind when you’re playing him, is there a part of you that thinks Will could have a Latin identity?
In the books, he doesn’t know his identity. He was orphaned as a child. He grew up in the foster-care system in Atlanta. And so there’s a bit of an ambiguity as to where he’s from. So I liked sort of playing into that in a way.
Because he doesn’t know his background, I didn’t want to lean on any sort of Latino flavor for him because if someone grew up in the group home system and didn’t know his parents and didn’t know anything about his background, there’d be a lot of things that — he would just be mostly shaped by his environment. There would be maybe obviously some DNA stuff there, maybe how he looked. But we kind of just played it as, like, this is a character that we don’t know much about. And in the season we wanted to slowly begin to kind of explore, potentially, his identity.
That’s a big piece of his life puzzle that he has no idea about — to not know anything about your family, your roots, where you came from, that could leave someone with a lot of questions. And I think for someone like Will, it’s definitely a big part — he hopes to try to find some of those answers to understand himself better.
Ramón also discussed our accent work with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show:
Will Trent has been renewed for a second season, so there should be lots more of this delightful show and Ramón’s great portrayal.