Intense gym sessions, consulting nutritionists and multiple coaches tweaking every aspect of your performance might sound like the life of a professional endurance athlete but increasingly the same demands are being made of actors – especially those trying to transform into well-known singers.
Anne-Marie Speed, who has trained the cast of musicals including Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and recently worked with actors on Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols TV series, was part of the team of coaches who helped the Industry star Marisa Abela transform to play the lead in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s forthcoming Amy Winehouse project, Back to Black.
The pair worked together from September 2022 to January 2023, when shooting started on the biopic, which also stars Lesley Manville as Winehouse’s grandmother Cynthia and Jack O’Connell as her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.
Abela had to learn to sing from scratch and underwent training with Speed and an accent coach, as well as taking guitar lessons and an exercise regime in order to be ready for the part. Speed said it was apt to liken the intense schedule to that of a professional athlete.
She said: “It’s full-time preparation, it’s like an athlete and people really underestimate how physical voice production can be. They don’t see it, but it really is. You’ve got to get the body working in the right way to truly support what’s happening and to produce the voice in that way.”
Taylor-Johnson has already tackled the life of one iconic British musician with 2009’s Nowhere Boy, which told the story of John Lennon’s early life. But getting Abela ready to play Winehouse, whose unique soulful voice is one of the most instantly recognisable of the modern era, was a different type of challenge.
“You want [the vocal performance] to be very close, but not an impression. Because otherwise, you might as well just mime to her recordings,” said Speed. “I was seeing her [Abela] four times a week for two-hour sessions for about three months before we started shooting. So it’s a big, big commitment.”
Abela has previously said she came to see her body as “a true instrument” and had to lose weight to play the star who died in 2011. Her voice was something she said she needed “to work at” in much the same way that she practised the guitar.
More actors are having to learn to sing as the demand for musical biopics has increased in recent years, with some calling it a “golden age” for the genre, with recent successes including Rocketman (Elton John), Straight Outta Compton (NWA) and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (Priscilla Presley).
There has been increased attention on the preparation actors undergo for the roles, with some favouring a “method” approach. Bradley Cooper, who is in Oscar contention for his depiction of the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, said it took him six years to prepare for the performance.
While not all actors go through a process that intense, Speed believes having the ability to sing has become a crucial string to an actor’s bow, but she stressed how difficult it can be to master.
“I think it is an important skill, but not everybody necessarily wants to focus on [it] … you have to find someone who is prepared to do the work because it it is work and it takes practice.
“I think one of the misunderstandings the public has [is] that people get take after take after take [to get it right]. You don’t because there’s a very strict schedule. So when they turn up on set, they have to be able to deliver.”
