Actors working in a foreign language

Since I have landed my role in the German TV series Alarm für Cobra 11 - Die Autobahnpolizei, many people have asked me, "do you speak German?" The answer to that question is "ein bisschen" (a little). Then they ask me, "do you need to speak German in that role?" And I reply, "Yes the script is entirely in German." Most people then get quite confused and wonder how on earth I can score a role on German TV despite not being able to speak German fluently.

I can speak some German but it is far from fluent. I have not spent years studying German intensively - I did make some efforts when I was a student at university but only for a few months. Then after that, it was merely picking it up here and there, from TV/films/internet, from friends and during my visits to German speaking European countries. So basically, I can read some German, I can understand most people when they speak slowly and clearly to me (and avoid difficult, complex words) and I can express myself and make myself understood without having to resort to English but my German is full of grammatical mistakes and I tend to mispronounce a lot of words. I guess you could compare my German skills to that of a young child of about 6 year old - it is basic, full of mistakes and unsophisticated but it is at least functional. But yes, I do have a knack for learning languages and my confidence with languages probably carries me a long way in this process.

This is not the first time I am acting in another language apart from English and Mandarin: I have used my French, Welsh, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Malay, Hokkien, Slovakian, German, Greek, Turkish and Eastern Canadian Inuktitut over the course of my acting career. I do speak some of these language fluently and confidently (such as Welsh, French and Hokkien) whilst I had to resort to memorizing lines in others that I barely speak or don't speak at all. Here's an example of me in an ad in Slovakia - I don't speak Slovakian but I memorized my lines here and with some help from the locals (and quite a lot of practice of course), the director was happy enough with the final product.

The reason why I have scored this role is more a question of supply and demand: there are simply very few Chinese actors in Europe who speak any German at all. Thus in the land of the blind, the one eye-man is king. In any case, I have proven myself to this German casting director before: even though I am not fluent in German, when given a script in German, I have shown that I can memorize it, learn the pronunciation (with the help of my German-speaking friends) and deliver it with confidence during the audition. I'm not the first actor who has done so, in fact, many actors have been bravely tackling roles in another language.

The best example I can give you is Rie Rasmussen, a beautiful Danish model, who took the lead role in the 2005 French film Angel-A despite not speaking French. No she did not speak English or Danish in her lead role, she spoke French and she was very convincing indeed. She had to simply memorize large volumes of dialogue in a language she barely spoke and probably had some help from language coaches. Another very convincing actor who attempted this was James Kyson Lee who played the Japanese character Ando in the NBC TV series Heroes - Lee is Korean-American and spoke very little Japanese before being cast in the role of Ando, yet he worked extremely hard at the Japanese language and was able to deliver his lines in Japanese very convincingly. I am very impressed indeed.

Let's not forget the China-born Singaporean actor Gong Li who played the role of Isabella in Miami Vice - now Gong Li does not speak much English. She knows a few words, she may understand the very basics but her English language skills are very limited. She simply learnt the lines phonetically and given that Isabella was this strange, mysterious mafia type character from the drug smuggling world, the fact that Gong Li had a strange accent didn't seem to matter that much - it worked and she got away with it.

Of course, there is always the possibility of dubbing an actor if s/he is really hopeless at learning the new language. Bruce Lee had been dubbed in all his early English-language films by a white man because film distributors back then had feared that people would film Lee's accent hard to understand. If if Gong Li had turned out to be hopeless in English (she was actually quite okay in the end), they might have dubbed her as well. However, no one has yet raised the possibility of dubbing me in German, so the pressure is now on me to nail all my lines in German perfectly!

Does this always work? Are actors simply so amazing that they can learn anything? Not always - there was the case in 2011 during BBC's production of the series Spooks (season 10) when they had cast a few Cantonese speaking Chinese actors as mainland Chinese characters from Beijing who worked in the Chinese embassy in London. There were some scenes were the actors had to deliver lines in Mandarin and it was so garbled and badly delivered that I had to read the subtitles to figure what the hell they were trying to say - it was a joke, a fiasco and the BBC were relying on the fact that very few of British viewers would actually understand Mandarin well enough to spot that mistake. That was a very disgraceful situation - shame on the BBC!

There have also been cases where white characters in films or TV programmes have been asked to deliver a few lines in Mandarin to give the impression that they do speak Chinese - this has often yielded poor results ranging from "who the hell are you trying to kid" to "nice try but your tones are waaaay off." It is a tall order for white people to achieve the standard of Mandarin that say Mark Zuckerberg has managed to attain. An actor who does stand out is Matt Damon - he has had to speak a number of languages in the Jason Bourne film series: German, French, Italian and Russian (correct me if I have left out any other languages) and he does so very convincingly indeed. Very impressive!

Lastly, give a performer the time and motivation to learn a new language and s/he will! I will leave you with the example of singer Celine Dion who started learning English only at the age of 15 when her music career started taking off.  You would hardly believe that English is her second language when you hear her belt out hits like My Heart Will Go On, Where Does My Heart Beat Now, The Power Of Love, Because You Loved Me and I'm Alive. Celine Dion is from Quebec and speaks French as a first language, she never really bothered with English as a child (as Quebec is very French speaking despite being a part of Canada) but she rose to the occasion and mastered English with ease. Likewise, Colombian singer Shakira also speaks English as a second language (her first language is Spanish) and her English is flawless. Oh man, if we were to go down this route - there are countless European singers who sing in perfect English despite English being their second language; ABBA, A-ha, Roxette, Aqua, Nena, Lena Meyer-Landrut, Lou Bega, Robyn, Loreen, Infernal, Neneh Cherry, Alcazar, The Cardigans, Vengaboys, Alice Deejay - need I go on?

What am I actually doing apart from memorizing my lines? I am cutting and pasting my lines into Google translate which then plays it back to me in German - it is a really useful tool, to get Google to read my lines back to me in German so I know how it should sound like and thus it is helping me with my pronunciation. Take a line like, "Um ganz ehrlich zu sein frage ich mich, ob ich mich noch auf Sie verlassen soll." Good grief. The part in the middle "ich mich, ob ich mich noch auf" is such a tongue twister and doesn't sound natural at all to me.

So there you go - it can be done, it has been done before and if it all goes terribly wrong, then they can always dub you. Although of course, in my case, I am working really hard to make sure that my German is indeed good enough to not require dubbing! Thanks for reading, vielen dank. Here's some German techno for us beginners in German...