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EPISODE 05 | SEASON 01
Fabien Enjalric is a dialect and language coach whose work has taken him behind the scenes of some of the biggest productions in film and television, including Dune, The Crown, Slow Horses, Wonder Woman, The King, Justice League and The Day of the Jackal.
His work exists in a part of filmmaking most audiences never see. Through accent, language, rhythm and sound, Fabien helps actors find the voice of a character and make it believable. When he does his job well, the audience should never notice his involvement at all.
In this episode of Makers Workshop, we sit down with Fabien at Olympic Studios in London to explore the extraordinary craft behind making characters sound real on film.
Fabien traces his journey from an early obsession with languages and imitation to discovering, almost by accident, that dialect coaching was a profession. His first opportunity would see him working with Helen Mirren, beginning a career that has since taken him onto major film and television sets around the world.
We explore what actually happens when an actor needs to speak with an unfamiliar accent or in another language. Fabien explains how he studies everything from mouth posture and individual sounds to rhythm, stress and intonation, before breaking dialogue into something an actor can absorb without losing their performance.
Sometimes he has weeks to prepare. Sometimes he has minutes.
The conversation also takes us inside the world of Dune and the challenge of working with Fremen. Although constructed for a fictional world, the language has its own grammar, vocabulary, phonetic system and patterns of intonation. Fabien explains what it takes to learn a language nobody grows up speaking, then help different actors make it feel completely natural on screen.
But technical accuracy is only part of the job.
Fabien explains why a perfectly pronounced word can sometimes be less important than an extraordinary performance, and how experience teaches you when to intervene, when to give an actor a simple note and when to leave something alone. Ultimately, much of his craft comes down to judgement.
We also explore what happens as AI becomes increasingly capable of reproducing voices, accents and speech. Fabien discusses where technology can help actors and coaches, but also what may be lost when human conversation, encouragement, creative decisions and authenticity are removed from the process.
It is a conversation about language, performance, sound, curiosity, craftsmanship and the invisible specialists whose work helps make fictional worlds believable.
Makers Workshop is a podcast about the people behind remarkable work. Hosted by Erik Stjernström and Julia Andersson of Makers Morrow, each episode is a conversation with someone who has spent their life creating, building or shaping something worth paying attention to.
IN THIS EPISODE:
• How dialect coaches make characters sound believable
• Fabien’s journey from language enthusiast to film sets
• Getting his first job working with Helen Mirren
• The hidden craft behind accents in film and television
• How actors learn unfamiliar languages and accents
• The four Ps of accent coaching: people, posture, phonetics and prosody
• Building trust with actors under pressure
• What happens when you only have minutes to prepare
• Learning and coaching the Fremen language for Dune
• How a fictional language can function like a real one
• Making language feel authentic rather than technically perfect
• Knowing when not to correct an actor
• Why judgement is fundamental to great craftsmanship
• How accents help actors inhabit a character
• The role of sound, rhythm and intonation in speech
• AI, synthetic voices and the future of language in film
• Why human authenticity still matters
• The invisible specialists behind major productions
• Why curiosity remains essential to mastering a craft
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Preview
02:00 Welcome to Makers Workshop
03:00 Fabien Enjalric and the invisible craft of dialect coaching
05:00 An early obsession with languages and sound
08:00 Discovering a job he never knew existed
11:00 Working with Helen Mirren on his first project
14:00 Building a career behind the scenes of major films
18:00 How a dialect coach builds trust with an actor
23:00 Making an accent part of the character
27:00 The four Ps of accent coaching
31:00 Preparing actors when time is limited
35:00 AI, synthetic voices and human authenticity
41:00 The tools behind dialect coaching
47:00 How the mouth physically creates language
52:00 Teaching actors languages they don't speak
56:00 Learning and coaching Fremen for Dune
61:00 Making an imaginary language feel real
66:00 What happens to language in post-production
69:00 Knowing when not to correct a performance
74:00 Can creative judgement be taught?
78:00 Why learning languages never really ends
83:00 The invisible craftspeople behind great films
87:00 Advice for becoming a dialect coach
Chapter timings should be updated against the final edit before publishing.
New episodes every Tuesday.
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