Habla el Discurso, Te lo Ruego - How goes the battle for bilingual actors?

“Actors, directors, and agents say a key to finding work is mastering accents and dialects. The actor with the ability to sound like he or she is at home in any Spanish-speaking region of the world is that much more employable. The same holds true for the Latino actor who can lose the accent.

Actor-writer-director Odalys Nanin, who runs the Macha Theatre Company in Los Angeles, has been on auditions at which she has been asked to lay an accent on more thickly and thereby sound more Spanish. “It’s a bit frustrating,” says the Cuban-born Nanin. “You spend a lot of money on diction class. Now you think, ‘Wow, I’m here. I’m bilingual. I’m fluent,’ but you look Latino, so they expect you to have an accent. And you’ve spent all this money trying to get rid of it. You have to play the game, and it’s their game. Give them what they want and you get the part.”"

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