Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder,’ the peace of a small British town is disturbed when a teenager decides to poke into a five-year-old murder mystery. The story’s protagonist is a 17-year-old Pippa Fitz-Amobi, who lives in Little Kilton with her family. She is in her final year of school and has to decide on the topic for her EPQ, which will be important in deciding which university she attends.
Pippa decides to shake things up by going for the case of Andie Bell’s mysterious disappearance and murder. Technically, the case is solved, but there are things about it that Pip just cannot make sense of. As the story progresses, the town, especially its British setting, becomes an important part of solving the case. Interestingly, the actress who plays Pip is not British at all. SPOILERS AHEAD
Emma Myers Hired a Dialect Coach to Get the Accent Right
The role of Pip in ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ is played by American actress Emma Myers, best known for her role as Enid Sinclair in ‘Wednesday.’ Born and raised in Orlando, Florida, Myers does not have any hint of a British accent in real life. For the show, however, she had to train herself in a British accent due to the British setting of the story. Talking about how she landed the role, Myers revealed that she was in London at the time and was flying back home when she received an email about meeting with director Dolly Wells and discussing the role of Pip. The meeting went well, and Myers read the scripts for the first three episodes and connected with Pip’s character.
The show’s creators also felt confident about casting her, but a condition was made. If she sent in a tape with her British accent, then she’d get the role. Before ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder,’ Myers had never worked in a British production or ever played a role that required her to do a British accent. She confessed that while she’d tried it for fun, she didn’t consider it good enough for her professional endeavor. This also made her nervous about getting the part of Pip, but she was determined to get it right. When Myers finally landed the role, she had two weeks before the filming started, during which she set camp in Somerset and hired a dialect coach with whom she met twice a week to work on her accent.
She and her coach pored over every scene in the script multiple times so that Myers was well-prepared before the filming began. Myers revealed that it was a lot of work, and she didn’t pick up the accent right away, but she did get the hang of it enough to be confident about playing the role. Because of the diversity of accents in the UK, Myers consciously refrained from basing her accent on a particular person or place because she didn’t want to get it wrong. To educate herself on the matter, she traveled around the country, covering London, Liverpool, and Bath, to name a few places, and got a better idea of what she should sound like.
Once on the set, Myers also found it incredibly helpful to have an entirely British cast, who helped her whenever she felt she was going wrong or had questions about approaching a scene. She developed a good bond with her castmates and even picked up a few British phrases (like “Good shout!”), which she has incorporated into her daily life. Considering all this, it is clear that while Emma Myers might not be British, she worked hard on her British accent to bring Pip’s character to the screen as faithfully to the book as possible.
Read More: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder: Is Pippa Fitz-Amobi Based on a Real Person?
