all actors are expected to work towards having what they call standard american speech. that describes speech devoid of regionalisms such as the now old school new york "tawk" for talk or the d.c. "curry" for carry. acting & speech teachers will tell you that the best speech/accents reside in the northwest, washington and oregon. no mid west twang, going to the R's too quick like the west coast, no southern drawl, and no east coast hacking vowels sounds and disappearing L's...
so you have to do a lot of these difficult speech drills with a coach to lose glottalizations, sibilant S's, disappearing L's, medial T's that turn to D's, and the biggest problem with us as black folks? not dropping end consonants. you can hear the training in jamie foxx for instance when he was promoting soul in them commercials during the nba playoffs last year. all of that brother's hard work done paid off, he low key sounds classically trained
the reason why they make actors strive for standard american speech is because they want you to have a clean palette (not the one in your mouth, think art canvas) to be as versatile as possible with the roles. great example was charlize theron in monster. she had that redneck florida accent down to a tee. you believed everything about that performance starting with her speech. for black actors it is important but won't get prioritized as much because we're not getting a multitude of opportunities to play roles that demand us to speak in different accents. though, if you're eddie and you go from playing reggie hammond in 48 hrs to playing marcus graham years later in boomerang you have to be versatile with the speech and work extra hard. and he nailed it in 1992 b, sounding exactly like a highly educated six figure corporate brother. you noticed it right away for instance in the elevator scene when he first runs up on jacqueline broyer played by robin givens. her speech was made for the role out the gate but not eddie's but he stepped it up god level. it is mad scientific son, i can talk this shyt all day lol. btw james earl jones is considered the god of all things voice and speech for actors. duke literally memorized patsy rodenburg the right to speak & went from a dude with like 10 speech impediments to murdering everything shakespeare. son is like the jordan of voice & speech...
