Yuen: How ‘Aunt Tracy’ from Anoka County coached Emma Thompson on the Minnesota accent

Ask any Hollywood A-lister: The Minnesota accent is an enigma.

Emma Thompson is the latest to give it a stab. Thompson stars in the thriller, “Dead of Winter,” which is set in rural Minnesota and opens in theaters Friday. The native Londoner drilled for the part not by way of a professional dialogue coach, but by going straight to the source: Aunt Tracy from Anoka County.

Film co-writer Dalton Leeb, originally from Coon Rapids, enlisted his aunt, Tracy Dooley, to help Thompson perfect the hard-to-master accent, as first reported by WCCO. Leeb wanted Thompson’s character, Barb, to sound like his late grandmother, whom he’s described as a strong woman who could confront adversity with a sense of humor. Out of all of his aunts and uncles, Dooley, the 10th of 12 children, sounded the most like her.

“I’m loud and I kinda laugh loud,” Dooley told me.

The Minnesota accent is notoriously difficult for outsiders to achieve. “It’s the hardest accent I’ve ever had to do,” Charlize Theron said, when her film “North Country” hit theaters in 2005.

Minneapolis native Larissa Kokernot played a sex worker from Chaska with some of the most memorable lines in the movie “Fargo.” After filmmaker Joel Coen saw Kokernot’s audition tape, he tapped her to coach Frances McDormand on how to achieve an intense rural Minnesota accent.

While Minnesotans remain divided on whether McDormand got it right, Kokernot was satisfied with her elocution. She said McDormand instinctively could mimic the accent in a way that the actor’s dialect coach could not.

It may not be as sexy as a Texan drawl or as charming as an Irish brogue, but our way of speaking is a distinct marvel. Local voice coaches have noted our unique oral posture, which may include pulling back the corners of our lips to keep words tight and bright. We flatten our vowels. We pronounce the long “o” in words like “boat” with a single, horizontal syllable, rather than stretching the “o” into two.

“The ‘o’s and the ‘a’s have a vaguely nasal quality,” Kokernot said. “They feel full and big and almost musical.”

I predict this column will come off as tone-deaf and insulting to all of you who will write me insisting that you enunciate like Walter Cronkite, avoid folksy jargon and prefer “Masterpiece Theater” over muskie fishing. I get it. Our little state isn’t on the big screen often, and when it is, it’s saturated in stereotypes of us being unsophisticated or naive. The accent has become shorthand for Rube from the Northland.

But while some Minnesotans seem embarrassed by their accents or even deny their existence, I argue we should lean in. Regional accents are dying out as American speech becomes homogenized, possibly due to migration and TV, and now TikTok. For a state that loves to talk about its exceptionalism, why fight a cultural aspect that makes us literally exceptional?

She remembers feeling jittery when she first logged on to see the Academy Award-winning star, but Thompson quickly put her at ease.

Thompson spoke with a Minnesotan accent during every Zoom conversation, except for the last chat, in which she reverted to her true British voice. That sounded “weird,” Dooley recalled.

I can attest that Dooley, a 68-year-old grandma who carefully chooses her words and has a slower cadence, does sound Minnesotan. Her kids tease her specifically for the way she pronounces the word “sorry.” But she doesn’t hear it. (“When I watch TV, say, ‘Good Morning America,’ I feel like they’re talking like me,” she said.)

Last month, Thompson gave Dooley and other Minnesotans a shout-out when speaking at a news conference in Switzerland for helping her understand not only the accent, but how the extreme climate has shaped culture in our region. Thompson said she learned from Minnesotans that you need multiple pairs of gloves for different occasions, and that frigid fingers could spell death.

Dooley plans to see the movie Friday and will get to judge whether her star pupil perfected the accent. Her nephew, for what it’s worth, thinks Thompson nailed it.

Here’s a sampling of other movies in which actors attempted to sound like us:

While promoting the movie, here’s what McDormand told reporters about her character’s accent in 1996, according to my colleague Chris Hewitt, then a film critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press: “It’s heightened, theatrical — because it’s not a documentary," McDormand said.

Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen knew the accents were a caricature, but that’s in part because the brothers felt so different, growing up Jewish in the middle of a “Scandinavian situation,” she added.

Kokernot noted the irony of the backlash to the movie in her home state. After “Fargo” came out, she was working at the St. Paul Grill’s coat check and overheard customers grumbling about the film.

“As I was getting their coats, they would be complaining about the accent — in the accent,“ she recalled. “The ability to hear yourself is almost impossible.”

When I listen to Allison Janney’s accent in the 1999 cult classic about a small-town beauty pageant, I think of my friend’s stepmom who grew up in a large Catholic family in southern Minnesota. It’s that authentic. As the chain-smoking Loretta, Janney’s way of speaking sounds soothing and grounded, rather than grating, perfected by the slight sing-song in the way she intones, “You guys wanna beer?”

Critics praised Russell for his depiction of Herb Brooks, originally from St. Paul, who coached the U.S. men’s ice hockey team to a gold medal in 1980. His locker room speech in which he roused his team to beat the Soviets impressed even the actual players, many who hailed from Minnesota, who said Russell accurately captured their coach’s mannerisms and intensity.

“I’m sick and tired of hearin’ about what a great hockey team the Soviets have,” he says. “Screw ‘em! This is YOUR time!”

Russell said he was lucky to meet with Brooks before production to absorb his voice and inflection. Some of my Strib colleagues disagree, but I thought Russell got pretty close to how an East Sider of Brooks’ generation spoke.

To prepare for her role as one of the first women to work in a taconite mine in Eveleth, the South African native boned up by reading “How to Talk Minnesotan” and listening to tapes of people from the Iron Range. But her accent didn’t come together until she traveled to Minnesota to shoot the film.

“You know what it was that finally made it click?” she told Hewitt. “Being in the cold. That’s when I started to understand why people talk the way they do. It’s like when you go to the South, you understand why people talk slowly, sitting in their rocking chairs in the heat. It happens that way up north, too. In Minnesota, I stepped off that plane that first day, and I thought, ‘Oh, it’s cold. I get why people don’t open their mouths too wide and why the sound is a little nasal.’ ”

Juno Temple, best known for her Essex accent as Keeley in “Ted Lasso,” told Stephen Colbert that learning the Minnesota accent for the latest season of FX’s “Fargo” was not fun initially, but “very complicated.”

Her dialect coach gave her a cheat sheet that included the phrase “Barb’s large apartment.” One of her favorite lines in the script was “bite ‘em in the ankle.” She’d practice sounding like a Minnesotan on strangers at the airport, and if she could get away with it, she figured she was nailing it.

“When you find that accent, you don’t want to let it go,” she said.