If an Irish woman can win a Golden Globe for playing a Sacramento teenager in Lady Bird, then why can’t an Englishman with no singing experience portray a Cajun country-music star?
For his lead role in Forever My Girl, as a performer who returns to his hometown to reconcile with his father and ex-fiancee, Alex Roe started with the accent and went from there.
“I listened to country music every day for about three months and would watch interviews with country artists to catch up on their mannerisms,” Roe said during a recent stop in Dallas. “There are so many different accents in the South.”
Perfecting a foreign accent in a speaking voice is one thing, but Roe also had to convince moviegoers as a chart-topping singer. And his performance as Danny in a stage version of Grease when he was about 12 wouldn’t provide much help.
“I thought both would go hand-in-hand. But learning a singing voice is different than learning a talking voice. I had to really hone in on changing my accent line by line, trying to figure out what the sound was,” Roe said. “There’s a lot of singers who seem to have quite general American accents, but when they sing, they have more of a country twang.”
Roe plays Liam, a country superstar lured back to his Louisiana hometown by a tragedy involving a former classmate. There he seeks redemption with his preacher father (John Benjamin Hickey) and with his high school sweetheart (Jessica Rothe) who he left at the altar eight years earlier to seek fame and fortune. She’s now a florist and single mother to a precocious girl (Abby Ryder Fortson).
“He’s been away and probably done some things that he’s not proud of, and not sure whether he’s even worthy to go back,” Roe said. “Everyone in the town knows each other, and they’ve kind of disowned him. So he repents and makes amends.”
The screenplay by director Bethany Ashton Wolf made some key narrative changes in adapting Heidi McLaughlin’s novel. It was filmed around Atlanta, standing in for the Louisiana bayou.
Roe (The Fifth Wave) first picked up a guitar at age 8, and has dabbled with it ever since, which simplified at least one element of his character transformation. But he still was trepidatious about filming the concert sequences in front of large crowds.
“It was really scary. Bethany understood that I wasn’t a singer, and that I needed to train. We really worked on our songs,” he said. “We watched different artists performing, and saw how they interact with the audience. I wanted to emulate that, rather than just go crazy on stage.”
Roe, 27, also had to record some songs for the film’s soundtrack. Fortunately, he was able to work with some top studio musicians in Nashville who have recorded with Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley, among others. It practically turned into a private music lesson.
“I tried to copy what they were doing,” Roe said. “They might write the riff that makes a song a hit, and they do that on an hourly wage. They’re the unsung heroes.”
