Toni Collette Q&A / Dream Horse
Toni Collette has no problem conveying extreme emotions as part of her job requirements as an actress. Her harrowing performance in the 2018 horror film Hereditary is ample proof of that. However, the Oscar-nominated, Emmy Award winning Australian found that her abilities were put to the test in DREAM HORSE, a dramatic comedy set for release in September. Based on a true story, Collette plays a Welsh bartender/supermarket cashier, Jan Vokes, who breeds a horse that would go on to become the champion racehorse of Wales. Though she loved the idea of working on the project, Collette struggled to master the Welsh accent.
“It’s the most heart-warming, beautiful story and I knew immediately that I wanted to do it,” Collette says. “But the Welsh accent is incredibly intimidating. It’s a really difficult accent I have to say. Because if you go too far you end up in India, they are very similar! Honestly.”
“Fortunately…I had a fantastic dialect coach and I was surrounded by the rest of the cast the crew [whose accents] were those I was meant to be making,. I felt very supported and nobody ever laughed at me.”
Directed buy Euros Lyn (Black Mirror), the film sees Collette play a Jan Vokes, the determined woman who starts a racing syndicate in her local Welsh village with the goal of breeding and training a champion racehorse. Damian Lewis (Billions) co-stars as a local accountant who joins forces with Vokes in her unstoppable quest to achieve horseracing glory.
“I grew up in the Welsh valleys where everyone knows this story – it’s a local legend, Lyn, the director, said. |”The moment I read Neil McKay’s brilliant script, I knew I had to direct [it]. Casting Toni Collette as Jan Vokes, our extraordinary heroine, and Damian Lewis as Howard Davies, her intriguingly conflicted accomplice, is my own dream come true”…
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